Microsoft has spent over a decade swimming against their users interests at this point and during that time frame Linux has been improving its desktop and improving kernel performance. We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features. Its pretty late in the game for them to start trying to switch back to producing an Operating system users actually want. Users refusing to switch from Windows 10 should have been that wake up call.
I don't think Microsoft can pull this off, I think as mindshare is shifting it will continue to do so and its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back and right now its only talking about doing some minor things. Now Nvidia is developing the drivers on Linux seriously there is every chance this transition snowballs and nothing Microsoft does will be enough.
Much of big tech became Product leaders running amok. Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best.
I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows, the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen, and windows search no longer searches your PC.
Deleting "Product" might save windows, short of that, I am doubtful.
Apple achieved it with Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Apple then spent ~15 years un-achieving it. It started with iOS 7, and has culminated in the Liquid (Gl)ass era: a mess of unintuitive menus, terrible and inconsistent UI patterns, the lobotomite twins Siri & Apple Intelligence.
Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.
I've never been bothered by Windows's changes, and I mostly think they were reasonable. But for a number of reasons it's never going to be easy for them to gain total acceptance: 1) the massive backwards compatibility back to Windows 95 stuff, 2) the willingness to try new and/or silly things that Apple is too stuffy to try, and 3) the fact that there's only ever going to be one "flavor" of Windows; if we were stuck with one single Linux distro people would be complaining about that one too.
The first is coercion. Installing without a Microsoft (Outlook) account is more and more difficult. An attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic. And there would be an easy control to disable all Copilot integration. Microsoft is coercive towards their customers with these and other actions.
The second is incompetence. The Windows update process is intrusive, lengthy, and prone to repeatedly bricking unlucky PCs. Linux updates are far more pleasant.
These are big problems, and I agree, it will take great institutional change to curb these abusive tendencies. I don't know if they can.
If you have two candidate ui designs you pick the best of the two. If you have an established ui and a candidate the new design needs to be dramatically better. It has to scream superiority. If it isn't that you are just ruining ux.
I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user
The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???
> This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
I'm not sure what this sentence means. Perhaps you already knew that Gimp's monochrome icons can be replaced by colorful ones by going to the Gimp settings under Theme -> Icon Theme, and unchecking the "Use symbolic icons if available" checkbox. That may be what you meant by "some place buried deep in the settings". But if you didn't, at least now you know how to get the colorful icons back.
The reason I'm making this comment, though, is to contrast it with Windows. A comment by chasil, left shortly after your own comment, said that "[a]n attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic." Gimp has done just that: in Icon Theme, you can choose the "Default" or "Legacy" icon theme, so if you got used to the older icons, you can get them back. And you can still use the newer icon set if you like, but get the icons' colors back by unchecking a (confusingly-named, the name definitely needs improvement) checkbox. Windows doesn't have any built-in way to get the older themes back; if you want Windows 11, or even 10, to look like Windows 7 or XP or whatever version you trained your visual memory on for years, then it takes third-party software to make that possible. (And it may not even be possible, I haven't checked).
When even one of the most infamous-for-confusing-UI pieces of open-source software (I mean Gimp, of course) is doing a better job of providing good UI than Microsoft is, Microsoft has a problem.
I'm actually not sure what you're saying about GIMP. I mean - I understand the frustration, the "button groups" or whatever they did to declutter things made things (imo) worse; I don't think it's a good default.
BUT
I don't actually understand your sentences for the most part. I really had to work to glean what you were talking about.
I'm not trying to be insulting here; sometimes I write in inscrutable ways too. But - could you reword a few things so I know what you're trying to say?
I've never been sentenced to repeating myself. I'm sure people normally hope for improvements in silence without informing me. Thanks!
The general point was that "Improvement" that ruin muscle memory usually aren't. It should be the most basic UI design principle.
One should be able to instinctively click on the Gmail icon while focused on the task at hand. If the icon isn't where one expects it to be you are no longer doing email things. Same goes for having the user search for the inbox inside the application. If they can't find it they are unproductive and feel dumb but they aren't to blame. Some bad designer came up with the brilliant idea to call it "all mail". The inbox is expected to live at the top of the menu. You can't improve it.
It's such basic stuff. It's like someone used your tools or your kitchen and put everything in a new spot. Eh, I mean the wrong spot.
I could give 1000 example inside windows but it seems everyone is trolling their users. They all want to create the new and improved slashdot, now without threaded discussions! - Hurray!
There's another pressure: each major release has to look different from the last one, otherwise it feels like a minor release. In this regard XP, Vista and 7 were successful. 8 also succeeded here, but at the expense of usability.
It doesn't have to use different window layouts, just differently themed decorations. Changing the default wallpaper is a simple way to do it.
Windows compatibility is pretty overrated at this point. There are a bevy of programs we use commercially that are quite old that just don’t work on 11, and not well on 10. Compatibility mode only gets you do far.
At this point Apple isn't even Apple. Product ate the world. I don't remember the last time someone came to me with a customer problem to solve. It's all warring fiefdoms.
Great point. Just last week I used AI to build a minimal replacement for a SaaS tool I’ve used in the past that has obnoxious feature gating/price tiers. My version isn’t nearly a complete replica, but it has the base functionality I want without having to feel like someone spent hundreds of hours perfecting price tiers with artificial limitations that annoy me just enough to upgrade.
Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.
Even this cannot adjust volume levels independently for multiple tabs in the same browser, which I have always been able to do on linux with pulseaudio/pipewire. People on windows use browser extensions for this, with full access to all tabs/sites...
Valve and devices like the Steam Deck and soon the Steam Machine are also grabbing the gaming segment away from Windows. Distros like Bazzite also are enticing to those technically inclined enough to boot from a USB drive and run the simple installer.
I bought two Linux pre-installed PC's last October. They were €350 cheaper apiece than the same Windows PC (presumably because the Windows machines came with a lot of additional software installed idk).
There are an awful lot of groups installing Linux on Win 10 cast offs around the world.
My uncle runs one in Bradford on Avon and they are slapping on an OS for you whilst you supp tea and chat. Often, the user-agent is set to something Microsoftie in the browser. If necessary Edge is installed but that is frowned on 8)
I have not heard of this MacBook Neo thing ... Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang around on HN.
1. The usage statistics don't reflect your anecdotal Linux usage; Linux desktop/laptop usage share has not grown that significantly in 20 years and Windows remains quite dominant.
2. MacBook Neo was widely discussed on HN not very long ago, and I'd think if anything an owner of an IT company would be more aware of it than an average HN user. It's definitely going to shake up the market for lower-end laptops.
1. The devil is in the details: How are those stats gathered? Many, if not most Linux users hide their OS affiliation via USER-AGENT
2. Missed it or perhaps blanked it. It really will not shake up the lower end because anyone wanting a lower end laptop (whatever that is) will insist on it running Windows and not Apples.
There is a really good reason why car manufacturers run multiple marques - the budget, standard and premium ones. Attempting to put the Apple "premium shine" on a budget effort may backfire spectacularly (and devalue the entire brand) or maybe they will somehow manage to re-invent marketing.
I’m not sure what market you are in, but this thing will absolutely upend the low end market in North America. This is a MacBook which handily competes with used/refurbished M1 airs for performance, but sells for less. Hell, it sells for less than an iPhone.
They have managed to keep the build quality without really sacrificing anything you would expect on an entry level computer.
My experience with the low end of laptops is that people can’t even tell you what OS they have (chrome or windows). People are going to see this and think that apple makes good phones, good tablets, and now good computers for affordable prices. The existence of the c model iPhones never “cheapened” the high end models. The existence of the iPad does not cheapen the iPad Pro. All the reviews and media basically are people wondering how they managed to create such a high quality product at this price point.
That might be what they think. I just installed windows and it had countless dialogs. Most have a reason to exist but it's a lot of work. The Ubuntu live usb on the other hand just boots into the desktop environment. It just works? There is nothing to do?
But this also mean you are not consulted on some critical configuration choice and that you are left alone wondering what to do next.
Earliest Macintoshs in the 1990 launched a tutorial on first boot until you explicitly finished or skipped it.
This was a wonderful experience as a kid and still warm my heart today thinking back of it.
Today's Mac only display "tips", "what's new" after first boot or major update because people are generally more computer literate. But (unless Liquid Glass changed that too) they never gave on this mantra that the OS should guide newcomers.
So yeah I think Linux distro have room to do better.
I hadn’t tried Fedora until late last year, and was very impressed. Came across as highly polished and complete.
Hadn’t tried Pupply Linux until a couple months ago, and it’s now my new favourite. I’m now running it on a small form factor desktop HP with no internal drive.
I think GP's point is that a chromebook is a perfectly cromulent apternative to windows, running normal ChromeOS, for users looking for a simple web/docs/email machine.
This is why Linux doesn't exist on more PCs - this is a problem.
Imagine a plumber talking about how much better his toilet is than everyone else's - bc everyone believes only a plumber can install it (which was truth for most of Linux history and general PC users).
Nobody took it seriously bc they took it as mostly an odd humblebrag for niche Windows haters.
Correct. And they usually don’t install windows on their computer either. The 8 year old laptop they got at Best Buy had it pre installed. So if Linux is going to go mainstream it’ll be because stores start offering PCs with Linux that are at a $140 discount.
Normal people can definitely install an OS. Last weekend I set aside time help a friend install CachyOS. They'd never used a terminal before and wanted some help.
When I called them, they had already set it up and was playing Risk of Rain 2. They started streaming for me on the Discord Flatpak they installed from the app store.
Define normal. I would argue at least 75% of the US population has zero interest in learning how to install a new OS, let alone actually do so themselves.
I say this as a decades-long Linux user (who has tried to evangelize it many times).
Gamers are one of the few demographics still buying new Windows PCs. There are now so many discord servers and subreddits filled with people discussing which Linux distro to use.
Honestly for your average home consumer, there isn't much need for a Windows PC now days.
Well I can agree with that, but that's not the same thing as being incapable of doing it. Both of my parents could easily install Linux, it's infantilizing to argue that they can't fill out a user wizard and select a drive to wipe.
You don't have to know. The Calamares installer annotates your partitions and explains what will happen in natural language. If you can order a pizza online, you can install Linux.
I don’t disagree that installing windows/macos and certain Linux distros can be stupid easy but to a layman it’s daunting.
In my experience most people who use a computing device may be able to tell me “this is window” or “this is Mac” by virtue of the branding being all over the stuff but for all intents and purposes these things are appliances.
In the same way most people except ambitious DIYers don’t rip apart their 500-1000 dollar washing machine to replace a worn belt the call a repair guy. Or in your case, have a buddy who knows how to do it.
These days it's as easy as running a powershell script. There is 0 functional barrier to installing Linux from any windows machine. Soon the same will be true for the Neo.
Normal people will be expected to upgrade to Windows 12 next year after seeing "your hardware isn't supported" Windows Update messages, without any idea of what an NPU is or why it's a system requirement to receive a system upgrade.
I think this is in response to slightly abnormal people trying Steam OS and other user-friendly Linux distros as they grow increasingly annoyed with Windows 11 antics.
> Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)
That's not at all how that works. DirectX12 isn't slow by any stretch of the imagination. In my personal and professional experience Vulkan is about on par depending on the driver. The main differences are in CPU cost, the GPU ultimately runs basically the same code.
There's no magic Vulkan can pull out of thin air to be faster than DX12, they're both doing basically the same thing and they're not far off the "speed of light" for driving the GPU hardware.
Emulating DX11 and below, as well as OpenGL, using Vulkan does not confer any performance benefits. In fact, it’s really hard to surpass them that way.
The performance benefits of Vulkan and DX12 come from tighter control over the hardware by the engine. An engine written for older APIs needs to be adapted to gain anything.
There's really no reason why DirectX 12 can't be as fast as Vulkan. In fact, the fact that converting DirectX to Vulkan makes it faster sort of proves that point.
> its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back
They won't actually move back to a user-focused OS at all. It's nice for them to declare they will, but their culture and business pressures will prevent any kind of sustained effort. (Their users aren't their customers.)
It hard to say what went wrong with this company. They were doing all the right things, hiring top notch decision makers like Satya, Pavan Davuluri, Asha Sharma, Sonali Yadav. Then employing tens of thousands of highly skilled H1Bs. I guess its just bad luck that this company's product quality is down in the drain.
I really hope you're right. The challenge with Linux still seems to be practicalities -- like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions?
Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably as on Windows. For nontechnical users who would never figure out which incantations to type into the terminal to fix it -- because they have their next meeting in 15 minutes.
I installed PopOS (22) and zoom worked fine right off the bat. So did steam and all my steam games. Heck even my printer worked. (It has since become more temperamental and now only works with one of the 3 print dialogues on my Linux box...)
My game controller worked, my BT headset, the media keys on my keyboard even worked.
Lots of stuff was mildly broken but no more so than it was on Windows. It is just differently broken.
I mean... Windows legitimately doesn't work. I work at one of the mag7 and it's a running jokes while using windows that suddenly everyone's microphone quits. We then have to restart. This has been going on years. Our colleagues on Linux don't have such problems.
It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work
Even though MacOS is not terribly better, it's good enough. Add to that the new cheaper macbook and it must inspire pause in the great folks at Microsoft.
Its going to take a lot longer than that. Hardware companies are very slow to adopt this sort of change, for this transition to happen it requires Microsoft to not get its act together for another decade.
I wish you were right, but Microsoft has a lot of money they can throw at the problem. Right now they don't care about Windows because their money comes from Azure. There are a few concerns here: if people _really_ moved away from Windows that would actually threaten the Azure ecosystem. Further, since Microsoft doesn't care to make a profit (with Windows) they could also just throw resources at Windows because it supports their Azure business. Microsoft can hire talent if they need to and turn the ship around.
It's possible that due to Azure success they decided that consumer sector is a testing ground for their exploitation patterns, where they can test out how much their userbase can withstand before being seriously annoyed. And this is what happen, people said "enough" by looking for alternatives.
They can throw money to tweak some stuff but I doubt they'll fully back off from pushing for software+services or all this recent conditioning for Copilot. This piece is a damage control but wording shows they won't change. I doubt that in last 26 years we had a company that truly admitted its mistakes - that's not in the "nature" of such entities.
I think companies think that once they go past the threshold they will know almost immediately and then returning is a simple matter of returning to the threshold. But it doesn't work like that its more like how tires loose grip at the limit, once they start to slide they loose an enormous amount of grip and you need to roll back your use a lot before they regrip up. In tires its 30%, but the amniosity with customers that all the anti user things they have done its a never ending list of complaints and the last 10% nor 30% is going to cut it to stop the exodus. Once people have left its very unlikely they come back if Linux is still working well for them. People change operating systems like they change banks.
Are the Linux graphics drivers actually worse, though? I thought it was widely agreed that the open-source user-space drivers, e.g., in Mesa, are actually very good these days.
One thing I will give to them is the MSVC ecosystem. (Something something developers)
No doubt it’s starting to show its age but it’s like watching a lion die. Win32 amenities just being automatically available is quite sick and I wish there was something similar for Linux.
It’s like windows devs and users live in alternate realities, I’m sure a lot of cool things can happen if they bring some of that dev love over to their UX.
And it really comes down to $MSFT. If the stock keeps dropping, how long do you think any real commitment to “quality” for a boring, low(no?) revenue product will last? Very little when the ad/partner revenue really starts flowing for “ai focused metrics” that can directly tie to windows surveillance (ie recall).
I really wonder how much of an impact these AI tools are going to have on the Linux ecosystem. Seems like huge potential advantage brewing over proprietary OSs. Look how fast Omarchy came together and improved…it’s phenomenal.
I've used *nix extensively headless for the last 30 years, but I have decision paralysis when it comes to figuring out what the heck Linux distro is good for a desktop.
Honestly, pick one of the well known distros at random. Personally I use Manjaro with GNOME: up to date software and a polished out of the box experience. I never have to go to the terminal unless I want to.
> We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features.
.. yet. The absolute roll-over I've seen regarding OS level age verification is concerning and disheartening.
Microsoft Windows will be just fine for a very long time. Corporate security systems and IT admin doesn't typically run on Linux well or at all, but it does run on Windows and MacOS. We're using popular auth software at my work, but it does not run on Linux otherwise I'd have switched to Linux on my work machines a while ago. That alone is 3 computers that won't ever have Linux. Anecdotal, I know, but the corporate world does not care about Linux as a computing platform outside of servers and machines that people don't use as a desktop/laptop to get work done. Sadly, Microsoft isn't going anywhere and I doubt they are worried about losing any market share to Linux.
When I first tried Ubuntu decades ago it was like an awakening and I started seeing every developer using Windows and Mac as brainwashed fools. That's not to pick on others because I also started seeing my former self as brainwashed.
For a developer, Linux is far superior for many reasons.
Moving from Windows to Linux reminds me of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
A lot of times, with software, you could be severely constrained but not realize it because you don't know better. The effect is very strong in this industry.
I am curious whether they will "suddenly realized" this after the community feedback process they initiated because they supposedly care so much about their users. Then, out of nowhere, they discovered that users do not want to be spied on or treated as the product. They just want to use their fucking operating system in peace without Microsoft constantly forcing its own products on them.
I wonder when that realization came and why. Maybe they started losing market share to Apple or users just prefer phones to pc even more?
Linux works about as well on the desktop as it did in 2003 - if you know what you're doing, you can make it work, and if not, you can still run a browser but most things won't work for you.
Linux is better than Windows on the desktop because Windows got worse, not because Linux got better.
Unless you mean for gaming. That was Valve's exit strategy from Windows.
Quality is not the issue. We should be more specific - Microsoft has been consciously employing dark patterns that they know will be harmful to users but they do not care because their incentives are misaligned. Employees of Microsoft have surely had meetings scheming of ways to degrade user experience for some internal metric they are trying to hit. A decade+ of conscious, willful decisions which negatively impact users.
I personally will never forgive them for uploading the entirety of my users dir to OneDrive without asking for permission. They're --still-- doing this. Whatever decision making process they have in place that not only cooked this scheme up, but allowed it to continue for years must be broken beyond repair. It's contemptuous, backwards, and hostile to users. It cannot be condemned enough.
This blog post talks about taskbar positioning and vaguely gesturing at quality, which is whatever. I'm not mad about removing features or even a higher incidence of bugs. I'm mad about hostile dark patterns that they have consciously chosen to employ at an ever increasing rate. I don't think you can fix this without drastic company wide changes.
For as long as I live, if I have a choice, I will avoid Microsoft products. They cannot be trusted.
Precisely. When I noticed the vagueness of most of those points, I did a Ctrl+F for "OneDrive". It produced zero results. Which is all I needed to know about Microsoft's sincerity. In fact, let me quote the first two items on that list in their entirety, then comment on them:
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:
> Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace.
Yes. Not being able to reposition the taskbar is definitely the biggest problem that users have been complaining about. They don't care about Recall trying to store screenshots in an insecure database, or OneDrive uploading copies of all their data without asking permission. It's being able to put the taskbar on the side of the screen that they care about most.
(To be fair, people do care about this and it's not at all a bad thing that they're giving more options back. It's just not deserving of the #1 spot).
> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus:
> You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows, focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted. As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
Notice this does not say "You will have one checkbox, prominently placed in the Settings app, that says 'Turn Copilot off entirely, remove it from my computer, and never mention it again until I uncheck this box'." Nope, they're still going to push Copilot in unnecessary places, they're just going to be more subtle about it.
Making (and uploading) a copy of your data, which might include private documents or corporate secrets that you're contractually obligated NOT to disclose, without asking you permission? That's a "logical consequence" of using a Microsoft OS? If so, then that's the best argument I've heard for not trusting Microsoft.
If you want to know how serious to take this, just look at this gem:
> Enhancing Search: [...] Clearer and more trustworthy results, with results from content on your device easy to understand and clearly distinct from web results
So yeah, you still get web results in your search bar, a feature absolutely zero people want and which is just there to fake Bing success, just with a little divider now next to the applications the search failed to find.
Not just me then? Those integrated search features have been around for so long, and always irritating. I use macOS. Same problem. Searching your computer or searching the web are fundamentally different tasks. I'm curious if anyone actually approaches them the same.
I don't like that default on mac either but in their defense it's super easy to customize. I turned off all but applications and my documents folder for spotlight search.
I think most computer users dislike this but I see a ton of normal folks do this, they don't have the same conceptual boundaries folks on this site do (myself included).
Yeah, but is that a good thing? I think the lack of those conceptual boundaries are exactly why computers are so difficult to learn for some people. Access to web services, and the services themselves, still aren’t reliable enough to support this idea of a completely transparent computer experience where you don’t need to know what machine a file is on.
How? I feel like every time I do my ~1 yearly Windows reinstall I need to google it and then alter half a dozen registry keys and a bunch of group policy settings, and some of them are the "old" settings now replaced with something even more vaguely named (probably on purpose).
I've used Windows as my primary desktop for ~35 years and I do my absolute best to housekeep, but I still need to reinstall about once a year or so. I'm militant about installing almost nothing on my primary PC and putting all the janky apps on another PC via RDP too.
Mine was from websites 7 days I think. Randomly stopped booting a month ago (bsod after updates).
Switched to cachyos - I've spoken with at least 5 people who have had the same bsod after updates situation in the last 6 months. If windows at least embraced proper update techniques like with immutable Linux - and enough polish to make the random bsod loop after updates impossible to accur without hardware damage id likely go back for my gaming rig at least - but right now, it feels like garbage ngl
Honestly I should. Registry and stuff gets cluttered. Programs don't uninstall cleanly, or they change settings I can't find. On one machine I somehow set it up as a wifi print server or something and for the life of me couldn't find a way to turn it off. But it's such a hassle to setup a computer.
What are the practical issues with "cluttered" registry? But also, you can use special apps to track installations and do advanced uninstallations for ~clean uninstalls. Likewise, you could even spend time tracking settings.
