I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account.
Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password because it was tied to the Microsoft account and you can't change the password locally.
I don't need Copilot managing my inbox through AI, nor do I need a more exciting widget experience.
I just want an OS where if something like the above happens there's a way to fix it without having to reinstall. It doesn't seem like much to ask.
Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)
Also years of Windows muscle memory here, especially the keyboard shortcuts. I’ve used Windows since 1997. I’ve decided I’m done. A new PC arrives in a month. It’ll be running Ubuntu. I’m done.
Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to? Maybe test code in a VM? (Although that gets you right back into Win11.)
I have no problem using Debian (I’m actually a Linux sysadmin by profession) so I have no problems later switching distros. But as of today, I’m happy with Ubuntu on my road laptop and I would no doubt be happy switching the home PC, too. (Actually the road lap is Lubuntu and it currently has zero visible AI influence.)
Do both. Insist that the authorities reform the abuser AND leave the relationship.
In a real life abusive relationship that would look like both calling the cops and leaving. In the case of software, demand reform and also switch OSes.
The day I can’t make a local-only account on windows (for personal use, work is a different matter unfortunately) is the day I stop using windows.
It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts. I can skip it, which is nice, but just don’t show the screen. If you’re installing linux you either know what you’re doing or you don’t: if you do you know it’s possible and don’t need it jammed in your face, and if you don’t you’re probably not quite tall enough to understand it isn’t needed and you probably don’t want it anyways.
What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is.
Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user base.
The incentives are alomost perpendicularly misaligned.
Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. People are looking for the exit, finding there is indeed a door, and stopping them will take far more than just some reassurance from the DJ boot.
It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500.
The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
They want to be Apple. Apple sells hardware, services, and takes a huge cut being a software store.
Microsoft sells software. They turned office into a service but it's still software. Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
Microsoft's strategy for turning into Apple is kneecapping their own software.
> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge.
Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.
Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night.
Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.
Regularly being presented with a "Set up Windows" after boot forcing you to click "no thanks" on a bunch of Microsoft services is exactly the kind of thing that irritates me. I've politely declined their services about 10 times already, make it stop!
When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work either directly on Linux or at least via things like Proton (courtesy Valve Software).
I got one of those external drive enclosures for an NVMe drive after I upgraded.
The only reason I still have Windows is the little screw securing the drive into the enclosure is in the wind and I can't be bothered to find it (for backup of all of my things so I can delete windows and install linux)
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible
I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.
I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.
Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.
What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.
Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.
Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.
You had Windows ME which was a terrible, buggy OS. I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose all their data on Windows ME.
Shifting personal windows to the Windows NT foundation provided a massive relative boost, but even that took until XP SP2 to reallt settle in, which was followed by the disaster that was Vista.
Then Windows 7 came along and it was genuinely really good. Probably peak Windows.
And then you came to an actual straitjacketing of windows in Windows 8, where the entire desktop Windows ecosystem was relegated to being a single app no better than calculator in the mobile first, completely undeveloped Windows 8 interface.
Windows 10 got us back to sanity, and barring a few minor UI mishaps Windows 11 was originally a nice refinement. This was the longest stretch of Windows being decent as a personal computer. The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop.
That was nearly a decade of enjoyable and productive Windows. Unfortunately, now we have AI, and Windows is once again being destroyed to serve the its AI master.
But I really wonder, is wanting a "little OS" just a hacker thing? For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS. I don't have a solid take on this yet.
"For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS."
I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is.
The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc.
For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.
The problem is that "to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run" changes when they want it to run something new. They don't care about cloud backup for their data? One hard drive failure, and suddenly they do. And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later.
But there needs to be a way to turn something off that you don't want, and to not get nagged about it repeatedly thereafter. But for that to work, there has to be a clear, easily findable way to turn it back on later.
been on linux for a month now, i found the exit and stepped through it. the pain points change from getting shafted by m$ to doing research and learning how to make the system work. at least the second option gives me some agency, and now its all set up i wish i had of switched sooner! ive got to say valve is doing the lords work, along with all the other linux enthusiasts.