So yes, still a hassle, but nothing comparable to setting/reinstalling everything from scratch, that's just pure waste
Click Start, type something to bring up search results, click the kabob in the top right (...), click "Search Settings", disable "Show search highlights".
Ha! This is the first time I've even tried the Win10 Search bar in months after constant disappointment from it, and it doesn't even load for me nowadays:
I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait. But then, since Linux adoption didn't meaningfully change in the last 20 years, I'm forced to confront the fact that either I'm wrong about its fundamentals, or the market is able to be irrational for longer than I find reasonable. Either way, Windows in my mind, represents a world I'd like to leave behind. Apple too, btw.
Windows is not technically inferior to Linux. To the extent it has problems, it is mainly because of top-down anti-user behaviour mandated from corporate. But anyone capable of using Linux is capable of hacking out that BS and getting a generally superior experience. I use both literally side-by-side, two laptops with a KVM switch, and I still greatly prefer Windows for many reasons.
Some reasons: Even as a low-level programmer fully capable of resolving problems, I want to spend my time working on my programs, not working on making my OS work, and Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues. Windows does a better job of managing memory/swaps, at least out of the box. Windows has a stable userland with 30 years of backwards compatibility. Windows makes good use of both GUIs and CLIs, letting you choose whichever is faster for the task, while Linux distros and devs have some kind of bizarre ideological purity culture and generally refuse to make good GUIs. Windows has a built-in tool for easily making full system images while the system is running, without requiring the image destination be larger than the system drive including unused space. Windows developers are not so in love with dynamically linked system libraries that dependency management becomes a pain in the ass. Windows generally has a polished UX with a lot fewer papercuts.
I think there are 3 major points that made Linux much more viable option in the last 2-3 years.
1) Somehow both GNOME and KDE got much better in the last 2 years. It's very smooth and polished experience that I now prefer to both MacOS and Windows. I only need to install 1 or 2 extensions and it's good to go for me.
2) AI! It's orders of magnitudes easier to fix any Linux issue now compared to 3 years ago. The issues that would take a whole afternoon of fighting are now just a couple back-and-forths with the LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini.
3) Valve and SteamOS. The large and mostly successful push by Valve to make Linux be the platform for gaming has cleared many Linux issues and hurdles on the way. I think this will have ripple effects in the industry. My prediction is that thanks to Valve and SteamOS we will see a viable, widely used Linux based phone in the next 3 years.
I think this is an underrated comment. On (2) you're totally right. Fixing issues is so much easier now I can interrogate an LLM for the right changes to make. It's not for everyone, but it makes my life a lot less stressful.
Linux has been able to serve most non-gaming use cases for over a decade now (source: I've been running the OS longer than that). The one thing it used to not be able to do was play games ... and now it does that.
The happy path has improved a lot. When Linux is working it's reasonably usable. But once something breaks it breaks HARD and recovery is still miserable.
For reference I've been using Linux since Red Hat 5.2 circa 2000. I cut my teeth debugging problems without internet access. I ran an LTSP lab at my high school. I remember the hell that was XF86Config (I was there, Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago).
....and like the previous commenter I run Windows on my personal machines because I want to spend my free time using them, not debugging them.
I don't get this. People would put up with absolute nonsense on Windows. But when it comes to Linux, they want to experiment, mess around with the configs, copy/paste random commands from internet and basically turn into l33t haxers and then stuff breaks, its Linux's fault. Like how? Install Fedora, don't add any extra repos, don't install anything not in the Software Center and let us see how many times your system breaks.
I have been using Linux since 2000s as well. I do remember the rpm hell, dealing with x config issues etc. It is NOT the same experience now a days. I don't have the time or inclination to mess around so I use Fedora + KDE and that basically stays out of my way. I don't rice my desktop or do any hacking around beyond basic automation and I have had zero instances of the system just breaking.
* I wanted to update a Raspberry Pi from Ubuntu LTS 22 to LTS 24. Turns out this is basically impossible. Ubuntu themselves tell you not to do it and their recommended solution is to wipe the system and try again. I ignored them and tried to do it anyway and my Pi ended up refusing to boot. Great.
* I needed to update a Raspberry Pi to change the list of WiFi networks it knew about. Except apparently there are two different networking stacks for Linux with different config files and I edited the wrong one.
* I built a new TrueNAS server. Turns out that you absolutely cannot configure the networking from the GUI. There's a section there, sure, but every time it refuses to save the information until you "test the changes" and that fails to reconnect every single time. You have to locally plug a monitor into the machine, boot it, and log in with a keyboard to get to the config there.
* Not strictly a bug, but I installed Debian in WSL and it doesn't include `man` by default. So I get a command line and no help for it. Brilliant.
* How do I get that? With cargo, so sudo apt install cargo
* `cargo binstall --strategies crate-meta-data jj-cli` -> `error: no such command: `binstall``
* `cargo install binstall` -> `error: cannot install package `cargo-binstall 1.17.7`, it requires rustc 1.79.0 or newer, while the currently active rustc version is 1.75.0`
* `sudo apt install rustc` -> `rustc is already the newest version (1.75.0+dfsg0ubuntu1~bpo0-0ubuntu0.22.04).`
Apparently the guidance is to manage your rust versions with a tool other than apt that you install with `curl ... | sh` because no one ever learns anything about security
Yeah like... on Windows that's the exact same steps you would need to take if you insisted on using binstall? You might have slightly different steps for installing rustup for Windows (e.g. you need to install Visual Studio).
Though honestly IMO this is more of a failure on the jj devs to not provide something that can be installed straight using apt, I guess (looking at https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/#linux). For Arch for example you just install it from the official repos.
> * I wanted to update a Raspberry Pi from Ubuntu LTS 22 to LTS 24. Turns out this is basically impossible. Ubuntu themselves tell you not to do it and their recommended solution is to wipe the system and try again. I ignored them and tried to do it anyway and my Pi ended up refusing to boot. Great.
"Ubuntu themselves tell you not to do it" - you do see it right? Let us see how you forgive Windows for breaking things by ignoring Microsoft's advice and blame them anyway when it breaks.
> * I needed to update a Raspberry Pi to change the list of WiFi networks it knew about. Except apparently there are two different networking stacks for Linux with different config files and I edited the wrong one.
Why? Why not connect it to the network you want so that it just connects to that going forward?
> * I built a new TrueNAS server. Turns out that you absolutely cannot configure the networking from the GUI. There's a section there, sure, but every time it refuses to save the information until you "test the changes" and that fails to reconnect every single time. You have to locally plug a monitor into the machine, boot it, and log in with a keyboard to get to the config there.
And TrueNAS's shortcomings are somehow Linux's fault just like every Windows thirdparty software issue is Windows' fault?
> * I want to install jj
* Its docs say to use cargo-binstall
Installation¶
Download pre-built binaries for a release¶
There are pre-built binaries of the last released version of jj for Windows, Mac, or Linux (the "musl" version should work on all distributions).
Cargo Binstall¶
If you use cargo-binstall, ....
You could have just used the pre-built binaries as per their advice. But if you didn't, you should have atleast bothered to click on that cargo-binstall link to see that it is an add-on which has its own instructions - it is not bundled with cargo by default. Unlike you, I did follow the steps and was able to install jj without issues:
$ > curl -L --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall/main/install-from-binstall-release.sh | bash
+ set -o pipefail
+ set -o pipefail
+ case "${BINSTALL_VERSION:-}" in
++ mktemp -d
+ cd /tmp/tmp.8IdPJtQBlE
+ '[' -z '' ']'
...
+ case ":$PATH:" in
+ '[' -n '' ']'
$ > cargo binstall --strategies crate-meta-data jj-cli
INFO the current QuickInstall statistics endpoint url="https://cargo-quickinstall-stats-server.fly.dev/record-install"
Binstall would like to collect install statistics for the QuickInstall project
to help inform which packages should be included in its index in the future.
If you agree, please type 'yes'. If you disagree, telemetry will not be sent.
...
INFO resolve: Resolving package: 'jj-cli'
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-bisector is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-diff-editor is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-echo is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-editor is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-formatter is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN The package jj-cli v0.39.0 (x86_64-unknown-linux-musl) has been downloaded from github.com
INFO This will install the following binaries:
INFO - jj => /home/xxxxx/.cargo/bin/jj
Do you wish to continue? [yes]/no yes
INFO Installing binaries...
INFO Done in 7.549505679s
$ > jj version
jj 0.39.0-d9689cd9b51b4139d2842fcf6c30f65f4eed8cd1
$ >
Again, a) this is third party b) just because you don't know how to follow the instructions, doesn't make the OS bad. Hell it doesn't even make cargo-binstall or jj look bad. By now, you should see that years of experience != knowing how to use things.
Having said all that, none of this stuff you mentioned even remotely resembled an average user's workflow who just uses his computer for listening to music and browsing the internet with some occasional document editing thrown in. Despite its warts and shortcomings, Linux does a much better job today than it used to.
> "Ubuntu themselves tell you not to do it" - you do see it right? Let us see how you forgive Windows for breaking things by ignoring Microsoft's advice and blame them anyway when it breaks.
Not giving a supported upgrade path between version N and N+1 of your operating system is unacceptable, user hostile, and not something a home user could deal with. "Install from scratch, wipe all your files, and set everything up again" is not OK. You can upgrade Windows from 1.0 through 11 without Microsoft saying "nah, this is impossible": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwXX5FQEl88
"the binaries" are a tarball whose instructions refer back to the previous document, whose "Install > Linux" section starts "from source" and says "go obtain Rust > 1.88", so all of the previous problems still apply.
> "the binaries" are a tarball whose instructions refer back to the previous document, whose "Install > Linux" section starts "from source" and says "go obtain Rust > 1.88", so all of the previous problems still apply.
Again with the assertions without checking things. This is the path of "the binaries":
From your link, at the very top: "See
the installation instructions to get started".
Not "figure out how to extract a tarball, find somewhere unspecified on your path to put things blah blah" but "to get started go read this doc whose first step is to install rust, which your package manager isn't capable of".
This is a fairly standard Linux experience, not one reserved for developer tools.
On Windows, if you're not going through an app store you get an EXE or MSI installer that you double click and it does everything else necessary. Every time.
And this is why Linux desktop remains a ~1% marketshare OS, despite all of the vocal complaints about the corporate enshittification of Windows. Countless people say they're going to switch out of frustration, and then quickly meet reality and understand how good they actually have it with Windows when they try Linux, not at all helped by encountering the snobby community who will deride anyone for not knowing everything they know. The Linux ecosystem very much assumes you already have the knowledge of having always used Linux. For somebody who just started using it, "following the install instructions at the top of the page" is a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing. It is not the user's fault if those instructions are bad and you could totally get it working more easily if only you already knew what you were doing.
I note you also dropped the line of argument about the OS updating, where you were chiding them, saying they did need to follow instructions in that case. Of course, the instructions in that case are indefensible - you cannot seriously suggest an OS is production-ready for the real world if the instructions are "this cannot be updated. Seriously, don't even try.".
> Why? Why not connect [the Raspberry Pi] to the network you want so that it just connects to that going forward?
I'm not the guy who wrote that, but I had the same use-case myself. (Except that I happened to choose the correct networking stack so I didn't have a problem). I wanted to set up a Raspberry Pi in my parents' house that would run Tailscale so I could use it as an exit node. (With my parents' full knowledge and permission). I wanted to pre-configure it with their WiFi password so that when I showed up for Christmas, I didn't have to spend any time configuring the device, just plug it in and go have dinner. (Then they changed ISPs, got a new router with a new WiFi password, and I had to ask them to plug it into the wired network so I could connect to it remotely and change the WiFi password again, so I had to do that work twice. But thankfully, I didn't have to walk them through the steps, just say "Hey, please plug it into the router with an Ethernet cable until you get an email from me telling you I've reconfigured the WiFi".)
I dunno, I thought about this before switching to Linux, when I gave my wife a Linux box I had sitting around in a pinch during the pandemic laptop shortage—a lot of people these days just need a browser, and there’s not really much to go wrong with that. If something does go wrong you can just nuke the whole thing and start over pretty easily.
I’ve certainly run into some odd situations on my desktop Linux machine over the past 6 years since I started using it full time, but I think most of them were related to the nature of how I use the machine more than inherent instability. I think I’ve spent many more hours of my life unwinding piles of malware and bloat from non-technical folks’ Windows machines than debugging this one.
My parents used Linux as their home computer for three years, regularly updating it and doing basic document writing with open office, as well as all of their banking etc
They don’t know what Linux is, and know nothing about tech, they just know that we had a 30 minute lesson on “here’s Firefox, this icon means you need to install updates, here’s how you print”.
The only app non technical users use anymore is a web browser. And since Linux has the same web browsers, non techies don't care. Also, it isn't spying on them or putting ads on their desktop, or breaking the mic randomly like Windows does. Big differences to most people.
There are more details that make me believe that linux as mobile OS is more feasible in near future. Apart from the Valve&SteamOS push, the one notable phenomenon that I see happening is retrogaming. In retrogaming handhelds ecosystem there are now many devices with form factor close to phones (they often literally use screens from older iPhones, etc) that are running on Linux or in some cases provide option to easily switch between Android and Linux. For example on Anbernic RG35XX using Garlic OS there's a toggle in the UI to switch between Android and Linux. Similarly Retroid Pocket 5 allows switching in the bootloader menu.
As a separate point, it seems quite feasible to run Android apps in VM on Linux based phone and make the experience fairly seamless. Something like what Waydroid provides.
> As a separate point, it seems quite feasible to run Android apps in VM on Linux based phone and make the experience fairly seamless.
But why?
The premise of Waydroid seems to be to bring Android apps you want to your Linux desktop. But why would you want the phone in your pocket to run Desktop Linux so that you could then run Android apps on your Desktop Linux mobile phone instead of just running Android on your phone?
What desktop Linux features do you want on your phone that would justify this complexity?
I want to use pre existing apps from the Android ecosystem, but I want the system to let me install and change anything I want. It looks like android is going to heavily restrict installing apps that are not on play store and there are now ~5 apps that I use that don't exist on Play store, but only on Obtanium or Zapstore.
My hope is that installation of the Android apps on Linux phone could be made seamless.
It seems like an Android fork that supports the stores you want would be a lot simpler.
I’m sure Google would deny Google Play Services to any popular fork that didn’t follow their rules. But they would do the same to any Linux desktop or whatever that didn’t follow their rules, too, if it became popular.
I don't know what it is, but UI on Linux always feels too disjoint from the rest of the system.
It's a bit like how Windows 3.11 was just UI-on-DOS. I get the same feeling.
Don't get me wrong - I love Linux for all its CLI use but for some reason I've never been able to primary drive it without going insane after a week.
Windows just seems to feel more put-together and I guess that's because the kernel probably has hacks to support Office, and Explorer probably has hacks to support the kernel, etc.
The only other system I've felt this level of unity in is FreeBSD with its userland+kernel harmony.
Maybe I need to try a Linux desktop again as I haven't done it in ~10y but the other comment here about Fedora not feeling production ready doesn't inspire much hope...
I run Trinity Desktop [1] on Linux. It's basically KDE 3 kept up to date (and has been around as long as I've been running Linux), and has a more or less similar look and feel to Windows from the 98/XP days. I run it on Ubuntu (currently 22.04), but it works with most distros.
Many Linux users seem to like upgrading (if you can call it that) to the latest eye candy every time Gnome or KDE or whoever puts out a new release. I'm the opposite. I do think much of the UI work in Linux has done more harm than good. But that's the nice thing about Linux: I don't have to care, precisely because of the lack of such close coupling between the GUI and the underlying OS. I can't stand the GUI that comes by default with Ubuntu, but I just don't use it; I use something else instead.
I felt the same as you, up until quite recently, although I was using Xbuntu which uses a very barebones desktop environment. Since changed to CachyOS + KDE Plasma late last year and haven't booted up Windows for 3 months other than to extract a few files. I"m a MacOS laptop user, Windows desktop user, but these days I much prefer CachyOS for speed, responsiveness, easy customisation. You may still find you prefer Windows but it's worth a revisit I think and easy to try via a USB Boot as you know (although running it off USB is way more sluggish I find).
I’m daily driver Linux now after three decades of Windows usage. I have Bazzite-dx (Fedora based) on my desktop and Cachy (Arch based) on my laptop, both using KDE Plasma for the GUI.
I can’t place my finger on it, but Bazzite feels more “coherent” despite using the exact same GUI.
I had the misfortune of using a Windows 11 machine the other day and I didn’t even recognise it. They’ve taken a huge misstep with the Copilot rollout.
10 years is a long time, you should definitely try again. Go with one of the mainstream distros, like Ubuntu or Mint. Regarding Fedora, I heard the opposite, but as I wrote in another comment, users tend to have vastly different experiences with a given OS. If you like Windows' UI, Zorin could be the distro for you.
XWindows/Wayland being a userland application with no solid hooks into kernel space (that has both advantages and disadvantages), where as Windows operates the Window Manager/GDI within the Executive [for performance]. It makes it feel disjoint. Mouse acceleration differences, too (also impacts macOS), but that's something you get used to, though I find gaming awkward on macOS because of the weird default acceleration.
Windows UI is the most disjoint though, with designs accumulated over the past 20 years still kicking in various places.
You really should, yeah. I've given up Linux as a daily driver in favor of a MacBook but I do have a work mandated Windows machine and I hate that thing with a passion. I cannot think of a single thing that's better on it than on my MacBook or any Linux distro I've ran as a daily driver.
In fact, most of the time I want to do any tasks which are not directly Teams or MS office related I find it easier to just use WSL.
> Windows UI is the most disjoint though, with designs accumulated over the past 20 years still kicking in various places.
But every Linux distro has its own UI, and pretty much every distro makes it easy to configure it to look how you want, with tens of thousands of themes out there developed over the past 20 years by people wanting their os to look a certain way.
The most glaring inconsistencies are going to be user-inflicted. If I spend a weekend tweaking defaults to look just right I need to be ok with possibly tweaking any new software I download to fit my theme.
But even from a non-power-user perspective, if my mom runs into problems with her computer it's much easier to walk her through a fix over the phone if she's on Windows or a Mac.
My dad, who is very tech-literate, once tried Linux and all the trouble shooting guides required him to open a command prompt (because there isn't a consistent GUI you can use to fix things across distros). He never forgave it.
As if you don't get a jumble of UI frameworks on Linux too.
You can run KDE but depending on the app and containerization you open you'll get a Qt environment, a Qt environment that doesn't respect the system theme, random GTK apps that don't follow the system theme, random GTK apps that only follow a light/dark mode toggle. The GTK apps render their own window decorations too. Sometimes the cursor will change size and theme depending on the window it's on top of.
I used to argue in favor of Windows with basically the same argument. But honestly, using Windows nowadays seems to require even more hacking than Linux. Particularly if you don't have the newest hardware made to Microsoft's standards. Or don't want to deal with regular full-screen ads to update to Windows 11, or don't want Copilot jammed into every app.
I installed Linux instead, Fedora specifically, and everything just worked. It actually cleared up some weird hardware issues I had on Windows that I could never manage to track down. I'm pretty sure I didn't need to do any CLI or config file tinkering for anything that wasn't getting an actual CLI app I wanted to use running. Beats the dozens of different registry hacks and powershell scripts downloaded off random Github repos people kept telling me I needed to do to make Windows 11 work and not be too annoying.
I want to have a computer with stable vendor supported OS so _I can do my stuff_ not tweak some os level configs.
I _don’t_ want to spend my time playing an os systems programmer.
OS is a _component_. Like the wifi driver. I think it’s great some people love developing wifi drivers but personally I just want network that-just-works because there are billion other cool things you can do with a computer.
Similarly I want an OS that just works! Without asking me to do a anything! Because _i don’t really care_. (I mean i care it works but i expect the engineers actually developing an os offering to have a far better idea than myself what is a good stable default config for the system)
This is exactly why modern Windows is problematic. MacOS is better. A right Linux distro (e.g. Fedora Silverblue) on right hardware (e.g. Thinkpad T series) also just works™; this basically the same kind of limitation as with MacOS.
I wish they issued a Windows Rock Stable edition. Ancient as rocks (Win7 look, or maybe even WinXP look), every known bug fixed, every feature either supported fully, or explicitly not supported. No new features added. Security updates issued regularly. It could be highly popular.
IMHO - disagree but it depends on point of view so this is not ”you are wrong” but ”in my view it’s not like that”.
I think it’s the role of the software vendor to offer a package for a modern platform.
Not the role of OS vendor to support infinite legacy tail.
I don’t personally ever need generational program binary compatibility. What I generally want is data compatibility.
I don’t want to operate on my data with decades old packages.
My point of view is either you innovate or offer backward compatibility. I much prefer forward thinking innovation with clear data migration path rather than having binary compatibility.
If I want 100% reproducible computing I think viable options are open source or super stable vendors - and in the latter case one can license the latest build. Or using Windows which mostly _does_ support backward binaries and I agree it is not a useless feature.
Mac works great out of the box. Linux can do whatever you want if you put some work into it. Windows sits kind of in the middle, and it turns out for a lot of people that's a comfortable spot even with its trade-offs.
They would still need to develop new drivers for new hardware, which could cause issues. But yes, the situation you describe would be much more stable than Win11.
I miss win2k personally. the UI was decent, and I was able to install enough oss on it that it felt like I could do most of the things I did with linux, but with good font rendering. there were also, to my surprise, a couple of apps (winmerge and proxomitron) that felt like they should totally have been linux apps, but for which I have yet to see anything as good over on the linux side.
winmerge is an open source diff/merge tool with a really good UI. comparable linux apps are meld and kdiff3, but winmerge is more capable than meld and feels a lot more polished than kdiff3. I'm actually surprised no one has ported it to linux, though I presume a lot of the polish is due to focusing on look and feel in a way that is tied to the underlying windows gui libraries.
proxomitron is a rewriting proxy, which I always thought was a very nice approach to webpage filtering. again, I remember it having very good UI/UX as well as being fast and capable.
I am using Windows now for about 20 years after being a FreeBSD user. I switched to Linux actually to be able to interact with my work environment which was using Windows tools (both office but also embedded development tools at the time) and I think virtualization/emulation was a lot easier. After bricking my laptop multiple times while traveling, because I always feeled inclined to fiddle with everything in my OS even during meetings. Linux was the perfect distraction (also me having latent ADHD). I eventually switched to windows for my laptop, when I needed to focus on productivity. What was meant to be temporary was permanent. I actually have stayed a console user and still use a lot of cygwin, using also the posix compat stuff earlier and now using WSL. Lately I even learned to like Powershell a bit. Only the latest annoyance with trying to force me into the Microsoft cloud and the temporarily very instable UI (taskbar hangs with not updating clock made me miss meetings) makes me think about switching to a free OS again seriously.
> Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues
This is one of the points where people have vastly different experiences. I'm one of those that has fewer issues with Linux, and I definitely don't spend hours fixing problems. And this despite the fact that I use Arch, which is supposed to be an unstable distro. Why is that different users report so different experiences I don't know. I think that this might be partly due to perception: we tend to forgive more the OS we like. But your case doesn't seem to be just about perception. So I wonder how much the hardware could play a role here. I think Linux has quite good hardware support nowadays, but maybe I was just lucky so far.
No, it has to do with how your system is set up. Without fail, someone who has his opinion about Linux is using some ungodly bloated corpse of a distro because they genuinely do not know better. Hence why they blame their system's problems on the kernel, despite ostensibly never having any actual problems with the kernel itself. It's not like Linux is particularly perfect, but how many complaints about using it as the basis of a desktop system include the mistake that is the devtree? Or the fact that nice values are complete placebo? Or the million quirks with it's specific implementation of SIGALRM?
You don't have problems with Arch presumably because you've avoided building your system into a neutron star of corporate shitware, while that's the default state for most distributions.
> Hence why they blame their system's problems on the kernel
I'm not blaming anything on the kernel (other than memory management). The userland ecosystem is part of what makes an OS, a perfect kernel with no userland is of no value to the general populace. You don't really get to discount everyone's complaints about the Linux experience because they aren't complaints about the kernel, or at least you won't convince anyone by doing so. It is clearly possible to solve many of the issues I have on top of the Linux kernel, because Android used to be decent, but it seems the desktop ecosystem is just locked in to too many bad choices at this point.
The vast majority of complaints about Windows have nothing to do with the NT kernel, either, which by most accounts is actually quite good.
You forgot the part where they edited a bunch of config files (that they didn't understand) for no reason or are running some experimental UI extension that makes their mouse pointer have a trail of stars or something.
All of these points apply to every OS. Windows bricking itself after updates is far more likely to be caused by all the bullshit software installed by manufacturers and the user.
I hear you, me personally I only use Fedora when it comes to Linux. It is easy to install, has everything I need. I keep everything default - maybe change wallpaper and install my apps and IDE. That is it. From this standpoint it is MUCH better than a Windows box for games, which always has some ads, long update, sometimes it breaks, a lot software is actually writing their config in "My Documents" folder which bugs me a lot AND I do not have to have Microsoft account (actually I don't need any account on that matter) to create a local account on my own computer. So yes, I would agree with inferiority argument almost completely. If Linux got a bit mainstream, the ecosystem and apps would follow very quickly I am sure. But Microsoft is trying hard to people try out Linux (which is good btw) so let's see. Myself, I am off to Fedora even for the games, I am done with Copilot and inability to have offline account.
I always turn off swap and that solves this problem. I really don't understand why it is on by default anymore. If you need swap, you are doing something very wrong somewhere else.
> anyone capable of using Linux is capable of hacking out that BS and getting a generally superior experience.
MS has made hacking out the BS harder and harder with each new version of Windows. Back in the Windows XP days, yes, I could avoid a lot of the BS on my home Windows computer (although I still had to deal with it at work because work computers are usually locked down so employees don't even have admin rights to them--if I have an issue with my work computer I have to put in a support ticket to the IT department). But even then there was enough friction on my Windows home computer to make me start using Linux at home. For a few years I was running both OSs at home, but even that got to be too difficult, and I simply stopped using the Windows computer at home, at least for my own use (see below). I've never looked back.
I do still have one Windows laptop at home, because some of the Python programs I write (I write them on the Linux computer) have to run on Windows, so I have to have a way of testing them. Even that is clunky compared to how easy it is to do things on my Linux computers. That laptop runs Windows 10, and if I am ever forced to upgrade it to Windows 11, I will probably just stop testing my programs on Windows (fortunately my livelihood does not depend on being able to do that), because Windows 11 is a nonstarter for me; the BS level has just gotten too high.
> Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues.
As someone who has been running Linux at home for well over twenty years now, this has not been my experience. Back when I still had Windows computers at home, I spent more time dealing with issues with them than I have spent dealing with issues with my Linux computers at home.
I would make similar comments about the rest of your post.
I have never tried one, I'm not interested in Apple's walled garden approach. Buying a Macbook and being unable to put a (properly working) alternative OS on it if I don't like the one on it is a non-starter to me.
Asahi Linux is definitely a "properly working" Linux distro at this point. MacBook hardware tends to be better than almost all the alternatives I've tried.
macs are amazing, you can close the lid on a macbook and the computer will be mostly asleep and won't burn down the house; and the best part is it'll work when you open it again. amazing tech.
Windows USED to have a polished UX. Is it still better than most Linux distros? Maybe.
But it has regressed so far from where it was 25 (or more) years ago that every day I'm still infuriated and depressed that I've had to return to it for work. The idiotic UI blunders alone must waste hours of my life per week.
Aside from the absolutely baffling functionality removals, there are the hateful petty ones. Great example: the removal of Remote Desktop. I erred in getting my parents Windows laptops, thinking they'd benefit from the familiarity. NOPE. And when they encounter some defective bullshit that stops them from doing what they're trying to do, they call me for help but I can't log in from 2400 miles away because MICROSOFT REMOVED THAT ABILITY. Disgraceful.
It’s really unclear whether you have any Linux experience. Because it feels like someone who knows Windows very well, and spent some time with Linux here and there.
the swap and vm tuning required on Linux to make it work even somewhat reasonably compared to Windows or macOS is batshit insane - or brain dead to quote Linus. you shouldn't need to do any of it and yet if you don't you risk hard locking your system when you run out of RAM - or even just write a lot to a disk - with zero warning.
1. Lots of rough edges "yeah it almost works if you tweak it a little" yeah thank you but no.
2. CLI is better for doing the thing you want, but GUI is better for discovering what options you have in the first place. The fact that GUI is an afterthought on Linux says a lot.
Not only is GUI better for discovery, it's not even always true that CLI is better for doing the thing you want. Depending on the complexity of the task, building a tower of CLI commands/arguments can be a pain, and if it's something you do ~once a month, good luck remembering the syntax. A GUI lets you not even have to think about it, not have to memorise syntax or go out of your way to write a script to save it. And while CLI is great for things you do routinely... Windows still offers great CLI support, so you simply get the best of both worlds.
We're in the age of LLMs and this is exactly what they shine at. Just the other day I got tired of Libre office having some crappy custom file picker.
"Claude, change the libre office file picker to the system default"
"Beep boop it is done"
Linux has a big leg up over windows in this regard because all the GUIs are essentially wrappers around CLIs and text files that LLMs can deal with quite well.
> A GUI lets you not even have to think about it, not have to memorise syntax or go out of your way to write a script to save it.
Unless the GUI buries what you want to do in five or six levels of menus and options--and then changes where they're buried in the next release, so you have to re-learn everything all over again. That's happened to me with work computers more times than I care to remember.
By contrast, my collection of shell scripts on my home Linux computers is still serving me well after more than twenty years.
I recently installed Fedora and holy shit it's still not production ready. During the initial setup you need to input your location, you have a choice between clicking on the map or typing the city, I don't remember which it is but one of them makes your system freeze, no way to get out other than a reboot. It's documented since Fedora 42, and was still there on Fedora 43
Every time my swap is full the entire system freezes for a good second, sometimes it stays stuck, no way out besides rebooting, I've never experienced that in any other OS ever
It's impossible to get more than a few days of uptimes, it's like the ram is never ever freed, last time I had to reboot my mac I had close to one year of uptime.
A friend sent me a png to print, every time I open it with the image viewer it uses 100% of my memory instantly (10+gb), causing the system to freeze. The image is 700kb and opens fine on gimp
I completely understand why people stick to the alternatives, it's way too easy to "hold it wrong" with Linux
It's Fedora 43 and I ran into the exact same issue. The other issue I have is that I don't have any display output as soon as I install my graphics card drivers. So using Linux on my desktop is put on hold for now.
I recently installed Fedora with KDE and ran into behavior that would have confused me if it wasn't for the setup of my home. Because the problem I was having didn't manifest directly on my PC at all, but rather on my AV receiver! When I log in, the receiver turns on and sets its source to internet music. If my PC and receiver weren't close enough that I could hear the relays clicking, I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to connect the two!
And of course when I look up the problem, the threads I land on don't point me to a thing to toggle in the UI. No, instead one of them directs me to create a config file for pipewire while another says the remove a specific package entirely. And they're not presented as a set of clear steps to follow, so good luck to your average person trying to fix the problem for themselves.
I have been daily driving fedora on my laptop for over a year now and haven't ran into a single issue. Not saying you're lying, but if you are having that many serious problems it might be a hardware issue.
The OS is definitely stable and perfectly fine to use.
I've installed and extensively used at least half a dozen different flavors of Linux on about as many computers over the last decade or two. I don't think there's been a single time where I didn't have to work around hardware compatibility issues. Just today, I tried printing a few pages on Linux, and could not get a single one to come out. I'd queue a job, it would just disappear without anything happening. I'd unplug the USB cable, reconnect it, try again, a page would come out with nothing printed on it. I'd restart the printer entirely, try again, nothing would happen. I'd unplug the USB cable, reconnect it, try again. Oh, maybe it's working? Oh no, the printer hard-failed halfway through printing the page, so I have to unplug the power cable, restart the printer, scrap that page, and try again. And so on, and so forth, for about an hour. I've been through this dance several times now and probably wasted at least 10-20 hours (re)installing printer drivers, messing with cups and boot configs, etc. This time I finally had enough, moved the printer over to my Windows machine, plugged it in, and printed my fucking pages. I have many other examples of wasting time trying to get basic stuff like this to work on Linux.
Picking the location odurong setup is a hardware issue? I find that hard to believe.
And do you mean hardware issue or hardware incompatibility?
The former would most likely manifest itself across many operating systems, but if you mean the latter... why would that matter in terms of a given person deciding whether to switch to Linux?
AFAIK the location lock is an nvidia driver issue... or more precisely the pitiful state of the open source nvidia drivers.
Yes the hardware you chose or is given will heavily influence your linux experience. I kinda wished the community was more proactive making lists of "certified" hardware that is likely to cause the least amount of problems...
If we’re collecting anecdata, I installed Fedora fresh on a framework a couple months ago. I like the cohesiveness of GNOME these days but i’ve seen a couple of issues like non stop notification bells on repeat or inability to wake screen when plugged in to a monitor that feel not prod ready.
I don’t know that i’d expect windows to be much better either, but that’s my experience.
> and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem
So the only superiority is that it runs the apps most people want to run?
And this is why geeks are always the “Less space than Nomad. No Wireless. Lame” types or the HN equivalent when talking about DropBox:
“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
PC gaming revenue on its own is around $45 Billion a year and there are all sorts of vertical market software that only runs on Windows.
But even if all most people want is browser, why go through the hassle of running Linux?
I usually recommended a Windows PC to most people because on the low end, they are cheap, disposable, and if the one odd program they might want to run isn’t available, I didn’t have to hear about it.
If they know what they want, I didn’t have a problem recommending an Air and now for a lot of use cases, a Neo.
Valve is making enough headway that game makers take Linux seriously. We’ll likely see a lot more native releases over time. (once the worry about anticheat subsides).
And still why should normal people go to Linux over Windows? Linux support is still not that great from OEMs and for the unwashed masses your local Best Buy or Apple Store.
Have you read the article? There's real frustration with Windows. It's so bad that my 15 year old, who only really uses his computer to launch Steam, asked me to help him install Linux. He had heard about Bazzite and already knew his gpu would be compatible. He gets about 20 fps more on Linux and can choose when updates are applied. There's no forced online login, ads in the OS or copilot prompts. His browser doesn't revert to Edge.
He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.
Some people, myself included, are already less frustrated with Linux. Which means it is likely that other people would be less frustrated if they tried Linux. Not 100% of them, of course, but some for sure.
Why bother making native releases when Valve/Proton will take care of it? Who wants the headache of supporting another build and directly supporting N flavors of Linux distributions?
When it comes to games, Linux has an OS/2 problem.
Steam runtime already gives developers a single target rather than having to support different distros individually.
If Steam Deck, the new Steam Machine etc take a significant part of market share, I think it will be more enticing for game developer to release a native version for Linux. Providing a native version should still be more robust and performant.
> Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier.
If you've ever used it before, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that web only Office is only useful for someone writing essays for school.
The moment you need to do anything more complex than that, the document renders completely differently on web vs app-- not to mention there are tons of critical features that aren't even available on the web version.
And you’d be making the same mistake as all those people that claim Windows is too awful to use for real work. Web Office is limited, but it is more than enough for the majority of business users.
I don’t do anything too “serious” as far as writing documents that Google Docs can’t handle - we use that at work instead of Office - is Word that much better than GSuite for most cases or is Office Web worse than GSuite?
Some people have some bizarre obsession with having absolute and total control over the placement of every single last character in their document while simultaneously not caring about the fact that this placement is sometimes not reproducible and randomly becomes diseased.
My most memorable MS Word experiences are all the times I accidentally put my document into a weird state and didn't notice something was wrong until I've spent 3 more hours on it, at which point I was forced to re-create the document by copy pasting text into an earlier copy.
And the only reason I knew something was subtly wrong was because the weird VB extension I was required to use would stop working correctly. Basically this would happen when some random key element of the document had ended up with a very subtly different style. If I didn't have to worry about the VB extension breaking, I'd just have a document with some weird bug somewhere.
If I wanted a professional looking document, I would use some modern LaTeX variant maybe with Pandoc to generate most of it from something more restricted like Markdown.
If I wanted total control over the content of a page, I would use some kind of graphical publishing software with text and vector graphics.
I have zero idea what kind of Stockholm syndrome you must have to think that Microsoft Office (or any other similar WYSIWYG editor for that matter) is power user software.
It has lots of features, that's for sure. But the features form a Jenga tower. That makes it a toy.
I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who only uses the web browser exclusively.
It’s true that most stuff is in the browser, but basically every user has a couple things that are native apps which don’t work on Linux.
Wine has come a long way for gaming, but my experience is for regular programs, most stuff doesn’t work. Even the simple apps are usually critically broken.
But it still was lame and ultimately made the world a worse place; and mounting remote storage is convenient and often preferable to something like Dropbox for several reasons. The fact that these aren't what matters for gaining wide popularity doesn't make such statements false.
If you follow the reasoning that the iPod led to the iPhone which made mobile internet use dominant and common, you can also follow that line to social media and attention economies which many would argue have caused the world to be worse.
But this is kind of like the 'great man' theory of history where you can also argue that the markets would have converged on this outcome regardless of what the specific device was that we attribute to it.
I think we would have been stuck with BlackBerry/Windows CE/SideKick type devices.
Even the then CEO of Google used BlackBerry devices years after Android came out as opposed to SJ who used the iPhone before it was released and after it was announced, saw that the screen was easily scratched and publicly did a press release that they were going to change it to use Gorilla Glass from plastic.
I was more thinking about normalization of walled gardens in personal computing devices and resulting duopolisation of the market. Widely used mobile Internet, social networks, touchscreen smartphones were coming with or without Apple, and it's not like the carrier-dominated market was all flowers and butterflies otherwise, but ultimately it was Apple who used its market and cultural position to push non-interoperable stuff like iMessage, fight "jailbreaking" and "sideloading", gatekeep software availability etc. which defined the course of action in the industry for the next decades. These things aren't what made iPhones successful and it didn't have to be done this way.
There was no “wall garden” with the iPod. In SJ’s “Thoughts on Music” that he posted on Apple’s front page in 2007, he said that less than 5% of users music came from iTunes.
This was the same post he said he wouldn’t license Apple’s DRM. But if the music industry would license their music DRM free, the interoperability goals would be achieved an Apple would sell DRM free music.
One of the major record labels and some independent labels took him up on it immediately. It took two years for the rest to come onboard.
iMessage always supported SMS and now RCS. What more did you expect Apple to do?
iPods are the main thing that allowed iPhone (the bigger brother of iPod Touch) to be successful. I'm reasonably convinced that without the iPod craze, Apple's phone wouldn't make such a big market impact, if they would release it at all.
What’s funny is that there were two years worth of rumors about the “true video iPod” and people nailed the specs of the iPod Touch. But no one suspected the “iPhone” that had also been rumored would be basically the same thing
What a horrible take, nothing but a tautology. It only runs the apps most people want to use because it's installed on so many computers, so developers target it. Linux can run anything Windows can. It's the same hardware, and if it was a much more popular desktop you bet your life that banks and streaming companies and AAA game developers would target linux as a supported platform. Has nothing to do with the quality of Windows, only the install base, which was the original point.
It doesn’t matter why it only runs apps most people want to use. As long as you don’t think a “quality” of something is that “it can do what I want it to do”.
As long as you think of "quality" as "something that is not quality". bad logic. There are many systems that are only usable because they are popular but everyone hates them and thinks they are garbage. Market capture doesn't equal quality, sorry, that's a horrible take.
That's a fair argument as to why someone should use windows. What does that have to do with quality though? You are confusing two things. Whether you should use it or recommend it is not the same as whether it's good quality.
You do have to ask yourself why Windows has such a high market share. Chrome OS is Linux based but still managed to poke a deeper hole than much of us expected in the consumer space. Android is Linux based and practically annihilated Windows CE off the face of the earth. Mac OS has been competing fairly well with Windows despite being hardware exclusive. I very very very rarely see a Linux distribution in the wild being used on a PC/Laptop. When I do, it's usually being used by a nerd who knows their thing.
I think the reason Windows is so successful is because it's stable, bulletproof and easy. You don't have to burn an ISO to a USB and boot from it, partition a disk and install it. You don't have to grep grub at any time. You rarely have to use PowerShell for much of anything at all, including device management, managing services and even tweaking the registry.
The "desktop environment" is the operating system, not a seperate abstraction around it. There's no research required on what distro works best for you, what package manager is ideal, what file system to use, what window manager to use, what desktop environment to use. There's no messing with repositories either. No issues with drivers that require compiling from source, no marking an executable as "executable" through chmod.
I like Linux, but the Linux community overestimate how usable it is outside of their meta, and underappreciate their own mental model of what a computer is and how it differs from the layman. Most people want to open their laptop, double click a browser and watch Family Guy funny moments on facebook.com without having to troubleshoot PulseAudio because it's suddenly gone super quiet.
ChromeOS did not poke a hole in the consumer space. It’s the B2B of hardware where the user is not the buyer. To a first approximation, no one wants a ChromeOS based computer for their home anymore than they want to run Salesforce at home. It is cheap and from what I have heard, Google’s MDM software is top notch.
Android “won” as pyrrhic of a victory as it is since Android manufacturers besides Samsung make very little profit and every one who has money (again to a first approximation) buys iPhones. It won because Google gave it away, shared ad revenue with OEMs and it bent over backwards to the carriers and Apple wouldn’t.
And yes Linux would save OEMs maybe $30 on licensing Windows. But OEMs make mire than that on bundleware.
It's so simple. It's because windows DID have a much better desktop experience in the past, for decades, and they built a trillion dollar company around it. It's no longer the clear winner though, and they are simply surfing the momentum of having an existing user base that doesn't want to relearn apps and UIs, apps and games that only work on windows due to the size of the user base, and general marketing and sales and existing corporate contracts.
None of this has anything to do with the quality of the desktop of Linux or windows. If Linux had 75% market share I promise you all those things above would quickly become true for Linux as well.
I love Windows, or at least I used to before Windows 8. I think that it is a truly pleasant OS to use, and is my preference. I use Linux as my daily driver today, but it's because I'm a refuge from the anti-user thugs MS has done (ads in the OS being first and foremost among them), not because I don't like Windows. If they brought back Windows 7 security updates, I would switch back to it in a heartbeat.
Same here. With Windows 11 I feel like, "look how they massacred my boy"
There were so many things in previous versions of Windows that were done with thought and care. Probably the blogs helped make me appreciate it (especially Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing). Windows 11 feels like an insult created by people who hate Windows and never use it
I really wish we could keep the modern underpinnings with a prior shell
The right click menu never once showed me “loading…” when I just want to click “properties”
A not too overly flashy UI that made efficient use of your screen space.
It didn’t used to by default shove “news and entertainment” bing suggestions. Nobody wants to open their browser after an update to be greeted by tabloid rags.
The search used to work. You could find files instead of bing results. You could grep text files with the explorer search bar (across the network too) and it just worked. Good luck doing that today.
Search just worked. (It still works if you use ClassicShell / OpenShell). Now it's braindead; even if the start menu shows results, half the time if you click one, Explorer pops up and just sits there broken, contemplating its life choices that led it to this rock bottom
Coffee drinkers "loved" Starbucks. EV advocates "loved" Tesla. The perception of something being good is not an indicator of quality in a post-industrial society, it mostly just reflects marketing efforts and other forms of artificial tastemaking.