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
Citation needed. “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc.
Even interpreting that as “all the functionality, but limit applications to utilities for managing the hardware”, I think there people who want that, but I doubt that’s what people, in general, want. Having to choose (and, likely, pay for) a photo manager, a simple word processor, etc. is just too much of a hassle for many.
Also, why would any commercial entity develop such an OS? The margin is in the
There is a huge difference between having a text editor included and running it by default on startup to pretend fast launches.
And then there is the whole world of nearly impossible to avoid 'services' you realy do not want but will keep popping up regardless of your wishes ('Telemetry', Onedrive, Copilot, Edge, Recall, Bing adds in the start menu ffs...).
Let us also not forget being forced into a Microsoft account against your wishes ... does it still feel like it's your computer?
"i hate how the current system is, i see some other guys have something that doesnt have these issues, what the other system needs to do is make their system exactly like my current, so that I dont need to spend ANY effort myself"
On Windows 11, when you reconnect to a monitor or set of monitors that you've connected to before, it will automatically return your open windows to the layout across those monitors that you had when you last disconnected (assuming those windows are still open).
This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked that way.
I can name features, but everything I can think of are technical features rather than obvious surface level stuff: DX12, better support for SSDs (Windows 7 doesn't natively support TRIM), HDR (I guess, but it still seems broken to me). And none of these are things that couldn't be implemented in Windows 7. The UI has nothing to do with these things, and there's no reason we couldn't have them without the trouble Windows 10/11, other than the fact that MS doesn't want to do things that way.
I used to run all three major OS' where I saw no real difference in me using it for the apps etc I needed. As I leaned more heavily on the development side, linux kind of prevailed. Windows 8.1 and Yosemite were the last of the other two I've used for real. Never had to look back to other two since, be it for work, games or whatever.
Even occasional need for Adobe things stopped. I would still really like to see Adobe suite on linux, but if they don't want my money that's cool too I guess. I suspect the software tools people use for work is what's holding them back mostly, like Altium, CADs etc. Funnily enough, Microsoft office is just fine without OS native version most of the time.
There are two mentions of "reliab[ility]" (I searched for the first five letters to be sure I got other morphological forms of the word). It appears twice: once near the top, as a general goal, and once at the bottom, as part of the general goal. Nothing in between, like saying "we'll be using {less AI | more AI debugging | more human screening | magic wands | secret sauce} in an effort to improve reliability". So at least as far as this post goes, hardly even lip service. Given the number of botched updates reported earlier this year, that's astonishing.
It fascinates me to speculate about who this is for. At least among people I've talked to, the ones who still want windows (instead of the obvious alternatives) cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job" or similar. I personally don't think these preferences reflect the reality of how much effort using e.g. a linux distro is in this day and age, to be clear, but these are the beliefs I encounter. Are there really people who want to deal with providing feedback and stress testing an operating system and its various software components and features, but doing this for a corporation that sets the terms of their transparency efforts and ultimately does this for profit and will still grab the reins and exert control against their users' will when they feel like it?
Right, but it's hard not to claim those people would likely get more out of an OS they could customize more, and also that it's considerably more exploitative of those people across the divide of corporate product versus community project
Sometimes it’s just about using the path of least resistance. I’ve also contributed to Apple Maps’ and Google Maps’ data, even though I’d prefer to exclusively contribute to OSM and other open platforms instead. But, it was just easier to go through a quick form in the (Apple|Google) Maps app, because that’s where I was at that point in time. Maybe the excuse is laziness and/or force of habit?
Edit: I also imagine the reach of the mainstream platforms to be much higher (e.g. Windows vs. Linux or Google Maps user reviews vs. <is there even an alternative?>).