Today, people don't love the iPod or Dropbox. Both products became completely commoditized once consumers realized that there is actually nothing special about using MP3 files or hosted NFS. Windows is a commoditized OS, it's unapologetic post-desktop slopware. And it sells.
Thats a little revisionist isn’t it? iPods and all music players started dying in popularity after the iPhone.
Steve Jobs himself said “Dropbox is a feature not a product”. Dropbox is the same cost for 5TB of storage as GSuite + 5TB of storage or Office365 with 1TB each for 5 (6?) users.
The iPod was never “commoditized”. It didn’t o market share to other cheaper “good enough” music players. It was “obsoleted” as technology moved forward.
Saying the iPod was commoditized is like saying 8 track tape players were commoditized.
I like Windows. Windows 11 gets on my nerves a lot but fundamentally I think it's a great system if you're a software developer or if you play video games(and I do both). I also have to use MacOS as part of my work and I don't understand how anyone uses it daily, it's like it's made by someone who never actually has to use it themselves. But I imagine it's a matter of personal preference to an extent.
I don't really mind Windows that much for non-development use, once you disable all the bloat. But for development... It seems obviously a distant third behind Linux and Mac, and I don't think I've ever heard any developer say otherwise. And I say this as someone who is forced to use it at work, so it's not out of ignorance (thank god for WSL).
But that's why I ask what kind of development you do, because I suppose there are areas where Windows really is a good option.
Visual Studio(the proper one, not Code) really has no rival. I'm a C++ low level engine developer and the kind of debugging I can do in VS, I don't know if any other IDE that allows that level of control and overview of every part of the system. I've tried
Raider and Xcode and neither comes close to the functionality of VS.
I was forced to use Windows recently for a year between late 2023-2024. Windows itself is fine. It’s the hardware that sucks with it still being forced to be on x86. The heat, the bad battery life, the fan noise, etc.
On the Mac side, either way I spent all of my day in VSCode and the browser - we use GSuite - Zoom and Slack. It wouldn’t make that much of a different either way.
The only integrations I use between my work Mac and my personal Apple life are my iPad for a second screen, shared subset of passwords. I have a separate Apple Account for my work computer and I share work related passwords.
I think you're vastly underestimating the technical illiteracy most people have with computers.
99% of people buy a desktop and don't even consider what the operating system is let alone think about changing it to something else. I would imagine they don't even know that a difference exists between operating systems.
This point stands to be underlined! Even the least possible friction is more than people at large are willing to deal with, it's only if the system changes are pushed from the top (rumblings in the EU block at the mo) that we'll see casual consumption of Linux in more mainstream context. Having run Linux Mint across a 50+ coworker setting from a sysadmin perspective this is entirely doable, most will not even notice as long as Chrome is in place alongside with something office-like.
I try new distros all the time and not a single one of them is 'GUI native' in the sense that you can do everything without touching a terminal. Some weird stuff always happens and you need to do a bunch of research to figure out how to fix it. The settings GUIs never have parity with the config files and it shows.
Depends what you are doing. I have Bazzite Linux on my gaming desktop and I don’t even connect a keyboard to it, let alone open a terminal. Everything is accessible via a controller.
Windows is 'GUI native', yet manages to be utterly incomprehensible. I'm a technical person and family and friends know it. Whenever someone tells me "you understand computers" and wants me to help them with their Windows, having used Linux for the past 20 years, I mostly cannot get the task done. This has become better with LLMs, but Windows gets zero credit for that.
What is the benefit of 'GUI native' if things are broken and people cannot fix them?
Do non-tech people even buy computers anymore? I imagine you basically have tech enthusiasts, gamers, and IT at offices buying desktop computers at this point.
I’ve never met someone who doesn’t own a computer. Every uni student owns a personal laptop. For all the marketing from Apple, the iPad still isn’t close to replacing a laptop.
You aren't well connected to GenZ. Especially Gen Z not going into higher education.
The only computers they tend to own are phones, tablets, and maybe a game console.
Heck, my millennial sister in law got her first computer because of covid. Until that point the only computers she was using was her work computer and her phone.
I agree, a tablet isn't as capable as a laptop. However, a very large portion of the population doesn't need those capabilities. They just want something to watch netflix on.
I am Gen Z on the older edge. Literally all of them I've ever met have a laptop. It may not be a good one or one they use often. Conversely I don't know many who have iPads unless they are artists. Even the ones who aren't in education usually have a desktop to play counter strike or something.
Your a Gen z in college (or just out of college) and I suspect most of your peer group is educated.
I'm an older millennial with a ton of genz family (nieces and nephews, I have 50 total. Mormon family). Very few of them have or want computers. I see the same thing with my in-laws. They have family computers which the kids have no interest in. It's the Gen x and millennials, mostly, that are obsessed with it.
Edit: I've been looking for stats to back my claim and this is frustratingly hard to find. Perhaps because genz is just starting to fully mature. 14 to 29 is just a large gap in terms of life experience.
The best I can find is the vast majority of Gen z have phones and access to laptops/PCs. One study I saw absolutely backed up what you are saying that Gen z tends to own laptops.
> More and more just a phone and maybe a ipad or other tablet.
And I think this is one reason why, for those of us who grew up with "computers" modern UI trends are, to quote https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm, "like we woke up one day to find our Legos had been replaced with Duplos"
Yes, there are hundreds of millions of professionals who need a computer for their work, while not being techies. They write and publish, do spreadsheets, edit photos and videos, make music, make invoices, read and send e-mails and so on.
It's like asking why a non-mechanic would ever need to use a car.
I did mention IT at offices buying computers for their coworkers. :-)
I know more and more people who are editing photos and videos on their phone/tablet - not movie producers, sure. But lots of YouTubers, influencers, etc.
I like a lot of things about Windows and would consider myself technically literate. I also like Linux and especially FreeBSD, but Windows has Good Bones. Shame about all the spyware and the shitty modern UI though.
This. While I was in college, I worked for Circuit City doing tech support (the "IQ Crew", heh, later called "firedog". Memories). People would call/come in and I would try to gather information about their setup.
It was extremely common to get Q/A like:
Me: Who is your internet serviced provider?
Them: I just click the 'e'.
Translation: They were telling me they use internet explorer.
Me: OK, bring in your computer and I can look at it.
Them: (arrives some time later, plops their CRT monitor on the table).
It was always like that. It took me a while to figure out how to ask the right questions to get the information I needed from them. TBH, this was most of the job.
KDE is an experience that is not that different in quality from Windows. And if 75% of users used KDE as their desktop instead of Windows, I promise you that the rough edges would be worked out. It has nothing to do with Windows having better UX or quality.
HN in general always does this. I got a lot of push back when I said that in general consumers don't care at all about open source, and the majority of them probably have no clue what it even means.
You can really sense the SF-centric bubble HN lives in.
Open source is a supply chain specific issue and consumers don’t care about supply chain.
Anyone with any illusions about this name quickly the top vendor for the third item in the materials itinerary of the first thing with a materials itinerary you get your hands on (for me it’s usually food. Who is the main vendor for citric acid? Or sugar. Or that red dye that causes adhd. I have no clue)
General consumers could not care less about open source.
Normal people buy computers at a retail store and use it in the factory configuration indefinitely. They think about changing their OS in the same way you think about changing the type of hem stitching on your slacks.
The world is a big place and while Linux is very visible to many of us it is irrelevant to the mindshare of the vast majority of the world. Not because of ignorance, but because it legitimately isn't that important to their life.
I don't care about the hem on my pants. My pants either work, or I get a new pair. This is most people's relationship with their computer.
I had a chat with a Linux fan the other day. They said Linux is better because you can replace kernels easily to get driver support for something that wasn't working.
The problem is that I do not want to mess around to make things work. This is the power of Windows. Everything is built around it and it does not need or want you to keep hacking it.
Don't get me wrong I am working on Mac and my personal dev laptop is a Linux Mint, but sometimes it physically hurt to find something that sends me down a rabbit hole yet again on Linux. I just think the whole "you have to hack it because you can and otherwise you don't really own it" thing is a big hurdle on Linux that keeps mainstream peeps to stay away
Not sure if I made sense, but yeah basically in order to challenge Windows Linux would need to "just work" which is not the case right now (or ever was)
I love Linux, I run it on all my computers and haven't run a proprietary OS at home since 2018. I've built up considerably instincts over the years to the point where I never have issues anymore. My Linux machines are far more stable than my Wife's Windows laptop at this point.
Having said that, I don't begrudge people from using Windows or Mac. As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, Linux has rough edges that most people really don't want to deal with. I'm willing to give Linux some grace because I believe in open source and want to support that world with my actions. But when someone complains about why their fingerprint reader doesn't work, all I can say is "yep, that can happen". I think the little niggles in Linux are worth it for having a free (as in freedom) OS, but as it turns out, most people don't value that.
I use both, Windows 11 and Pop! OS (which is Ubuntu, with Cosmic).
Pop! OS is definitely not ready for the average user in my opinion. Some common work-related apps I need like Citrix Workspace straight up don't work. Audio + Camera randomly give out in the middle of video conferences, only fixable by a complete reboot. Some things are only fixable in the terminal.
I use it as much as I can, but there is still work to be done. I agree that Windows is on the wrong path.
>I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers.
It's the easiest route. On non-Apple computers, Windows is already installed. (It takes a bit of effort to buy a computer without an OS.) Microsoft makes it easy for a user to get Microsoft 365. With that, users have the computer they have at the office and are familiar with. Most are just surfing the web and writing an occasional letter, anyway. That doesn't include people who are perfectly fine with a Chromebook or just their phone.
Finding a Linux distribution, downloading it, putting it on a USB stick (or burning a disc), then installing it is not simple for most people. (Don't even ask them to verify the checksum.)
> I'm forced to confront the fact that either I'm wrong about its fundamentals, or the market is able to be irrational for longer than I find reasonable. Either way, Windows in my mind, represents a world I'd like to leave behind. Apple too, btw.
I think that the market (though it is certainly irrational) is moving away from windows. It's very likely the reason why this post was written and they're now (4+ years after the release windows 11) addressing even the most basic complaints (like the taskbar). I have zero faith that the attitudes driving the fundamental problems that brought us to the point where MS has to be genuinely worried about the future of Window's market share have changed.
Microsoft still sees your computer as belonging to them. They still feel entitled to all of your data and the contents of your hard drive. They still want to use their OS as an ad platform. They're still deeply envious of Apple and want an app store with similar control over what you can and can't install on your computer.
Like you, they've lost me. The moment any meaningful amount of gaming was viable on linux they lost the only thing that could have kept me using Windows in any capacity (and even then my gaming PC would have been treated like a console. Almost zero personal info and mostly offline).
They fucked up badly and promises like "you can move your taskbar" or "we'll be less obnoxious with updates" is not going to being me back.
The only winning move is not to play - leave behind all the Windows and Apples garbage, and life gets remarkably better. I'm almost 6 months in switching from Windows to Linux and it's so awesome that my computer doesn't fight me anymore. I've done 10% of the troubleshooting under Linux that I had to do under Windows, and that was just early on; once things work, they stay working, and there's no sense of dread about what was going to break next after every patch Tuesday.
My mother calls up geeksquad when she has a problem with windows. Who do you call when you have a problem with debian or ubuntu or arch setup to use kde or gnome or xfc using wayland or x11 with systemd or launchd or ...
When her printer dies, does she go to the store and buy a new one, or does she get online to research what's compatible with her distro?
The expertise required to cover the surface area known as "linux on the desktop" is going to make that a much more expensive call, and a "i can't help you with that" from anywhere she can buy a printer in person.
Maybe at one point in time; I've had objectively fewer issues with Linux than I had with Windows, and they only happened because I was doing nerd shit; in normal person average user mode, I haven't had any issues whatsoever. I installed linux on a laptop, and it's been an absolute joy to use. Network, printers, browsers, regular apps, all that stuff just works. Windows would reliably fuck up something important on a weekly basis, whether it was drivers, security, printers, app compatibility; I'd spend a minimum of 30 minutes a week simply overcoming some arbitrary bullshit Microsoft decided to inflict on me.
I honestly think there are many distros that are more than up to the task of handling normal users and providing an objectively better, easier, less hassling experience than windows out of the box.
Windows is horrifically awful. Everything it does is completely, thoroughly enshittified. User experience and quality control are a distant memory. If you're so jaded to it and just letting it happen, I highly recommend getting on Linux ASAP- it's not like it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago; the desktop experience is just good. If you absolutely need Excel or some other Windows software, look for the cloud version, find an alternate workflow.
>>Who do you call when you have a problem with debian or ubuntu or arch setup to use kde or gnome or xfc using wayland or x11 with systemd or launchd or ...
Any AI. they all have libraries worth of troubleshooting sessions and successful linux troubleshooting workflows and documentation and so on in the training data. Agentic training and operator training flows often include Linux environments, specifically. Any IT person worth half a damn is going to be using AI and will be more than capable of resolving anything it is possible to resolve. Support your local independent IT businesses, too.
But again, get the Linux PC working and I'd bet a good donut that it takes less work to maintain and is easier to use - even for our moms.
I think you're incredibly disconnected from how most people use computers, and how most people hate computers, because they're a means to an end that often just get in the way.
My mom isn't going to use AI, or go to a library and read books, or read documentation about who knows what, to fix her computer. She's going to do as most people do: if something goes wrong, you take it to a place to fix it. And, that's good. Computers should be boring things that help you get actual things done, with the OS being something that lets you open apps, just as all the subsystems in your car are just something that lets you push the gas and get somewhere.
> that it takes less work to maintain
What is "maintain"? This concept does not exist for the average user. What they see is that their system sometimes reboots, or takes a bit longer to turn on, for some sort of update. Who knows, it just does that sometimes. There's literally nothing beyond turning it on and off, and opening apps.
> superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, not some inherent trait
But since real users live at the level of the ecosystem, what's hard about understanding that they can't replace a lacking ecosystem with "inherent traits"?
I am a very technical person, living on a computer for the majority of my life by this point, and I've spent at least 3000 hours on each of the big 3 OSes. I like windows, because 95% of things just work. I love the philosophy of linux, I love its technical specificity, I love that with enough effort it's possible to do almost anything on it. But at the end of the day the computer is a means to an end, and windows is the sweet spot between customizability and fiddliness that lets me focus on the end rather than the means.
The context here is the average user, so you need to consider if this they share this perspective of fundamentally inferiority that is so obvious to you.
Here's a litmus test: Put your non-programmer relative in front of each, have them do some common simple tasks, like print an email on their printer, and ask them.
You are *NOT* an average user.
edit: people are focusing on the printer too much. my point was some arbitrary task they would be common to an average user. OMMIT THE PRINTER. After they use their computer as they normally would for a week, what is it exactly that so clearly results in their perception of "obviously inferiority"? My claim is somewhere between nothing and the very first thing to go wrong.
Sit a non-programmer relative in front of each, and have them plug in a printer. One of them will end up with malware and maybe be able to print something, the other will almost certainly not even notice that they didn't have to do anything to make the print item in gmail put words on paper.
This sounds disingenuous. How does your grandma fare on Windows? Can your grandpa even navigate Linux? For all I know, your grandma could be a HN user and your grandpa a plumber.
Setting up printers on Linux is way easier than windows. Usually you don't have to do anything at all special at all as long as it's a fairly well known manufacturer. ChromeOS is just linux after all, and it uses the exact same CUPS infra under the hood, and it works just fine.
On Windows you often have to download and install drivers, which is always a headache.
Manufacturers selling Linux computers could attach little stickers with ""As long as..." Inside", to commemorate the official motto of "The Year of the Linux Desktop", for the last 30 years. :P
Tbh all OSs handle printers that way. Ones that have drivers “just work.” It’s just that if you buy any printer in the store you can be assured that if it isn’t on that list of drivers that ships with the OS, there will be a driver for Windows and Mac from the manufacturer. You don’t get that assurance automatically with another OS.
1. It's not "fundamentally inferior". It's just, historically, focused on a different type of user. Linux is for people who want a lot of control and power but don't mind learning how to use a command line or config file. Windows is more focused on typical users who just want things to work with GUI config tools and still be somewhat flexible. You also need to keep in mind that many new users have grown up on iOS and it doesn't even occur to them that things can be customized in more than superficial ways.
2. Linux has, historically, been fundamentally inferior for some purposes. Lots of (sometimes very expensive) equipment has proprietary drivers that only run on windows. You'll find old versions of windows running hardware in labs all over the world. This is minor though, compared to the mainstream office and home user, as well as gamers. If a typical joe uses windows and MS office at work, its only natural to do the same thing at home. Why learn a new OS for your home computer if you're only using it a few hours a week? Gamers, of course, are still locked into Windows for some titles despite Steam's best efforts. Some gaming hardware still doesn't support Linux properly (I'm looking at you, Razer). Linux is getting really close to Windows for gaming though.
3. Windows was actually a pretty nice OS for a while, until the recent slide into Microslop silliness.
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"Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus: You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows, focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted. As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad."
While mealy-mouthed at best, I take this as indicating MS has finally started paying attention to the growing backlash and is going to back off on trying to AI ALL THE THINGS. A lot of users simply don't need or want Copilot everywhere. Many users also now have a compelling alternative in Linux. Inertia keeps them with Windows, but a significant irritant could make them switch. If MS wants to keep those users, they need to stop pushing AI so hard and focus on keeping the rest of Windows in good shape.
It comes preinstalled on new hardware, and has drivers.
For folks who use odd-ball hardware, e.g., the new generation Wacom EMR stylus equipped Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 I'm writing this out on (really, using a stylus to write this out) it's pretty much the only option, which I wish was not the case.
That said, I bought a pair of Raspberry Pi 5s a while back, and am hopeful that the Soulscircuit Pilet I backed on Kickstarter will work well w/ a Wacom One, and if it does so, I'll upgrade to a Movink 13 or something similar.
I’d suggest you get out of your echo chamber. If you can’t see why Linux doesn’t make mainstream appeal. For civilians, computers are hard enough to use without them being desktop Linux.
Enterprises love Windows for the ability to centrally manage an entire fleet's configuration using Active Directory. Is there anything for Linux that comes close to that?
People just have disliked computing in general as a result of their Windows experience.
I’m not seeing any brick and mortar stores selling Linux laptops or any mindshare for any Linux brand. Maybe if Ubuntu started selling hardware in supermarkets Linux would have a chance of capturing people’s consciousness outside of the power user / professional circles. But they’re years too late now.
My father is a 70-year-old software engineer who programs .NET Core in Notepad and builds using custom BAT files that build the project using csc (the outright compiler). He browses and copies files in the Windows Terminal. He is also accustomed to Linux since we deploy to it in our business, and he can do everything comfortably in the Linux terminal.
He trusts me almost blindly, yet I can’t convince him to swap to Linux even though every time he keeps fighting Windows. I'm actually fairly surprised since I'm certain he'd find himself at home almost immediately( he already is when managing servers)
I’m fairly sure it’s Notepad keeping him there, but I’ve told him there is also a Linux clone or Wine.
I had been dabbling in Linux for 30 years, and it’s been about 7 or 8 years since I switched full-time and couldn’t be happier. But honestly, we're going to get there because it’s inevitable. It’s the only OS that's currently not wholly incentivized to "enshittify" itself and is actually improving at a pretty good pace due to Wayland's novelty fostering a plethora of alternative window managers.
I'm only a decade younger - I write .Net (C#) professionally - work it is Windows & Visual Studio (there is no way I'd want to mange any project that size without an IDE, tbh I much prefer using a IDE since I first got one in early 90s)
But at home - I use Jet Brains Rider (free non commercial) for C# .Net projects on Linux machines (Debian + KDE or Mint depending on machine)
I wonder if you mean Notepad++ not Notepad - I find KATE on KDE is good enough, when I just want to edit a file, but I've run Notepad++ under wine before.
I didn't think TextPad was included in Windows as it not a Microsoft product or free.
If you mean WordPad, which was on Windows - that is a simple Word Processor , so not suitable for writing code in.
Not sure how he will get along with all the stuff MS is adding to I'd suggest getting to look at NotePad++. On Linux Mint Xed behaves similar to Notepad
I've met a surprising number of people who are seriously tied to the specific editor they're used to, some going so far as to not even wanting to change the version they are on.
He wrote a programming language for his master thesis, so obviously he used it to write all his software. His first project was the POS/management system for his father's music store (Now famous as the Mexican company that acquired Sam Ash). I believe they didn't switch until around 2005 or so (so about 30 years maintaining it or training a software developer on it as a side thought)
He then started a large sized customs software company with i that ended up getting acquired.. Everytime the language required a new feature the devs would just ask him (like when he had to write a graphical toolkit for it because it started as a text only runtime). There is no record of this language anywhere as far as I know.
I believe around the 2000s as part of the sale of the company he rewrote the whole stack in C#. And he's been using it ever since, including the company we started together in 2013 (together doing a lot of work here). Still with good old Notepad and CSC.exe just like year 1.He curses everytime the ecosystem has big required changes (async, nuget) though I've managed to coerce him into keeping up with the times, dragging and screaming.
> I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait.
I'm not a Windows fanboy by any stretch, but it is a remarkably resilient OS. Case in point: I took the OS drive (SATA SSD) from my old workstation and installed it into a laptop. This was a Dell 7910, with a dual CPU Xeon configuration, NVidia graphics card and ECC memory. The laptop the drive was transplanted into was an old T520. The OS was Windows 10. Firing it up, I expected a kernel panic given how different the drivers would be between the two and resigned myself to a couple of hours using the Recovery partition. To my surprise, it booted up to the desktop and automatically started installing the missing drivers. In the meantime, I could actually use the darn thing.
In all my years of using Linux, I have yet to see that work without a hitch. A chroot to modify fstab is usually the starting point, then comes the inevitable blacklist and driver removal. Linux LiveCDs come close, but this was a full fledged Windows install with custom swap file configurations, 10G network card, etc.
Barring all this user-hostile behaviour from MS, at the OS level, Windows seems well-engineered.
That's exactly why fstab needs to be modified. If an old machine previously had two partitions/drives, the entry for the missing drive will prevent Linux from booting.
There is a reason that this submission is currently on the top of the front page. There are enough “hackers” that still care about Windows, because it did a lot of things right.
Install drivers, but they dont work due to some secure boot interaction with driver signing, that made me jump through quite a few hoops (thx to AI for walking me through it fairly well)
I'm sorry but an average person is not ready for this level of bs in their daily life
It’s absolutely wild to me just how unaware tech people can be to how far from normal their experience is. Like this is just not even close to understanding what the game even is. We’d all be better off if we could somehow impart a lot more empathy for everyone to be even just aware of other life contexts.
That’s probably generally true. But I suspect any field that requires interacting closely with non-peers suffers less from this. I bet tech people who do user-oriented stuff like interviews, UX, etc. suffer less from it.
In business, the “best” solution doesn’t win—the one that aligns with incentives does. You can argue Linux is technically better than Windows, but Windows wins in many orgs because of familiarity, vendor support, existing tooling, and lower perceived risk. Adoption beats superiority.
It's like iOS. It's a closed ecosystem much like windows so to me android seems like the obvious choice. But that doesn't seem to be the case in the US. This is changing though, android is becoming very much like android
If my middle monitor didn't require a screen resolution change and revert to not be black after every boot or wake I'd use Linux all the time, but right now I can't make it work without a big hassle and believe me, I tried
When I had a similar issue on FreeBSD, I wrote some automatic pre- and post-suspend scripts (audio interface could cause full system crash going into suspend unless correctly managed beforehand). I’m sure you could do something similar on Linux.
I've been interested in moving my windows machine to Linux. Do you have any recommendations for distros to use? Last time I used Linux was Linux Mint. It was fine, but definitely felt less polished compared to Windows or Mac OS
I've been using Linux for a long time, which might sound like I'm comfortable with all its rough edges, but it's honestly the opposite. Early on it was a new toy and I would accept issues as part of messing around with it. The past 10~15 years on the other hand, I've needed to get serious work done on it, and also use it for PC gaming, so I've gone the other way and focused on getting the most no-nonsense easy setup where I don't have to be tinkering with things all the time.
Based on that, I'd say: go for a popular distro with KDE. I'm sure there are other very polished options out there, but my recommendation is Kubuntu, even though it's not the one I use today (I use Arch mostly), as it's very simple to set up and well supported.
I’ve read your posts for the past 25 years - originally on slashdot (not literally you). As you proposed, I think you’re fundamentally wrong. I got my MIL a Chromebook and it was probably the single worst technical support decision I ever made. For some, it will always be the year of Linux on the desktop. But rather the reality is the desktop will run its course before Linux has a foothold there.
> I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers.
The reason is simple: Microsoft has a lock on PCs used by corporate and government employees, so the vast majority of people who use computers at work use Windows computers. And so they naturally buy the same kind of computer for home that they're used to using at work. People like me, who run Linux at home even though I'm forced to use Windows at work, are outliers. And probably always will be. So the only way for the Linux desktop to really take off would be for large corporate customers and governments to switch from Windows to Linux. I would love it if that happened, but I'm not holding my breath.
Many people have processes on these machines that would be too costly, disruptive and with questionable ROI to migrate. They'll stay there until it's no longer an option.
Linux the kernel is fundamentally inferior to NT from 30 years ago, Linux the userspace is barely tolerable, Linux as an ecosystem is an amateur clownshow barely held together by corporate donations of drivers and absolute dedication of a handful of volunteers of wildly differing skill.
If your biggest innovation of a decade is a carbon copy of a feature introduced in NT 3.5 in 1994 AND THEN it turns out most serious people disable it because you cannot even copy a feature without introducing new vulnerabilities - that's a sign of quality.
NT was originally designed along the lines of a microkernel though in NT 4 they violated the rules and put the graphics driver in ring 0 (iirc) and didn't undo that until around Vista, I believe.
Technology-wise, Windows NT and it's APIs is well developed and designed.
Microsoft hasn't been able to get marketplace in any other consumer product line. This seems pretty clear that Windows team is mostly just coasting on the fact that Windows is being forced upon people and frankly most people don't even understand what's an operating system so this strategy has been and will continue working well.
You've gotta understand that most people outside of IT have very little to no computer literacy. They want something that just works, and Linux doesn't do that.
I've completely replaced Windows with Bazzite since November and it's been great for me, but it's not been without issues. Those issues are doable for me, but if I put Bazzite, Fedora, Linux Mint or any of the other beginner friendly distros on anybody else's PC they'll encounter a roadblock that they won't know how to resolve and that'll taint their Linux experience. Not to mention spotty hardware drivers (I've had several wifi drivers just stop working with an update, which is infuriating if you don't have a reliable wired connection), volunteer software for many configurations (OpenRGB doesn't support my motherboard), nVidia drivers and finding alternatives to software people know and use like Office and Photoshop.
These might not seem like a big deal, but they're dealbreakers for many and they'd rather put up with some dodgy window resize behaviour or their OS spying on them.
You have a market that's locked by Microsoft working with OEMs and Microsoft spraying money around to ensure that nobody ever seriously consider switching. Add to that that Windows is used as a surveillance tool by the three letter agencies and you have the perfect storm for things not to change.
Walled garden, closed-source, user-hostility. That's my main gripe with Windows too. It's a bit lazy to lump them together, because when you get into the weeds they act differently, but both fall way below my standards of what I want my tools to be like. With Apple, the anti-ownership, anti-repair lobbying stands out to me as especially bad. Apple's walled garden is especially strong, and the hardware exclusivity is 1950s in the worst way. It's like hardware standartization never happened. Hate to think if every PC vendor was like this.
It's nice to think about a FOSS-first world, but what people want is turnkey computing. That's why Apple does well -- the happy path on the Mac, or in iOS, is very very smooth for both technical people and octogenarians.
The fun thing about the Mac is that technical people can do more or less whatever they want, while the out of the box experience is still super simple and easy for people who do not have a comfortable relationship with computing. This is a good thing.
Consider the easy integration you get with Apple headphones and Apple devices. Regular Bluetooth pairing is far more fiddly and annoying.
Consider how you'd set up easy use of a password manager across devices. This is "it just works" territory with the Apple ecosystem. It's awkward and weird on Windows. It's a giant DIY project on Linux.
This is why Apple succeeds. They think about end user experience far more than Microsoft does. Linux, as a non-product (this is not a ding), doesn't "think" about this at all, for the most part.
I DO think it's pretty obvious that desktop Linux would be much farther along had Apple not pivoted to a FreeBSD based OS a quarter century ago. That brought a lot of very technical people onto the platfor that would've otherwise gone to Linux. There was a time when any given tech conf was a sea of illuminated Apples on the backs of laptop screens, because getting your average LAMP stack running was trivial on a Mac and painful on Windows. It was an opportunity for Microsoft, but Ballmer couldn't see it, and so here we are.
While Linux may seem like a better experience to the technically inclined, it is an utter mess to the average computer user. Linux is like a Lotus Elise: fast, bare bones, responsive, and a pure sports car for racecar drivers. They don't care that it has no air conditioning, no power windows, no power locks, no remote start, no padding on the seats. Put an average driver in it and they hate it. Then there's Windows, which is kind of like a Mercedes - a technical wonder, but over the years they've tacked so many things on it that now we have a cooled cup holder, 4D surround sound, and a god damn glowing logo on the front. But the core has been forgotten for all of the creature comforts. Put a racecar driver in this and they hate it. Put your average driver in it and they think it's the bees knees.
You, I, and everyone on HN are all racecar drivers. Our view of Windows is heavily skewed by our technical knowledge, but it is exactly what it's supposed to be - the operating system of the masses. The masses will never love Linux...it's very philosophy is antithetical to what makes a good operating system for the average user. The idea that Linux could ever take serious ground from Windows is never going to happen. It is purely wishful thinking, but it will always have its place in infrastructure and for geeks like you and I.
All of that said, for daily driving, I'll take the Mercedes.
If you're having trouble confronting the facts, it might help to search up some of the criticisms people have of Linux, and - critically - ignore the replies to it. There's a psychological effect where if you don't understand where someone is coming from, if someone says "that's stupid" then it gives your mind license to conclude that the person you don't understand is just crazy. Staring into the abyss of the Linux criticisms long enough, and you'll start to see it from their perspective.
I just don't think people like having something shoved down their throats. The dedicated Copilot button on keyboards and adding Copilot shortcuts all over the OS (and automatic popups/ads) was far too far.
I think OS level integrations that are opt-in, not opt-out, may even be popular. But they have to be done carefully and tastefully.
I have the same feeling about any kind of integration. We're moving away from Google because we simply do not want to have this kind of forced relationship with products and/or services. It either fits and we'll pick it or it does not and then we don't. We won't pay for things we do not intend to use. And we don't want exposure to products that may constitute a security or a privacy risk.
Email and document collaboration are the big ones, email is probably going to be the easier one of those two, documents much harder because we have a pretty specific workflow that is tied closely to how google docs works. But the decision has been made and I don't care if it is going to cause us to have to work a bit slower or different, this is just unacceptable.
The whole Gemini thing is just a massive embarrassment for Google I really can't follow their thinking, you'd think that after the Google '+' debacle that they would have learned their lesson not to cannibalize your old products to launch a new one.
I actually think Gemini Pro is great and I don't have a problem paying for it, but I don't want its tendrils in Drive and Gmail or anywhere else, it actively damages the product experience there. Everywhere they've tried to integrate LLMs, it generally provides an experience that's inferior to just chatting with Gemini.
The closest to useful it's been is in the GCP console, but it seems to decide at random to forget context, and it might just be Gemini Flash with minimal thinking, which tends to mean it's just repeating things it's already said.
Around new years my company had to replace my windows laptop because windows update has been broken for a few months on my machine. They had a replacement windows laptop ready but I asked them to provide a MacBook instead. This is first time in my two decades of career that I specifically asked for a MacBook.
Funnily enough, there's a bug that's affecting all MacBook users in my company (does not wake after lid down overnight). Apparently the culprit is windows defender installed in the MacBooks. Corporate, you know...
Microsoft directors want Copilot so they can make the case to executive leadership that they're aligned with that vision. It's why even in this announcement, the admission that they've maybe taken the whole AI OS thing a bit too far is phrased positively for AI with "Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus", so the skim reading exec or financial journalist can read it as "good, Windows is still integrating AI"
And if the surprise is unpleasant you can disable it by turning off memories and holidays in the settings of the photo app. Not so easy to escape Copilot on Windows.
That's not nearly comparable tho. I don't care it's watching my photo as long as it doesn't annoy me when I want to watch them. Copilot is everywhere, you got to actively avoid it like the plague it is.
Even the linked blog post indicates that that is not the case. Windows has Copilot buttons on practically every built in application, a taskbar icon, and a dedicated physical keyboard key that people commonly accidentally hit (contractually required for OEMs to provide). They also actively promote Copilot in the OS (particularly Home Edition with nothing disabled e.g. "Tips," Notification Spam, Recommendations, etc).
Nobody can predict what Apple will do tomorrow, but as of today, they aren't really pushing Siri/Apple intelligence really hard particularly after initial setup. None of most of the above for example.
I have Pro Edition and for me Copilot only added two icons. One in Notepad and another one in Paint. I ignore both. There's also the Copilot app that I didn't even know I have installed.
I don't know what happens with Home Edition, but I though the pushback was mainly from Insider Preview?
You want to take a look at Microsoft office, my bad Microsoft copilot 365...
You can't even select a cell on notepad without a freaking copilot button pooping up every single time. Same on word, that's maddening !
You could argue that windows isn't Microsoft copilot 365, but then, why do people even use windows ? It's always because of the office, my bad, copilot 365 suite.
You can also get rid of both of them very easily with O&O Shutup 10++ (or any of many other GUIs or scripts designed for the same purpose of decrapifying Windows). I toggled off Copilot and Onedrive and haven't seen either in all the years I've been using Windows 11.
I'm not GP, so I can't comment on where their line is, but for me the difference between Copilot and Apple Intelligence is that I can turn off the latter and never see anything about it again. Copilot, on the other hand, is everywhere and it's almost all universally buggy garbage, even when it's disabled.
I actually trust the Apple Intelligence, when off, doesn't exfiltrate my data.
Oh yeah and even when you turn off preferences/settings/features in Windows, they mysteriously come back later in one of the unilateral forced updates, against your wishes.
> So the issue isn't actually that it's baked into the OS, it's that you should have control over when it's used.
Baked into the OS implies that it's integral to its operation in a way that the two are fundamentally inseparable. Having a global off switch implies that's not true.
There are other irritating baked in aspects of the newest macos and other recent versions that are arguably less avoidable, like Tahoe's entire UI design, or the Settings app.
The real issue is copilot is implemented in their apps inconsistently. Very clear there’s little cross app planning. Apples solution is global and apps and hook into it or not. And if you turn it off apps done break.
I don’t think I’ve ever even noticed Siri/Apple intelligence on macOS. I’ve disabled it somehow (probably at install) and have not heard about it since
Why would Apple Intelligence bother them? It's very unobtrusive and actually useful when it's visible. I literally don't notice it except when it's helpful.
Have you even tried it? I'm a Mac user for 20+ years and I'm running Tahoe. Not once have I ever thought about Apple Intelligence. I don't even notice it. I think you have to switch it on.
The funny thing is there's plenty of things I think to myself, it would be nice if AI could do this, but instead it's all top-down "this is what we think you should need"
No, I don't need you to summarize a two sentence email. How about I move emails to folders and you start to learn the patterns? Or which alert emails I want to ignore? Or who asked me something last week and I forgot to respond? Or which emails I should look at first after a vacation? Etc.
Yea, I've replaced Windows with Ubuntu on my pc and have just ordered an M5 Macbook Air.
Sure both have their quirks, but it's just wild how much Windows goes out of its way to be annoying. From a billion startup notifications to basic UI stuff to copilot and the list goes on.
I put bazitte on my desktop and left it connected to the TV. It's the most seamless linux distro I've ever used. Been using it for a year now purely with an xbox controller.
some are, it depends, but i'd expect to lose access to those type. if it mattered and crossplay existed for the game i'd get a console if it was gunna be a big deal...
I switched to Mac around Vista and never looked back. For games, enlightenment is realizing the PC gaming tribalism is dumb and PlayStations are actually really nice. It's an appliance that plays games without giving you trouble, in a comfortable place instead of encouraging you to spend even more time at a desk.
If your interests lie entirely or mostly in the realm of AAA or AA games that are playable with a controller, then I completely agree.
However if your interests lie in indie games or games that require a keyboard and mouse interface (precision shooters, grand strategy games, RTS games, etc) then having a PC that can play games is completely necessary. (I say this as someone who runs linux btw, not a windows defender).
Or onedrive integrations and constant ‘backup your computer now’ popups which are _advertisements_ for onedrive, or Netflix, Spotify, or LinkedIn pre-installed and difficult to remove, or all of the above reinstalling during windows updates.
In fact, basically any feature added since Windows 10 is probably unwanted.
I have been on a MacBook Pro exclusively for the past 3 years and I do not ever see anything about iCloud. I also never signed up so may be that is why?
My iCloud is full. Every once in a while my iPhone nags me to upgrade for a few days in a row and I tell it no and it goes away for 6 months or so. My Mac has never once nagged me about iCloud storage.
Comparing windows to an OS I don’t use isn’t a fair comparison unless my work machine stops being windows. I assume Apple are a slightly less variant of bad though
I don’t care if it had the best UX of all apps on windows. I don’t want or need data scraping in the form of cloud storage.
Edit: but I am somewhat surprised that it’s qt and not the typical react electron bloat that Microsoft is slopping out. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
If integrated properly, something akin to copilot generating Mac shortcuts, with close supervision, copilot could be extremely powerful on the desktop. Now that Apple has licensed Gemini, I would expect that to come soon.
Gen AI has even more power at task generation than at content generation. Imagine running Photoshop or Final Cut Pro via prompts. People seem squeamish because so far the Copilot entrypoints have been encouraging tacky text & image content generation, like Clippy. But imo that’s the weakest and most sensitive application.
V1 is often not very good, for any new application.
I don't think macOS will liberate you from OS-level integration with AI. If you really cannot tolerate built-in AI, Linux and the BSDs are your only choice.
Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc.
I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.
I agree and sadly I wouldn't hold hopes to see actual meaningful changes (granted - last time had windows was win 7),
My reasoning is from bitter experience. I saw too many these honest talks/commitments - it always this pattern when product/company starts to decline. Suddenly somebody with technical background shows up talks about past mistakes and what need to fix. Even sometimes holds discussion, which is usually very reasonable. But as time goes there only cosmetic changes with excuses like lack of resources, market wind changed this time, too hard make changes due politics and etc.
Something that comes to mind for me is the old Bill Gates trustworthy computing memo [0], from the era when early windows xp was getting flak for poor security. That was supposedly the turning point where they started those overhauls towards service pack 2 and likewise added a security focus in other products, and they decided they couldn't sneak in easter egg flight simulators into excel any more because it just added opportunities for flaws.
What stands out to me is the organization needs to be accept that change is needed and 'walk the walk', and also that those efforts take time. I've no idea what things are in motion in MS, but I wonder how quickly they can turn the ship, how much momentum is in their current direction and how much force is in turning. Moving the taskbar seems like addressing a loud persistent talking point, but it's one among many. What's the timeline (even though windows version timing seems like 'when they need branding')? Win12? Win13?
The only thing I'd add is that not only did he tweet the infamous tweet that caused the backlash, Pavan ridiculed those in the backlash (since deleted). Also, Satya still spews the same "agentic OS" narrative as recent as last week.
So, I hope for the best, but I don't plan on taking them at their word.
Everyone at MSFT who is senior is a lying piece of shit these days. I remember on here Satya being treated like the second coming of Jesus due to his promises. Any comments against him were downvoted.
Absolutely nothing wrong with an "agentic OS", agentic UX is the future of personal computing. The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done.
Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus.
The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.
> The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
I think your last paragraph is the real issue that will forever crush improvements over clicking on stuff. Once you get to "buy me socks" you're just entering some different advertising domain. We already see it with very simple things like getting Siri to play a song. Two songs with the same name, the more popular one will win, apply that simple logic to everything and put a pay to play model in it and there's your "agentic" OS of the future.
yeah for me even with other people, the amount of times you think "it would be easier for me to just show you" is maybe 30% of interactions with agents currently.
perplexity keeps trying to get me to use "computer" and for the life of me I can't think of anything I'd actually do with it.
I beg to differ that "the technology is here". Everyone I see who uses voice commands have to speak in a very contrived manner so that the computer can understand them properly. Computer vision systems still run into all sorts of weird edge cases.
We've progressed an impressive lot since, say, the nineties when computers (and the internet) started to spread to the general consumer market but the last 10% or so of the way is what would really be the game changer. And if we believe Pareto, of course that is gonna be 90% of the work. We've barely scratched the surface.
> it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well
As I use AI more and more to write code I find myself just implementing something myself more and more for this reason. By the time I have actually explained what I want in precise detail it's often faster to have just made the change myself.
Without enough detail SOTA models can often still get something working, but it's usually not the desired approach and causes problems later.
It all depends on where the the AI is running. The problem with the idea, is that for the majority of Windows boxes where it would be running do not have the bare metal hardware to support local models and thus it would be in the cloud and all of the issues associated with that when it comes to privacy/security. It would be neat, given MSFT's footprint, to look to develop small models, running locally, with user transparency when it comes to actions, but that doesn't align with MSFT's core objectives.
AFAIK the existing Copilot features always use the NPU and do not fall back to the cloud. Given that Windows 12 will require an NPU I don't see why it would fall back either.
This is true for only features of Copilot+. The issue that MSFT faces, especially as it pushes Copilot EVERYWHERE is the reality of the majority if the hardware running Windows does not, and will not have, the NPU required for 12, nor is there the actual consumer purchasing power, to upgrade hardware to have an NPU. This a reality that MSFT just does not seem want to deal with while the push the technology onto consumers because its not based off of the reality of the install base they are dealing with but rather trying to justify their strategic investment into AI in the B2C space without doing the proper product market fit to justify it.
- "summarize the discussions on hacker news of last week based on what I would find interesting".
- "Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options"
- "Look at my household budget and find ways to be more frugal."
There are thousands of things I can think of when it comes to how an agentic OS would work better than the current Screen Keyboard paradigm. I mean all these things I could now do with Claude or Codex and some of these things I already do with these tools.
"Agentic typewriters are the future of typewriting. The idea is that something intelligent understands what you want to type and types it for you. Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of typewriter interfaces with repetitive key taps and carriage returns."
See how that sounds a bit silly? It's because it presents a false dichotomy. That our choice is between either the current state of interfaces or an agentic system which strips away your autonomy and does it for you.
Even theoretical AI still has the other mind problem from economics.
Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.
Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.
Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.
We've already been through this when people a decade ago thought voice was the future of the computer.
When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.
You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.
We’ve had computing technology that clearly understands what the user wants to do. It’s called a command line interface. No guessing, no recommendations, no dark patterns, no bullshit.
I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.
I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.
And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.
Yep, wanted to write the same thing. I remember 2 occasions when even Windows 10 Pro attempted to force me to login into MS account when booting my Laptop. Somehow I skipped it (I don't remember well what I did, since obviously they made it unintuitive). Much later I eventually logged into the account just to buy Minecraft, but boy, this sudden forcing to use MS accounts during the boot was so disgusting. I guess this is becoming much worse now. After learning that MS is making harder and harder to setup local account (eventually it will become impossible?) and even Notepad can ask for MS account, I deleted Windows and installed Ubuntu.
Online accounts are fine when optional, but unacceptable when forced.
This is just cheap damage control, just wait and see if they actually do all of those things correctly. Slow file explorer was an issue since very beginning of windows 11 and they "fix" it only now? But they took time to add copilot to snippet tool?
> Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth. Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows. And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.
They are not even acknowledging that feedback is negative. They make it sound like a love fest where users love windows so much that they want to make it even better.
I find that this happens when you enter folders that have media files like audio files, video files and so on. One way to fix it is to enter one such folder, then remove all columns (like file name, date modified - those columns) and remove all the columns that are media metadata columns. Things like track length, artist, contributing artist or whatever else, then click in the File explorer menu on the 3 dots icon (**) and select View tab, then click 'Apply to folders'. This will apply the column and view settings that you just applied to all such folders.
Now all folders with media files open immediately. Also if you want no wait for video files folders, right click in the folder and select 'View -> Details or View -> List or some other option where it doesn't create thumbnails and it'll load even quicker.
> remove all columns (like file name, date modified - those columns) and remove all the columns that are media metadata columns [...] click in the File explorer menu on the 3 dots icon (*) and select View tab, then click 'Apply to folders' [...] click in the folder and select 'View -> Details or View -> List or some other option
I'm sorry, this is very funny to me in the context of the person upthread arguing about how great "agentic OSes" are. Some people seem to believe that we're living in the future, but I'm pretty sure we're still stuck in Windows '95.
It's not just media files. I'm forced to use Windows 11 on my work PC, and I had to disable the new shell extensions to make the file explorer usable again. It's noticeably faster without the new UI.
Looking up media details is of course one of the main reasons. Thank you for sharing this information. However, all the folders are already configured as general folders and this one specifically has a bunch of PDF files.
When such basic tasks are failing spectacularly, nobody can have any confidence that complex things can be achieved reliably. Instead of spying on their users and trying to squeeze more and more money from them, they should first focus on making a great product and work on making it better, not researching ways to enshitify things.
Nah, analytics. Some PM needs to know which operands are most used so they can optimize the calculator layout to improve the UX. And for the least used operands, they'll take a pragmatic stance and remove them to clean up the interface.
This sounds wildly optimistic. I buy the metrics compilation, but I'll be damned if there's any PM at Microsoft (or Apple or Google for that matter) who's interested in '[optimizing] the calculator layout to improve the UX.'
I need that Drake meme here, where he's negative about the idea "Optimize the calculator layout to improve the UX" and very enthusiastic about the idea "Find ways to get incremental revenue from users of Calculator with ads or selling of data"
Obliterating the performance of a calculator wasn't enough, they actually managed to introduce some all new usability regressions as well. They decided to localize inputs so now periods don't work depending on your locale. Copying numbers also includes the formatted and localized output as well instead of the raw value. Parsers are going to love those commas.
We're reaching Microslop levels we never thought possible. I actually think Claude Code would have done a better job.
Be grateful we are talking about a desktop OS where you are free to not use the built-in apps and even install an arbitrary calculator of your choosing. Unlike dozens of built-in "Apps" on mobile platforms that just exist and you can either use them all as provided, or switch to (Apple or Android).
Right now my start menu randomly crashes. Like all I see is a black box with no icons. I'm impressed with how even basic functionalities break pretty often
Well honestly, that's the easiest problem to fix: just install any of the dozens of excellent and stable third party file managers. I for instance am (or was, while I still used Windows) a fan of Total Commander (actually, when I started using it, it was called Windows Commander). As a bonus, you'll be spared the useless UI and usability changes inflicted upon you with every new Windows version.
If you're going to replace tools as fundamental as the file manager, you may as well switch to a stable and fast operating system like most Linux distributions or Mac.
Yeah, that's what I did, eventually, but some people still need some software that only runs under Windows, or want to play games without messing around with Proton etc. etc.
No. "Commitment" in corporate speak is a synonym for "absolute lack of intention". That's why corps 'commit' to reducing emissions, treating employees fairly, etc, ie. to all the things they will not do. But no suit 'commits' to making money. They just make money. It's just a superficial linguistic gesture. Shakespeare got it.
They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.
Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.
Good point, and that one has actually caused logistical headaches. If someone tries to set up a new out-of-box computer without an internet connect, well, you just cannot. Even the previously working bypass has been removed in a recent update.
And, yes, I am aware that Pro/Enterprise don't suffer from this, but a LOT of computers sold are Windows Home/OEM licenses. It impacts a ton of people.
They also aren't saying "we're going to prioritize performance and make sure that when we rewrite functionality, it performs just as well as what it's replacing". Color me skeptical that they actually care about quality.
Can't help but feel like Microsoft is getting pressured by the laptop OEMs to make Windows not suck, because of the MacBook Neo is going to eat all their lunches.
- The OS is getting buggier, with every large update getting press coverage on scary bugs.
- The OS is getting overbearing; constant nagging for upsells on Microsoft products with terrible attach rates.
- The OS is getting focused on hype; the latest trend is AI?Let's force a new button on people that will break decades-old workflows. Let's put AI everywhere.
- The OS is getting slow; there's no focus on speed and the place where 85% of the market resides (laptops) is getting completely trounced by Apple Silicon.
- The OS is getting squeezed; under 300$ it's all terrible e-waste in six months Chromebooks. Over 500$ Apple is aggressively entering the market with the Neo. Over 1,000$ Apple has owned a commanding share of the profits there for decades.
There are 994 more problems with Windows but I've made my point; there's just no end in sight to the problems with Windows. I haven't mentioned it's become a minor part of Microsoft's profits!
Saying and doing are very different. They have passed through the "fuck around" phase, and are entering the "find out" phase of this AI journey. Lots of companies are, suddenly.
My employer trained us all on the Gartner hype cycle, tested us on how to remain level-headed before and during the peak of unreasonable expectations and now every single manager in the company is drooling over AI, saying that "this is the future, join us or find another job" and I cannot wait for the curve to come back down to a sane level where intelligence rules behavior as much as it used to. We'll see.
We’ve certainly done the “fucking around” and now we'll see if we "find out" enough to regain our sanity and our humanity.
Maybe a bit of a weird analogy, but y'all know about the basic advice to not come back to your abusive ex? Don't trust Microsoft to always respect you as an user, even if they now are trying to tell you they'll change and do so again. It's all just damage control PR speak.
I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
Windows' value is as a funnel to the Microsoft platform. Starving that funnel of attention might not have an immediate effect, but it's a slow death spiral for the company because it cannibalizes their long-term mind share. The 10-year-olds today who grow up using Chromebooks in school, Macbooks in college, and iPhones/Android phones in their daily lives, will end up investing in Google and Apple products as a working adult at home or at the office. The one remaining moat that Windows has over other operating systems is games and old software, but with Valve hard at work to get Steam games working on Linux, this last bastion of Microsoft's consumer presence is under attack as well.
> The 10-year-olds today who grow up using Chromebooks in school, Macbooks in college, and iPhones/Android phones in their daily lives, will end up investing in Google and Apple products as a working adult at home or at the office.
1. That's not how businesses work - the 10-year-old will be 28 when he becomes an IT manager, and their 40yo boss will say "LOL no, learn to use Active Directory, we're not switching the entire company to Chromebooks/MacBook Neos because you 'grew up with' them." They will then adapt and learn to use what the business has.
2. Even assuming charitably that our 10yo will be founding a company one day and making all purchasing decisions for themselves, it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything. Even MDM Apple farms out to third parties, likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though). A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only.
The MacBook Neo is a cute PC for a student or a grandma or indeed any casual user. But despite it giving Apple (for the first time in Apple's existence) a price point for an entire computer that's under the amount where you'd be embarrassed to propose adopting it for your whole fleet... the hardware is but one part of a larger ecosystem, and Apple has demonstrated that they have no interest into selling into "The Enterprise" except for tiny niches (relative to the whole PC market) such as "web and mobile" software engineers, video editors, VFX shops etc.
Their 40 yo boss will have never used anything other than a web browser (or a game) in their entire lives at that point. He will never have heard of AD. Windows is legacy at this point. Only the most old and obtuse businesses still use it and then only for Excel and maybe PowerPoint. Most of the staff today only uses a web browser. In 20 years, nobody will even know that AD existed except in some museum in SJ.
Not OP, but I've got a friend of a friend in the Windows org that backs this up. Most engineers are teamed up by manufacturers. HP team, Lenovo team, etc. These are the primary drivers of feature development. If it won't sell grandma another $500 HP laptop, they're not interested.
I’ve included this here because it’s highly relevant to the discussion. That said, anything not closely tied to revenue will not be prioritized, which limits the impact of this microsoft post.
I noticed that, too. However, I will say that having a couple weeks to watch Microsoft through the lens of the original post, I am inclined to adopt it as my current model for Microsoft's actual agenda.
As a result, I do not currently think that Microsoft is consumer-oriented. They have reinforced my opinion by doing anti-consumer changes in XBOX and then saying that they were pro-gamer. Seems like a pattern.
Maybe they will prove me wrong; I am sun-setting my final host that's running their software soon.
This is actually true though. If you look at the revenue breakdown for Microsoft, windows is relatively small. It's Azure and Office that make up the lions share. Those are also the growth sectors. No matter how good you make Windows, you won't sell more licenses because everyone who wants a PC already has one. The only thing they need to do is prevent people moving to Mac, which historically hasn't been a huge risk.
Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.
So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.
MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.
This has been the case for 15-20 years at least. It’s only now that the horrible experience for regular users is so obvious compared to Linux becoming quite good, and Mac OS ranging from fine to meh.
The continual recall/ai push from Microsoft has not helped at all and is pretty gross. There is a way to do a “recall” style thing that some folks will really want if they can trust it. The msft approach has been the opposite of that.
The whole point of Azure is that it ties into Windows processes neatly. If everyone stops using Windows, then there won’t be any real point to use Azure.
To demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to Windows quality, you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen. No no, it's not vaporware, they even included four screenshots. Everyone can rest assured now.
A feature they removed due to their inability to make it performant in Windows 11
A feature that existed as early as win95.
The most requested change in user voice, since the earliest windows 11 betas.
It takes a team of Ph.D. level engineers to implement left-hand taskbars in a performant way! You can't expect ordinary folks from the Windows shell team to code at that level!
I had to check the date on my phone as I was sure it was an April fools joke. After the absolute onslaught of negative feedback and the new term "Microslop", they put out an article saying you can now adjust the position of the taskbar. Unreal.
No, they put out an article saying that not right now but later this month or maybe next month, if you switch to a beta release, then possibly you'll be able to adjust the position of the taskbar. But at least they have screenshots!
It's kinda hilarious that this is the result of the leadership at MSFT. Great example of why the current crop of corporate leadership needs to be taxed into oblivion and have their fiefdoms divided for the masses. Their reign needs to swiftly end.
It might sound like a joke but it's because they are re-adding a feature they had in Windows 95, why was it removed? One can only speculate but given the pervasiveness of webviews in places where there used to be plain (and performant) win32 stuff, one is led to the conclusion that the recently on-boarded interns simply can't write any C++.
I left Windows long ago for Linux, but TFA leading with this had me questioning whether it was an April Fool's joke they let out early.
… this was a feature in Windows 95. I didn't even realize they'd removed it! Is the author too young to remember a time when the start bar was positionable…?
… to then follow "we listed to your feedback" with "more AI everywhere" … it's satire … right? Right?!
No automatic restarts! I understand that in our security patching world that patching and restarting automatically is the default, fine, but there absolutely should be a dead simple way of disabling auto restarts in settings. I'm fine if it pesters me to restart or whatever, perhaps with growing alarm the longer I wait, but it should always be optional in the end. There are just no words for how bad it can be for mission critical workloads when your computer restarts without your consent. Please make disabling this simple.
I disagree, at least on end-user devices as opposed to servers.
If you make it possible to defer updates indefinitely, users will. Guaranteed. Doesn't matter how urgent or critical the update is, how bad the bug or vulnerability it patches is, how disastrous the consequences may be: they'll never, ever voluntarily apply them.
If you're running a server, and willing to accept the risk of deferral because 1) you're in a better position to assess the risk and apply compensating controls than a regular user is, and 2) you're OK accepting the personal risk of having to explain to your boss why you kept deferring the urgent patch until after it blew up in your face, then yes, you should have a control to delay or disable it.
But end users? No. I use to believe otherwise, but now I've seen far, far too many cases where people train themselves to click "Delay 1 day" without even consciously seeing the dialog.
The real sin is combining security updates with feature updates. An argument can be made for enforced security updates(1). There is no good argument for forcing feature updates.
Most security-only updates have a low risk of interfering with with the user or causing instability. Most feature updates have a high risk of doing so.
(1) Although I think there should be some way of disabling even those, even if that way is hard to find and/or cumbersome to keep the regular users away.
Alright, I can buy that. Although from a dev POV I can also appreciate the not-fun of testing a combinatorial explosion of security updates vs features.
The problem is that there's dozens of security updates every month, so even if you can skip feature updates, you'll have to reboot every Patch Tuesday anyway.
Even the Server Core edition, which has a much smaller "surface area" needs reboots almost every month.
I'm the wrong person to ask about that. I've gone ages between Debian reboots while applying regular updates, and I'm not sure what it is about the Windows model that requires a reboot after patching a few things.
So still nothing about local accounts, or disabling copilot entirely.
This is basically: we’re doing the absolute minimum possible to claim we’re listening to users while still pursuing exactly what we were doing before. We realized we just need to boil the frog a little slower.
If they were hoping this would help shake microslop, they’re in trouble.
Or random telemetry, or random network usage of some anonymous service that leaves you unable to pretty much do anything internet-related until that service has done it's thing.
I see people mentioning Linux. And indeed Linux in general is now fairly compatible, especially in the age of web apps.
Still, each time I install Ubuntu I discover unpolished side of Linux that makes it harder to recommend to the non technical user. After install I always need to figure something out, with Wayland the graphic stack is complex so even basic remote control (including the built in one) becomes a complex task.
For governments:
We already see some shift to OSS and non-US from all sort of reasons.
For businesses:
Tech companies are more agile to changing stacks and devices. But traditional business are less easy to switch.
For private users:
Younger generation will shape the future of the above. But there’s no real OS lock in today for general use.
The MacBook Neo is great investment by Apple.
Google might also introduce eventually something that fuse ChromeOS and Android in a way that will spark this discussion again.
AI companies already shaping some ideas that will change OS workflows (yet OS product managers shouldn’t try to shove things as it is now - also mentioned in the above post)
Talk is cheap, I want to see heads rolling, head of whoever was responsible with the all the disastrous windows 11 decisions. Till then I won't touch windows 11 and I'm not the only one.
Disastrous decisions like ads, phoning home, and AI integration? I'm pretty sure MS brass considers those smart business decisions; even if those features fail, they will attempt to pivot them to something more successful rather than roll them back and admit defeat.
Executives always justify their own bizarre salary by saying that they make the decisions, but they never lose their position when those decisions are shit. They fire a bunch of developers and "refocus" like this article. The labor, who probably were against a bunch of this shit in the first place, take the blame.
Nothing on limiting dependence on online account/services and forced hardware requirements. The rest sounds like every text people could read for decades during Windows installation.
Sorry Microsoft, some people already transfer to a different train because you offered a crazy ride.
> all while reducing update noise with fewer automatic restarts and notifications.
Pause for longer.. why not just stop. And resume when wanted.
Fewer automatic restart. What about no automatic restart.
I couldn't read any further. Mind bended leadership to think this sort of wording after the obvious fiasco would make users hopeful.
I stopped using windows personally 15 years ago. My mental health improved right away. Forced to use Windows at work, I finally got liberated 4 years ago and my mental health got even better. I refuse since then employment forcing me to use this OS. It's a health hazard, always has been.
Because most regular people will never choose to turn them back on, that’s why. We already know what the world looks like when millions of computers run an unsecured OS. Last I heard, a stock Windows 98 machine lasted 30 seconds online before being compromised. Automatic updates are good, and they’re here to stay.
Actually it's the wrong question. Implement rebootless updates is the right ask.
You'll have to reboot like once a month still but it's better than how it is now.
next up: an automatic visit from your friendly neighborhood policemen to install a camera in every room of your home. we already know what the world looks like when millions of "adults" are allowed to "do whatever they want" in the privacy of their homes.
Looks like you'll be able to pause them indefinitely with the new update so we'll see if this prediction comes true. Most computers will spend their entire life never once exposed to the public internet, the firewall does still work even if a cafe is your threat vector, and browsers and AV definitions are still automatically updated so I'm siding with the doubters on this one.
Apple has, AFAICT, never required automatic updates. I just checked the iOS 26 settings, and sure enough, I have both download and install automatically turned off. So it is possible.
Well, if yo allow random users to just stop updates forever in a non-managed environment, then a good portion of them won't remember to reenable them. This would create new breeding grounds for security vulnerabilities. Remember Sasser and Blaster?
Average computer owners don't really care about their machines, let alone understand them. Computers are appliances to them like their washing machines and microwaves.
Agree, even if it reads like you are exaggerating it, I fully understand it.
I was forced to work on windows for years too, it's like working with a tool that's broken and repaired with duct tape. You can't stop thinking it's amateurish and this product should have perished a long time ago.
Switching everything to apple was like a breath of air, sadly it's starting to become bad. Every updates brought stuff that felt out of place but last one is complete nonsense..
And it's not like there is much competition, it's either'duct tape' windows, macos or 'broken' Linux.
Feels like screaming "please don't leave us, we will now build what you ask for". On the one hand, this is great to hear, but on the other side I wonder how much this will matter. Apple is now winning on the hardware other than offering a better UX experience. But they also have lost their touch with it over the years!
These are not improvements, its not even a good bait. I don't care about their stupid taskbar anymore. I 100% believe that any improvements they are promising will be so tiny it won't matter.
No ads. No upselling. Being able to completely ignore Microsoft account and install offline. No telemetry if that’s what user decides, no opt-in - single dialog during installation. No dark patterns. That’s what people want.
This. Microsoft has said similar things before, and always tripled down on bad behavior afterward. Their priority is business outcomes, not user experiences or support, and that’s why even this non-apology makes it clear the stuff customers, engineers, and support staff hate - invasive telemetry, outright surveillance/spyware, online-only requirements, AI-everywhere, constant arbitrary deprecation of APIs and endpoints for external tools to drive internal product adoption, refusal to support consumer technologies long-term (MCE, WMR) or do things contrary to everyone else (print drivers) - isn’t actually getting addressed.
Don’t listen to the smooth talk. Plan an exit strategy now, before you need it later.
> Plan an exit strategy now, before you need it later.
The idea that we'll all be forced off of Windows one day sounds like a dream, but so far we continue to be in a state where myself and many other are long past the point of wanting to leave, but we can't for some reason or another.
Microsoft knows that, which is why they've been able to do whatever they want and not worry about the consequences.
Microsoft won't force you off, but everyone - and every business - has a line in the sand somewhere. In my experience, most folks don't realize where it is until it's too late, and by then the costs are far higher (opportunity, financial, time) than they would've been with a defined strategy.
Even if you're not leaving the ecosystem anytime soon, you should always know where those lines are and what the landscape looks like on the other side of things.
I keep a VM with windows on it. Unfortunately you have to purchase a license. Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade it like they've allowed since ~Vista. But now anyone tracking user agents knows I'm not using Microsoft. I didn't even put a browser on the VM. I have used the VM under 10 times over the past year and that's usually just to use Quick Assist to help others with their Microslop OS. Sometimes to deal with a particularly obnoxious excel file.
Of course the proof in the pudding is in the eating, but just saying that they want to do this stuff is at least a slight improvement over before, where we mostly just saw apathy and enshittification. It's also a promise that people can hold them to if they fail.
What about bringing back old notepad and improving admin apps?
MMC snapins haven't been touched in years and still can't even sort those columns properly, search and filtering is terrible
Control panel is still not migrated over to settings after 12 years nor you can open two settings apps.
Error messages in modern apps are just the worst, how about printing valuable error messages than "something is wrong"?
Fixing dark patterns like taking over your screen with popups and taking over the application header so you can't close windows unless you go to the task manager. First time opening edge shows a really annoying splash screen + home page is filled with ads.
Also where are 5 second boot times on NVMe SSDs? Anything more is just sloppy.
Just to list a few pet peeves
But let's see if they can even fix things they've mentioned in the post, though that's like 1/4 of the issues that should be fixed.
I actually like the features on new notepad (like dark mode and markdown, not the Copilot garbage), but 300MB of memory for notepad.exe is fucking hilarious.
It is reasonably feature complete, but not 100%, so some things are absurdly difficult to automate on Server Core, such as changing the ACL of the private key of a certificate (i.e.: to give a service account access).
It also takes a solid two seconds to launch even on a high-end PC with a fast SSD. It takes much longer on a small VM with overpriced cloud remote storage.
i've stopped administrating windows some time ago so hopefully my response is still accurate -
1. deprecated lol
2. i think it can't be run on things like AD, so for very small companies this is annoying
3. ... that's not really an admin app?
4. sure, but then i might as well switch to linux if i have to stick to cli (and i did)
5. last time i checked there were two versions, incompatible with one another, not great alternative to ansible
6. if you have hybrid and are in azure already, maybe? haven't used
I mean it's not like there are not 5 alternatives in azure/intune for every thing as well that are half baked. And 365 and azure is worse with terrible migration guides, ms graph with a combination of commands and json inputs and defaults from 2016.
It's really time for microsoft to fully commit to one thing, make it good, finish it and deprecate everything else.
I was just listing stuff that generally replaced the old MMC consoles. Things like regional options can be set through the Admin app, and is weirdly difficult with other mechanisms even on Windows Server. Some critical aspects are still MMC-only or require half a page of PowerShell scripts.
> 4. sure, but then i might as well switch to linux if i have to stick to cli (and i did)
Ironically, you're missing out on PowerShell, which is more UNIX than UNIX, and blows every legacy shell on Linux out of the water.
> 5. last time i checked there were two versions, incompatible with one another, not great alternative to ansible
> 6. if you have hybrid and are in azure already, maybe? haven't used [Azure Arc]
It's supposed to replace Group Policy, Windows Update, and bits and pieces of SCCM and SCOM.
It is incredibly, hilariously bad at all of those things.
It's a level of failure that simply boggles the mind, and I can only surmise that it was developed by a small army of junior outsourced Indian developers that had never seen any of the tools they were replacing and did everything "to the letter of the spec".
>More fluid and responsive app interactions: Reducing interaction latency by moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework.
I think this is good, because they're talking about removing (hideously inappropriate) react and other web technologies from core OS components, and using proper native OS calls instead. But I'm not familiar with WinUI3. I only know Win32. Is WinUI3 a flash-in-the-pan system like their other UI attempts, or is it decent and stable?
> Is WinUI3 a flash-in-the-pan system like their other UI attempts, or is it decent and stable?
If you stay in the happy path, it's decent, better than it used to be. Microsoft does seem committed to it, they're slowly converting Windows apps to WinUI 3.
That said, the team is clearly understaffed; there are long-standing unresolved bugs, just search for "memory leak" on their GitHub issue tracker. Also, native, non-.NET support is definitely an afterthought, it's barely documented and the tooling is super awkward. But at least, unlike WPF, it exists.
WinUI 3 was a step back from WPF in technology, because it panders to the virtually non-existent Microsoft .NET mobile app market.
To remain compatible with Android and iPhones they removed or simplified a bunch of features, ironically stripping out HDR support just when practically all phones got wide gamut and HDR, OLED screens, etc.
In the era when mobile phones are getting amazing, Microsoft is still racing towards the bottom along with every laptop maker other than Apple.
God, the React stuff is so overblown. There's one small section of the start menu that's built with React Native for Windows, which is _not_ React and _not_ React Native, but a flavor of React that compiles down to native code calling Windows APIs.
That sounds like the same bullshit they spouted when they tried to shove the "modern app" crap with Win8.
There's nothing wrong with Win32 (and everything wrong with the newer stuff); "interaction latency" was just fine on a single-core 33MHz 486 running Windows 95.
As a 20+ year Windows user now happily running desktop Linux for about a year - too little, too late. This company has completely lost my trust over the past 5+ years, with all the ads, upsells, silent telemetry, bugs, background process mess, forced updates, poor performance, etc.
It's not only steered me off of Windows, but Azure, Office, and anything else with the Microsoft name on it. I'll do my best to steer family and business customers off likewise.
Trust is earned over years, and whoever the execs are that pushed all these shitty short-term squeezes on their customers, the company now gets to pay the reputational price.
msft don't earn trust, they actively butchers it and see who'd stay, it's a little bit like scam letters that are full of spelling mistakes, that's the filter. those that'd still fall for it are exactly the people they're looking for. the strategy have worked very well for a very long time, it's so successful they don't really know what broke the current users, and you can see that in this release. they analysed the feedback and the number 1 fix is to "raise the bar" literally by allowing users to position bar anywhere, nothing organisational, nothing cultural, just close random tickets
I will give them this one benefit of the doubt. The tone in the blog post is a straightforward one that is rare to see in such communications, without fluff or marketing speak. It's a rare acknowledgment of going a bit nuts with the copilot integrations. It did look like they were trying to see what sticks and presumably the answer is, we can't figure out what did.
Personal computing is a rare niche these days thanks to the majority who have chosen to give over the personal aspect to the privacy hostile duopoly of MS and Apple (while celebrating doing so) who hold the leash.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace.
I wonder if this will include being able to put it on the non-primary display once again. It's not mentioned, but that was one of the biggest frustrations with Windows 11. It seems their focus is exclusively on single display devices.
It also ruined my flow for my flight sim until I found a workaround. The fullscreen window wishes to launch to the primary display, which means losing the useful bits of the taskbar.
I love what they're saying, but my faith in them is very, very is low.
I have also configured my Windows 11 to look and act like Windows 7. I like my taskbar to be a list of open windows with labels. The tray area and the start menu is replicated across all my monitors.
I also have set the classic right-click menus.
There are some things about Windows 11 I like but a lot of it seems to be designed by people who use Mac OS (graphic designers).
I can't believe I'm reading about those things being presented as new and exciting in 2026.
I had to dig around because I could not remember since when I take this stuff - putting as many toolbars as you'd like anywhere on multiple monitors you feel like as granted and yes, 14 years ago xfce 4.10 was released. Time flies, I guess.
Used Windows since forever because "it just worked for me". Last year switched to Fedora + Plasma, as I started to consider staying on windows was risky.
The feedback/forum tool, has been a thing for years. Submited many bugs that I wanted fixed, and always been ignored.
> The feedback/forum tool, has been a thing for years. Submited many bugs that I wanted fixed, and always been ignored.
Just like the dialog that searched for a solution to why my program just crashed. Of all the times I saw that (maybe every other day), it found something precisely 0 times, but wasted my time every time.
Although I haven't touched Windows in a few years now, my understanding is that the OS has been having a very rough few months with unstable updates, bricked devices, etc. And yet the first thing they mention is moving around the task bar? Is that really what they want to lead with? It's just baffling. It's also a bit disturbing to see "reduced flicker for file explorer" as a main focus. Just how bad is the Windows experience?
What is apparent from windows in my opinion is a lack of direction. Ask for feedback when something falls outside of common sense, you ask for feedback when you need another point of view. But windows is currently failing at the most essentials, these should be apparent inside Microsoft as well, and should've been for the last few years.
It is not that everything should stay the same, that is one choice, but there needs to be a steward that says, hey our right click menu on the desktop has an SLA of 100ms to open, it doesn't matter which features you put in there, if something causes it to be slow, kill it.
Can I access basic apps that are table stakes for an OS, an editor, screenshots etc without popups for unrelated nonsense. If you fail at that, then as a user I get confused. I am used to just being able to note down some text, why am I asked to transcribe with Copilot or login to microsoft.
It is clear that the adoption of Copilot was measured in activations, and as such was pushed in as many places as possible, simply because they needed all that exposure to meet their targets. Windows was not just a product but a funnel to other offerings and that cannibalized windows even more than it was previously.
I've got a slight bias, as I haven't had windows installed in about 10 years, but when I've helped my family with their issues, it is clear how much of a shitshow it actually is.
I don't see anything about respecting user preferences. Things that drive me up the wall about Windows: attempting to switch me to Edge, Bing etc after every update. Apple doesn't do that. Also, forcing me to sign in using a Microsoft account as opposed to a local account.
Nothing in this article made me think they even understand the problem. I don't know what I expecting, though. I mean, the first thing they mention is the ability to move the taskbar around? Oh wow. Yeah, they have no idea what's wrong.
My personal opinion is "Copilot is pretty good as a chatbot [1] but don't waste your time trying anything multimodal." So I don't mind it at all, in fact I like it enough that I installed the app on my phone. I've got no interest in having it rewrite stuff for me in Word or for LinkedIn though.
On the other hand, Microsoft is famous for killing something good (like OneNote) but spamming the UI with numerous entry points that will make you think "this is some piece of crap that Microsoft is spamming because nobody in their right mind would want it." That they are getting some self-awareness of this is a good sign.
[1] I'd say Google's AI Mode gives consistently better answers (like use "vite-ignore" instead of writing a Vite plugin that doesn't work) than copilot with the reservation that if Google seems to get uncomfortable about a conversation it will end the conversation with a ten pack of search results whereas Copilot tries to simulate a person with healthy boundaries (e.g. "I will help you write a romance story but I won't help you write a sex scene")
My own anecdotal experience is that Copilot doesn't even do a good job as a chatbot. I usually only use it in a few occasions where I don't have access to ChatGPT/Claude.
And I could tell that. In one instance where I asked it to write a script that does a bunch of things, it provided a series of steps to do in the terminal. This is very off my typical experience with other chatbots. I immediately went to Claude which gave me a complete script that does exactly what I need.
Ugh. They horribly borked Notepad. The whole reason I use it is because it's dumb and simple. The moment you change it into a full-featured rich text editor with AI assistants and autocorrect ... you should just make it another app, because it's solving a different problem.
At the very least, don't forget my font setting on the update.
> "… by making them necessary entry points! Muahahaha!"
Starting with Windows 11 26H2, the Start Menu will be removed and replaced with Copilot. In order to use a locally hosted app, an externally hosted LLM will need to be instructed to launch it. The reliability is phenomenal: our testing has shown it can launch the right app with 95% accuracy.
Users will also need to drink a Monster™ verification can every time they launch the start menu if they do not have a Premium AI PRO Ultra MAX account. Users may chose to skip verification process if they agree to the new EULA where it is stipulated that they must meet a weekly quota of Big Macs™ stamps. Failing that your Copilot™ Account will enter lock-down mode where a full document, body and facial scan must be "performed" to recover it.
I'm not sure these problems are solvable once a company gets big enough and incentives completely take over. It's like the hands are trying to sew a parachute while the legs are sprinting towards a cliff.
* We're going to make sure we double down on our dark patterns slamming our obnoxious account requirements in your face every chance we get. We'll also make sure to "accidentally forget" any "unfavourable" setting you might have turned to your liking just to make sure you get the best experience we want.
* We're going to keep shoving AI and copilot in your face in every corner of the system whether you want it or not. It's what we want after all. Please subscribe to copilot now or 3 days later.
* We're going to continue vibe coding core system components and interface elements in JavaScript to minimize our developer costs. Just get over it already.
> "A more relevant Recommended section in Start will surface apps and content you care about most, with clear controls to customize the experience or turn it off"
Too little, too late. In fact, in this post they seem to be committing to keeping it as bad (or even making it even worse) for my use case.
I've used Windows since 3.1. Win 11 was the straw that broke the camel's back. I moved to CachyOS a few months ago and I honestly can't find a reason to switch back.
I've used Windows since 3.11 and I am using macOS for 5+ years now for work (requirement).
Switched to Linux on my personal devices 2 years ago and using Ubuntu and PopOS! on two different laptops. I've had very small number of issues. Can't understand people moving to Mac - it is the same messed half backed OS as both Windows and Linux (flavors). With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes.
With Linux at least I don't have to worry about privacy.
> With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes.
I think this point is really it. What in the past needed a 40min google search to fix something, llms now fix it in seconds.
Lifelong user and 11-year Insider Program participant (i.e., since the literal start of the program).
Just this past January I implemented something on my workstation I should've done a long time ago: outbound filtering all network traffic via so-called 'Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security'. I've also skipped more Insider builds in the past two months than I have in the past 11 years.
The only thing keeping me around at this point is the migration overhead and (at least I tell myself) window 'snapping'.
The first thing I did when a mac was handed to me by an employer was find an app for window snapping. It served me well.
I went back to windows, using WSL in 2017. In 2023 I got sick of how everything was getting progressively worse and switched to linux (which has window snapping). I'm never looking back.
Hiding most of the items by default and making it really hard to restore it! I had to try 3 different obscure methods to get the old context menu back.
Which just tells me what I already know - Windows is actively hostile to power users, and they should be on Linux. Leave Windows for the less technically confident who need that stuff hidden away.
You mean Metro/Modern? I never see it anymore, and to be honest I prefer the 10 look over Aero, despite being a Millennial vaporwave fan. I haven't spun up 7 in years and years, and I don't miss it at all. But OS X 10.4's Aqua was the peak.
But also, why wouldn't UI changes be possible if the source was open? I remember WindowBlinds and patched uxTheme.dll in the XP days, and that was /without/ source being available. So in this hypothetical, what's stopping hackers from backporting the things they like about 7 to 10 or adding more rounded translucency?
I am sus. Optimistic but sus. I am hoping for some combo of:
- MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating...
- Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.
It's like you could take the good from both and discard the bad, but it hasn't happened yet.
It sure looks like a PR campaign to take the attention away from how bad the things are, and I need to see it to believe it.
Also, why couldn't they make this announcement as they release the taskbar change. Taking away the most basic features and bringing a few back doesn't mean things are improving, it means things are getting petty.
There is no reason for the start menu to take 2 seconds to show up on a computer with 8 CPUs running at 4GHz. We all know that they're completely half-assing everything now.
> Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.
Would you settle for 2 out of 3? UX is improving, and things get more polished every year, but we've mostly settled on shoving things into some sort of package (container, flatpak, snap) alongside all its dependencies specifically so we don't have to actually stabilize any sort of ABI
Yep. Will take what I can get! Re the flatpacks, snaps, docker etc. Yea... I don't like those much more than the Apple/Google/MS app stores. They don't have the perverse incentives, but are still setting up friction points vs being able to just have an executable work, expect to work in 5-10 years, and work on diff distros. (This is something MS actually does right; possibly the best thing about Win)
I was coincidentally just updating old softare I wrote, and I just ripped out the snap, RPM and Debs because I can't be bothered to maintain all of them.
No commitment to keeping your machine yours with local only accounts. No commitment to blocking ads. Honestly though, at this point even if they did massive changes and addressed privacy and ownership I would be years away from trying them again. They could pay me and I would say no.
Being able to uninstall Bing and Edge would be great too. Being realistic, it’s likely that Copilot will join the list of apps you cannot uninstall very soon.
Remember, Microsoft's goal is to turn Windows into an AI agent that keeps all your data in the cloud, that it can use that data for endless money-making purposes like advertising, and that you pay for with a dozen different subscriptions.
Microsoft will continue to move in that direction in various overt and covert manners, and any so-called responding to what users wants is just a charade.
I can't help but think, 90s Microsoft was far from perfect, but they at least seemed to care a lot about the quality of Windows. 2020s Microsoft seems to see Windows as something they can leverage to get themselves in front of whatever the latest tech trend is, never mind what it does to their users' ability to get stuff done.
They may say they're backing off now, but it's hard to trust them. Will they just do the same thing with whatever the next tech trend is?
How do they expect anyone to believe they can improve when they show a complete lack of understanding what they are doing wrong. The only message I get is that they think their audience consists of comlete morons. So nothing has changed at all.
It feels like Windows is old and tired. Remember when Microsoft and Intel seemed unstoppable in the 1990s and early 2000s? The momentum is no longer there. The latest bad decisions around AI for Microsoft are just the straw breaking the camel’s back.
It's not an OS anymore. It's an AI that spies on you while you work and sends your information back to servers controlled by intelligence services. Once your data is there, more AIs spend endless resources examining (thinking about) your life, cross referencing your windows behavior with the information they receive about you from data brokers. It's a threat to your personal sovereignty, your corporate/national security, remove it immediately. Switch to Linux.
We used to be able to make any folder a popup menu on taskbar, including any subfolders. Served the need for quick shortcuts to whatever we need within 2 clicks. Sorely miss it in Win11.
The taskbar being nerfed is the main reason I haven't upgraded to Windows 11. The vertical taskbar he mentions first is critical but they need to bring back Quick Launch folders too.
Interesting headline. And I start reading as a MS skeptic. Maybe they finally got it? Maybe MS have realized why Windows really is so crappy. I read the first entry, bolded, in the bullet list. It reads “ More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions”.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: [...] We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace.
This already existed. You took it away. If anything, you are back peddling and re-introducing it. But I don't care anymore. Made the switch to Linux and don't look back.
If Bill is reading this: Another way to commit to quality would be (a) fund a $200M+ open source foundation to migrate/port/rewrite all of Windows (drivers, utilities, applications) to Linux; (b) give the foundation full IP rights to do so; (c) put all Microsoft Windows employees on the effort too.
Bill definitely wouldn't approve of the current Windows quality. This email by him (2003) is very interesting. It looks like he was powerless to stop the degradation.
The guy's still a narcissistic asshole and likely sexual predator, but when even Bill Gates says the UI sucks on Microsoft products, you know the rot runs deep.
I actually don't have any particular problems with Windows. It's familiar, it works with everything I do, I don't have a reason to switch.
That said, it's completely rudderless. How important is an operating system anymore anyway when most applications are just an Electron app anyway? What does consumer Windows provide Microsoft anymore besides a gateway to Office 365 and other actually profitable services?
They also clearly fell asleep at the wheel on things like gaming. The future is clearly Linux-based.
And on the hardware front, Microsoft seemed to have given up on their own consumer gear, and their partners have left them out to dry yet again.
When are they going to walk back the deliberate deprecation of the vast majority of PCs that ran Windows 10 fine but do not meet the unnecessary and completely arbitrary hardware requirements imposed by Windows 11? I mean, the performance and AI and taskbar stuff also demonstrates bad judgement, but I really can't get past the Win11 thing.
I didn't switch to linux because windows was bad. I was running LTSC IoT Enterprise and selectively ran scripts from AtlasOS.
What finally pushed me to linux was because specifically in my narrow usecases it's just plain better, but if we were to completely ignore that, even if linux was worse, I just don't want to support evil companies anymore.
Now I'll admit that this is what AI would say, but it's not always about what is better, it's about sending a message, a message that microsoft appears to have heard loud and clear, however, we will have to see if this is just PR or not.
I dual boot LTSC and Fedora. I find myself using fedora more and more, but I need Windows for a couple of apps that don't play nicely with Wine/Proton (Ableton Live 12 mainly).
I'm glad they explicitly mention File Explorer. As a person solely use Windows for decades, I've naturally developed a very deep allergical behavior of avoiding to touch File Explorer as much as I can for years. Hope they could help fix me. I really need VSCode-like experience for files management.
Interesting how often they use the word „craft“. For me, a sign that AI fatiguge is a real issue, not only among Windows users. Good, maybe a small, first step towards down-regulation of the hype.
Otherwise it wouldn't take years to unbreak the simple stuff like taskbar positioning!
> Thank you for holding us to a high standard
"We" apologize for failing to do that!
> moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework.
Is that the framework that's incapable of the most basic frameworky thing - displaying non-blurry text and hopes that high-dpi screens will save us?
> Enhancing Search: Delivering faster, more accurate results with consistent search experience across Windows surfaces
> Substantially lower latency for search,
Everything has existed for many years and solved the speed/latency! Some file managers were even smart enough to integrate it!
> Improving the Start and Taskbar experience: Making these core Windows surfaces more reliable, flexible and personalized
Similarly, Windhawk already exist, take that power and make it built-in and easier to mod/apply!
P.S.
By the way, when have we retired programs and apps?
I wonder if the incentive structure shaped by the internal MS metrics has been updated to reflect this commitment. Otherwise, little is going to change.
I'm at a large enterprise outfit, and "shoving things in your face" has been a problem with large software suites for a long time, long before the AI craze. I keep telling my skip level leadership that we need more User-Experience "mob goons" that have authority across product domains to (metaphorically) beat the living daylight out of bad "PM-brained" ideas.
It's got to be somewhat depressing working on a household name product in its trashy downturn. Surely you can't have the pride in your work that an equivalent employee once would have.
Windows 11 performs like a pig, it’s full of unnecessary notifications and apps that constantly seek attention, copilot isn’t useful, I feel like I’m being spied on, the UI is weird.
It could be turned into a great OS if they simply remove some things. Get rid of the ads, make copilot an optional component, stop trying to sell 365, let me turn off telemetry, etc.
Remember when installers allowed you to personalize the components you wanted to install? I miss that. I wasn't on windows but I remember that office allowed you to choose which components you wanted
Quality is only real if you validate outputs automatically. In data systems, I check every result against expected schemas before delivery — catches 95% of issues before users see them.
I grew up on Windows, switched to Mac (college and beyond), and over time, have come to hate Windows. It feels like it doesn’t have a user’s best interest in mind. I’m just there to have Copilot or XYZ service shoved down my throat. I’m not sure Mac is actually any less sinister but at least it feels less so.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong cause I don't recall where I got this understanding from, but I believe Windows 11 still has the Windows 10 taskbar, but a startup process basically hides it and replaces it with a brand new one they made for Windows 11, built with web technologies. And they probably just never got around to figuring out how to put it somewhere else on the screen since they didn't inherit that behaviour from before.
I moved over to Linux a few months ago. Absolutely zero issues. My only thought was, "Wow. Why didn't I do this sooner?" There's nothing Windows can do to bring me back at this point.
> This includes the ability to skip updates during device setup to get to the desktop faster...
There's only one complaint that practically everyone has regarding what's required "during device setup," and it's not updates. I can't say I'm shocked that it's being ignored.
I want to believe but I can't.
We know how much product decision there is in there putting business on top of quality. Doing shady stuff and having at least weird round tables. Putting a spy on everyone's house.
For now, I am so bitter about windows, that I just want it to stop being a thing
>Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth. Every day, we hear from the community about how you experience Windows. And over the past several months, the team and I have spent a great deal of time analyzing your feedback. What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.
>Today, I’m sharing what we are doing in response.
Just these words are already off putting. The extremely careful wording to avoid anything minimally resembling recognizing an issue.
It's ok to say we fucked up. It's empowering. Not being able to do it is a huge red flag.
Overall some potential here, if they follow through, but it's amusing that the first bullet point is essentially "more new surface we can accidently break".
Exactly. However, I think this hints at the real problem - how disconnected from their users is the Windows team that they thought people would welcome AI in Notepad?
Can we all just appreciate the sheer amount of writing and re-writing and executive review that had to go on to make this blog post go out? Goodness, I can smell the hand-wringing and political battling represented by these words through the wire. Incredible stuff.
Recently got an HP ProBook for a relative to replace his old 2011 ThinkPad with Kubuntu 24.04 and I was shocked how laggy and unusable Windows 11 was. Every menu has tons of latency, programs take forever to start, even something simple like Rufus. File Explorer is a laggy mess, the whole OS feels like you are walking through mud. After a reboot there was a fullscreen message about "finish setting up the device" (??? it's already set up) with the only options being Confirm and "Remind me in 3 days". Thankfully my relative was comfortable with Kubuntu and all his files were there (and frankly we were too lazy to set everything up from scratch again) so I just cloned his old drive and Kubuntu runs like a dream! I'm not someone who would advocate for Linux because it still has very rough edges (even more so than 10 years ago somehow) and has a higher learning curve but Windows 11 is unbelievable bad. I switched to macOS roughly around Windows 11's release so my only other experience was at work (where I constantly complain about the TWO context menus!!!).
The last performant Windows version was Windows 8, despite its UX flaws. It actually made old computers faster and it started going downhill with the very first Windows 10 Technical Preview. I doubt that MS will reach that level of performance and stability again.
Funny, I just bought Start11 from Stardock for side taskbar placement. It was the oddest choice to remove that feature. On an ultrawide monitor it just makes so much sense.
Whatever, I'm just counting the time until I can drop windows entirely... right now I just need it for gaming, but I'm thinking maybe Valve's OS will be the replacement
I can't guarantee a great experience, but anecdotally my brother and I have had no issues in the last ~12 months playing all types of games on Linux. Only games which require kernel-level anti-cheat are unavailable. Otherwise, Proton and native clients (when available) have been rock solid, and I've been surprised that some games (like Minecraft) actually run much better than in Windows.
I feel like this commitment to Windows quality post is actually just copilot generated slop.
Someone in the comments here said nobody loves Windows. I probably did love Windows 7. I felt that it was the best of all worlds, huge support for hardware, basically rock solid on good hardware, gaming performance was fantastic.
In my opinion, Windows has spiraled downwards ever since 7. So much so that I finally switched to Linux permanently. Windows 11 and the forced AI integration was the absolute last straw for me.
The only thing that had really kept me on Windows lately was the gaming side of it. As I've gotten older, the games became less important. Now Proton pretty much gets me compatibility on 172 of 173 games in my steam library. Sure I had to search and find and compile my own controller driver, but it wasn't super painful, probably beyond the realms of an average user still.
Back in the Longhorn (that is, Vista) days, I was friends with an engineering manager on the core desktop services team. He told me about how the "combine icons" in taskbar feature came to be. I think it came out after XP? mmm. I think yeah it came in Vista right after XP. Or was it one of the XP service packs? Anyhow, it was endlessly introduced by PMs, and endlessly cut after obnoxious reviews. Per this guy he just coded it one day and pushed it into daily build. Got in a lot of trouble but it made it.
Glad they're putting taskbar back into whatever sides. I despise my work Mac's single location at the bottom, wasteful waste of space. I've had icons on the left since Windows 95 and I like them there.
Reminds me of when they finally apologized for the train wreck that was IE6 [1] and resumed Internet Explorer development in the 2000s after Firefox came along and started eating IE's market share.
In this case it's the MacBook Neo that's causing them to get off their butts and reinvest in the quality of their software after letting it stagnate for years, but the pattern is the same: rest on their monopolistic laurels until competition makes them feel threatened, then magically start caring about their users again all of a sudden.
Windows is just a wonderful box of chocolate that keeps expanding. You never know what you get, all brilliant frontier tech innovations like Edge, Bing, the calculator, vertical taskbar, and now the highly intelligent Copilot, up there fighting with OpenCode, CC and others...!
Microsoft deserves credit where credit is due. Windows Insider is a great program that takes a lot of effort to manage, and this mea culpa is a response to community feedback .
Windows is a fabulous operating system. I encourage people to see it as a tool and as an engineering marvel, rather than as an enemy or target of ridicule. I’ve been tremendously productive on Windows, and I have run every desktop OS , including Gentoo (when it used to take 2+ days to compile), BeOS, OS2 , Redhat on Power PC, FreeBSD and loads of niche operating systems.
If you like Operating systems, and hate Windows, I encourage you to read Show Stoppers about Dave Cutler making NT. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and will probably convert you from a Windows hater to an NT Kernel appreciator.
Go back to Win98 UI, I know it will never happen but can you imagine...
At this point I genuinely think people would be blown away at how much of a functional improvement it would be.
There would also be a lot of bewilderment for the younger generations, and people who aren't interested in actually using computers who don't think it looks "sleek" enough or whatever. But in terms of day to day quality of life, those old UIs just got the fuck out the way, and were obvious when you had to interact with it. I have some earned hate for the underlying windows OS, but in terms of UI and desktop, we didn't know what we had until it was taken away.
they joke with us. What we want is just a pure basic Windows experience without AI things make everything slower and not secure. What they give is taking the taskbar to left - right - top
In 10 and prior you could even move it to other monitors, just by dragging and dropping it. It's baffling they thought that functionality was a bug that people wanted 'fixed'.
Reading this from the perspective of someone that hasn't used windows as a desktop for over 20 years, this reads like a list of features they removed over the years that they are putting back in, but announcing it like it's all new. What a load of bullshit.
I was hoping for: "We understood the insanity and the insult of trying to replace native UI with cheap web stack imitation and it will never happen again".
The obnoxious behavior of Windows update is the single biggest reason I left the platform over a decade ago. Too little too late for me.
Also there is one huge glaring omission in the article. The sneaky integration of ads embedded in the OS. I have thankfully never experienced this myself since I abandoned Windows before the ads became a thing.
I sometimes have to use Enterprise Windows 11 professionally, but I can’t ever see myself going back to it for any kind of personal computing. Basically Microsoft had a good thing and decided to enshitify it to death.
I wish them what I wished them when Windows Vista was released, and I said to my friend something like ‘huh, we have all that in Linux’ What I meant is GUI, as I was just a beginner. Today, I don’t know, I really wanted to write LOL, like with the biggest possible font size, and some GIF that supports it, but we’re not like that here, right? So, again, I just wish them that I wished them that many years ago. And for the Linux desktop year to finally come. As it feels like we’re there already. I don’t see any point in willingly using Windows for an average Joe.
> We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen
No, you mean reintroducing a capability that was standard in Windows for 20+ years? Stop acting like this is some new innovation being introduced in Windows 11.
Just a handful of things that all were taken for granted in Windows previously, doesn't even scratch the surface of issues with Windows 10/11, which removed tons of useful stuff and added garbage nobody wants.
Forced to use Windows 11 at work (well, or a Mac, but Windows 11 is just barely the lesser of two evils) and I hate it. I continue to use Windows 7 at home, which remains the best workstation OS and likely will forever.
Weren't you able to move the taskbar to the top in like Windows 98 and XP? So they deliberately took away a feature, are adding it back after years, and selling this as "see we listen to our users!!"
I'll believe it when I see it. But I hope I will, I don't want to be cynical.
Back a decade or so, the Visual Studio experience was terrible, the team promised they were going to fix a lot of it, I didn't believe them, and they actually delivered. No VS is not perfect. But it was on a downward spiral and they got it out.
I hope they deliver now, and bring back my inner Windows fan which they eroded and then killed with the abomination that is current Win11.
Is this a joke? Is this guy for real? And he calls himself a REAL engineer?
He’s a manager doing damage control because all this time Microslop is greedy and has stopped caring about power users.
We’re not first time users, we don’t want Microsoft BOB as our UI, we don’t want ads and internet search “functionality” in our Start menu, we don’t want AI everywhere and we don’t want things hidden from us.
Make Windows 11 Pro for real pro users and 11 Home for new users. I hope a few people from MS are reading this, especially Mr Engineer.
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but I don’t care.
Embedding your signature at the end of a blog post is such a bullshit executive move. You just know this guy has been playing corporate politics for the last 30 years.
This is too little and too late, but you must give them credit for having the introspection ability to even go this far. Yes, the bar for microsoft is so low as to be handicap-accessible.
This is so depressingly off-base and wrong-headed.
It completely ignores the huge UI regressions Windows has suffered over the last... 20 years?
Windows's UI ineptitude has reached crippling levels. Application windows lack title bars, so you frequently don't know what application you're looking at. Applications lack menus; critical functions are scattered all over the place behind hamburger buttons... and sometimes even further, under a "more" item in the menu the hamburger invokes (try saving a file you're viewing in Edge).
Applications eschew the tidy, readily comprehensible, familiar, and efficient File dialog in favor of a bizarre text-based pane consisting of crude, unlabeled boxes and horizontal lines... with no context as to where you are in the file system.
Then there are the baffling functional regressions. Here's one that wastes my time daily: You can't select multiple files in Explorer and say "Open with." WTF, this was old hat 30 years ago. Want to open several PNGs in Photoshop? NOPE, not anymore!
> File Explorer is one of the most used surfaces in Windows. Our first round of improvements will focus on a quicker launch experience, reduced flicker, smoother navigation and more reliable performance for everyday file tasks.
Really? it took "user feedback" for one of the world's best software companies to realize one of the most fundamental parts of the OS was broken?
I have been long on $MSFT for a while now, but my faith as an investor stands shook.
If you believe this has any long term staying power at MSFT, I have a bridge to sell you paid for with MSFT stock funded by quarterly earnings reports.
Windows has been going downhill for too long for me to take them at their word. I'll believe it when I see it.
> Windows is as much yours as it is ours.
Microsoft has been inflicting unwanted crap on me for years now, and they keep expanding with more unwanted crap (even to the point of wanting to force people to have Microsoft accounts) as time goes on. Reading this line actually made me laugh out loud. No, Microsoft, you don't believe this even a little.
Something tickles me about describing the forced inclusion of Copilot as “entry points” in things like Notepad. It reveals Microsoft’s intentions SO precisely.
They aren’t trying to add Copilot in useful ways for their users. They’re forcing it into Notepad when they know it doesn’t fit there, because it might be your “entry” into their slop generator.
User experience be damned, these shareholders must have their value.
I started laughing out loud uncontrollably when I got to this point:
> Craft
> To us, craft is the discipline that turns functional products into loved ones through usability, polish, coherence and refinement.
> This year, you will see us invest in raising the bar on the overall usability of the experience, with more opportunities for personalization, less noise, less distraction and more control across the OS. That includes being thoughtful about how and where we bring AI into Windows, leading with transparency, choice and control, so that new capabilities enhance the experience rather than complicate it.
"Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you".
Tell us why it was removed in the first place, why it takes years to put it back and it's still future promises as of March 2026. That's just a clown show.
> Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth.
You could skip the "almost" if you had stuck to your guns on Windows Phone. It was a good phone OS, and we could have done without the iOS/Android duopoly, but MS chickened out.
There are two wolves that live inside the Windows brain - Apple and Linux (yes, two wolves).
On one hand, Windows has pressure to be something that "just works" like an iPad used to be - users can't screw it up. This is what enterprises want for the daily drivers of their massive user populations.
OTOH, Windows has pressure to be this highly customizable tool for savvy high-agency individuals. This is what we all want.
I can empathize with both needs, for sure, but it is a constant war. They're doing alright, considering.
> Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth.
This can not possibly be true, in several dimensions/metrics. I understand that this is mostly marketing bluster, but holy cow are they delusional here.
I'm reading this thread and I'm absolutely shocked that people are still advocating for Ubuntu for anything. It was a more user-friendly choice with more up to date packages maybe 15 years ago than the beloved Debian at the time, but that was long ago. Even then I wasn't one to put it on servers unless I had to for whatever reason, it just wasn't stable.
RHEL is mostly what you will see @ Corpo, with some occasional SUSE for Europeans. Given that Fedora is the upstream for RHEL (and no snapd), it is quite well supported. AFAIK, it's also what Linus Torvalds has ran for a long while now.
Oh, someone's feeling the heat of MacBook Neo and getting pressured by their hardware partners.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:
Pfft. Still slow, react-based, and ad-riddled
> reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
Must have failed to meet the metrics goals
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
You can bet they will still flash the screen take-over riddled with all the dark patterns in the world to get you to upload all your files to their cloud "for backup"
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer [..] quicker launch experience:
Oh, the preloading of explorer into ram before it's launched? Lmao. Entirely embarassed by File Pilot https://filepilot.tech
I love how the second half of this article is obviously just an AI slop agenda. That entirely speaks to how much microsoft "cares".
Frankly, the things they've listed as action items for the future are things that they should have been doing FROM THE BEGINNING.
Like, how on earth was
> Faster and more responsive Windows experiences
NOT a part of just the general release cycle of a major windows update? How was it they didn't notice that the file explorer experience in 11 was noticeably worse than windows 10 and the same hardware?
We all know the answer, it's because the highest priority wasn't a good UX, it was to make sure copilot was integrated into everything.
So long as microsoft management doesn't prioritize performance (and they clearly do not) this is just a natural endstate of any software. If you aren't focusing and paying your developers to make things faster and smoother, you'll get this sort of high memory consumption and janky applications. Making things not janky requires someone in management to care about that.
Am I wrong in thinking that Windows 95 had the ability to reposition the task bar either horizontally or vertically? And someone actually chose to lead with that.
It's crazy how windows blew its dominance isn't it?
Even for gaming, the only reason why I would stick with windows is not an issue anymore. Thanks to Steam gaming just works on Linux. I'm using Omarchy and it's very easy.
I can't see ever going back to windows personally.
> Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth.
Thankfully Ballmer failed and this isn’t even close to true. I, like a lot of highly technical professionals, have been Windows sober for many years now.
I am not convinced that Microsoft is all of a sudden deciding to try again to become a consumer-oriented company based on something Pravan Davuluri says.
It's not sitting at 60-65% and has been slowly bleeding for the last 20 years or so. In my opinion, anyone who have figured out how to move his processes, has left the building and never checked back.
Now Windows is being attacked aggressively from multiple fronts:
- macbook neo. Apple is projected to sell roughly 5million of these this year. This is a segment that couldn't previously move out of Windows because of cost not Office.
- improvement in Linux (Desktop/Gaming): This will eat another chunk for people whom Linux didn't function previously.
- HarmonyOS Next. This is underestimated by the rest of the Western world. I think by 5-10 years most of China would have moved to its own OS. Windows highest marketshare is in Asia.
The idea that Microsoft can exist on Azure/Office alone is not valid, in my opinion. Especially for Office, Windows is your portal to the rest of Microsoft stack. If you use HarmonyOS, you'll like use their own Office system. From there, they'll own the rest of the stack.
tl;dr: MSFT is screwed and they know it. They are also going to do nothing about it.
Are they microsofter in the brain than MicroSlop? MegaSlop? GigaSlop? Reading "Windows" and "quality" in the same sentence already triggers every bullshit alert in the book.
This is good to hear, as someone who has used basically nothing but Windows since 2000. I haven't stepped off the Windows train yet. I use Linux at arm's length for my homelab's hypervisor and at work, but my daily driver is still Windows 10.
I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very frankly I prefer the developer experience on Windows, where you can write a (relatively) high-quality native desktop application with purely first-party tooling and release a single, tiny (~10^4 bytes) executable that quite literally runs anywhere. The Windows API surface area is huge and developers can write entire multi-domain programs without ever looking for a third-party library.
This probably sounds like a lot of copium, but I feel like recent events like the rising costs of memory and competition like the MacBook Neo will light a fire under Microsoft's arse. I really hope some of the AI overboard in Windows 11 is rolled back over the near future. They should migrate core Windows applications back to native and CLI technologies, actually support and maintain these without chasing the next big thing, and release frameworks for safer compiled languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin, and allocate more resources to F#.
Windows is still a solid 'gets out of the way' operating system (with numerous tweaks, customizations, and stripping) when it works. If they focus on fixing UX issues and improving stability and performance, it may be enough to slow the rise of desktop Linux.
Better support for F#, or really any language other than C# is a longshot though. Those resources were likely 'reallocated' to AI R&D indefinitely.
> Windows is still a solid 'gets out of the way' operating system
A good way to put it.
There are third-party tools that Microsoft really need to adopt to make Windows a bit nicer (WizTree, VoidTools Everything, adopt improvements from Total Commander, make more PowerToys default), but broadly it is still a decent OS. There are issues like slow `CloseHandle()` because of Defender (which needs to be a bit less zealous), and maybe more first-party adoption of WinGet.
On the other hand, every time I use desktop Linux I get some paper cut because some edge case that I just don't ever think about is broken on Linux, whether it be my multi-monitor high pixel density layout, my USB audio interface and peripherals, or my touchpad sensitivity and gestures that Windows was widely derided for in the early 2010s and suddenly after 'Precision Touchpads'[1] no one ever complained about again, or random GPU glitches even on Intel/AMD integrated graphics that I have literally never seen on the Windows desktop, or poor battery life (Windows somehow gets 2-3x the battery life of Linux).
As someone that ran the Insider channel from ~2014-2019, Windows has been in a real weal-and-woe situation. Some parts are so hopelessly bad that they can never be fixed (eg. UI frameworks) while others are extremely promising and justify using Windows for ordinary work (eg. WSL). It's easy to subscribe to either extreme and assume that Windows is doomed or perfect because some specific feature exists.
Five years of Windows Insider made me pretty weary, though. Being downstream of Microsoft's changes is like reading tea leaves, WSL2 had broken networking for four years before any fix ever came up. I can appreciate the work that Microsoft does to ship a stable OS to millions of users, but my impatience got the better of me in the end. I switched to Linux waiting for WSL2 to get fixed, and while it's not a perfect experience it does consistently improve in a transparent and open manner.
I found the microsoft development experience to be terrible aside from win32. Yes, win32 lasts forever and outlived every attempt to replace it. There's been no end in half-baked APIs such as winforms, direct video, etc. I once had a problem where i was writing a video streaming thing that had to touch a bunch of meta-data inside a WPF program and then have it run on different versions of windows. There was no "one true way" and ended up doing it all in QT.
> I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible.
Nah, NT always had... mostly... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved inside of an operating system that actively hates me. But the core OS is cool.
> The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices
NTFS is plenty fast, even for thousands of small files; it is the Windows Defender file system filter driver that slows things down. Specifically, it slows down CloseHandle[1].
> NT's core tech
I'm not just talking about NT. I think most of the user mode is great, too. Office blows the pants off most other 'office' suites. D3D is generally very forward-looking, and many extensions are released on D3D first, sometimes years before they're ported to Vulkan (ray-tracing, mesh shaders, descriptor heaps, etc). Windows has had a superb low-latency audio subsystem in WASAPI since Vista, which is something like a decade before Linux got Pipewire. There are many other examples of random cool stuff in Windows that Linux 'rediscovered independently' but Windows got there much earlier just because of the sheer install base and surface area.
It’s frankly embarrassing that they have to come out and say that they are going to make Explorer “faster and more dependable.” It’s amazing how badly they fucked up the most basic function of managing a graphical operating system.
Too little and too late. I’ll believe it when I’ll see it. And so far everything I’ve seen has told me to abandon ship. Even if you reverse course, you’d need a miracle to make me trust you anytime soon.
This is how goodwill works. Easy to burn, hard to earn back. I’m not touching any products by Meta, Google or Microsoft, and none of them are getting me back on board with a cute blog post.
I don't want to be just purely negative but I refuse to believe the sentiment of this post. For years they have been told that windows have pretty shit annoying features which they keep implementing and only thing they did was implement more absolutely useless chatbots all over the place. I do not belive that this is genuine effort to making a better product or answer to ongoing massive enshittifaction of microsoft products to squeeze more money. Maybe people started to leave them for Apple and they noticed?
If Cosmic desktop would be finished, I would now be on Linux. But instead, I am back on Windows 10. Linux desktop is just not there yet. I will either skip Windows 11 and go to 12, or finally end up on Linux by necessity. Looking at the direction of Microsoft and Windows, I think there is no chance for 12 to be a good operating system that I would want to use. I know I can milk Windows 10 for another 5-8 years without any issues. So, we'll see. But then again, there is also HarmonyOS and who knows where *BSD desktop will be and other OSs that might come up. Maybe nVidia will make their own Linux based OS. Or Google. I think this is the direction the OSs are heading towards. The domination of Microsoft and Apple is near its end and if big corporations step in and centralize the completely broken world of linux desktop into few solid distributions, we can have nice things again.
If Microsoft leadership thinks that they took a wrong turn in the last few years, they are in for a rude awakening (I hope). They took a wrong turn in the late 90s. Probably earlier than that. They have managed to stave off all user feedback for 30 years through litigious bullying and strict vendor lock-in. This isn't about the taskbar, man. This isn't even about Copilot.
The pushback which you are only now starting to perceive is being caused by an entire generation of Microsoft intentionally and actively positioning itself in conflict with its customers.
I understand that once you have a million customers, you can't really treat them right anymore. But Microsoft has not given a single shit about customer feedback, even in aggregate for decades now.
As I read this, all I can think is "too little, too late." I have watched in my workplace Windows go from being a product that we are happy to purchase to yet another piece of technology that we would simply replace were we not yoked to it.
I guess even now they probably still don't care. Microsoft will continue printing money until the sun burns out.
This is vague lip service with little substance, as far as I can tell. That is unsurprising consider it's from Microsoft and it's about Windows. It addresses (in cheap words) a few real pain points, but completely fails to address the dozens of either incredibly painful and stupid decisions MS has made.
On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.
> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus
Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions
This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer
See comment on task bar above.
> More control over widgets and feed experiences
Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.
On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:
- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.
- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.
- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.
- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.
- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.
- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps
- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.
- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.
- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.
As is tradition, HN has downvoted your legit comments to the twilight realm. I agree with everything you say. Onedrive should be flagged as a virus. Why do they get a pass for things any other app would be blocked for doing?
I think the real issue is that MS doesn't view Windows primarily as an OS that should be invisible, out of the way -- with minimal "innovation" geared to sell MS products. The problem is that MS views Windows as a sales/marketing channel for their ads/apps/services.
“Improved Feedback Hub” is a code for “The corner that we told the plebs to scream into was close enough to the executives that they could hear some of the angry swearing, so we moved everyone over to a padded room in the basement where they can’t bother anybody.”
I don't think Microsoft can pull this off, I think as mindshare is shifting it will continue to do so and its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back and right now its only talking about doing some minor things. Now Nvidia is developing the drivers on Linux seriously there is every chance this transition snowballs and nothing Microsoft does will be enough.