First of all, in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11 (except Apple). For example, even if a model supports Linux in the US as many Lenovo Thinkpads do, in Singapore it's just not sold without Windows.
Second, Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI. Bettery life is shit now, and hibernate is disabled by default in most OS. Also, hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one (windows presaves memory to disk continuously, while in linux you have to wait until the whole ram (+ vram, if gpu) is saved/restored). It takes time. Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it. So linux is really a bad choice for laptop. But Windows 11 is much worse, especially if you don't really like ads.
I don't really understand the rationale behind disabling S3 sleep...
Was it simply that getting every device and driver to properly support it was hard, so the easiest option was to remove it and have the machine always powered up?
ACPI defines power state of power-saving capable offbrand fake IBM computers(among other things, and also the "fake IBM" part is almost completely moot at this point).
ACPI power state S0 is everything running. S1 pauses CPU and CPU I/O bus. S2 puts CPU to reset. S3 cuts power to CPU. S4 cuts off everything(not actual power off). S5 cuts off everything(actual power off).
S3 and S4 are often referred to as Sleep and Hibernation. In Sleep, RAM contents are kept as-is, and sleep handling code just restore CPU internal states that gets lost. In Hibernation, OS usually dump RAM contents to disk, and write back to RAM upon bootup - S4 and S5 aren't always clearly separated and both Windows and Linux tend to go through standard boot processes, then do the state resume using RAM dump they find on disk.
For SOME reason, Microsoft forced laptop vendors to quit supporting S3 in favor of their custom "S0iX" state, which is more or less just machine running at full power, which can be extremely wasteful as far as sleep state goes.
The official explanation for this pressuring is that everybody want notification and this is the only way Windows could possibly handle notifications. A lot are skeptical about that.
> hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one
Part of this is that hibernation can't be cancelled mid way, which is dumb. Ideally a computer is like a light switch - you can turn it on and off instantly whenever. To get closer to that, if you turn it off, but then immediately on again, the hibernation should be cancelled and return you to your desktop.
Also, the whole idea of a 'hibernation image' which is read from disk in one huge 10+ second read is best for hard drives. Now that everyone uses SSD, it should all be demand-paged in.
I used to daily drive Windows 10 for many months before official release. It was great. I wish I could stay on development builds that still had Windows 7 style Start menu.
Sadly now I use Windows 11 just because manufacturer of my laptop didn't bother to ensure that their sound driver worked corrctly on Windows 10.
My mouse lags for seconds when gpu is busy, even with something as trivial as alt-tabbing from a game.
My mental model remains that the Windows team is mostly governed by designers on Macs who want to see a user-visible change to get their promo and never use Windows.
> The theme is simple: fewer disruptions, more clarity, more control. This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates, and gives you more flexibility to time updates around your schedule. We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Finally, like seriously, so many times I have to "shutdown" (aka restart) for an update before going to bed. I don't want to have to babysit my desktop computer when I want to finish up for the night.
They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles.
Installing Tiny11 and then running a debloat over its corpse results in a much faster and less memory hungry default clean install.
> realign the experiences to those that provide the most value to users
Aside from the fact that nobody actually takes what Microsoft says seriously (they are professional bullshitters [with full time PR firms perfecting their bullshit] and have been for 30 years), it's funny that even this line can be reasonably interpreted as pushing more blatant nonsense onto consumers as long as it's what C-suite types think they should be paying for.
Notice that what provides the most value to users is not at all necessarily the same thing as'what our users want'. And it isn't even clear that Microsoft is thinking of consumer users here as opposed to corporate users and corporate IT departments, which are in most cases these days their actually direct customers. Most home user consumers don't pay for Windows directly.
>We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Multiple times I've wanted to shutdown my laptop so I can go home and Windows says no, sit here for 5 minutes.
I don't trust sleep mode to not keep running and overheat, so I wait.
Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day. Music production on Linux isn't really practical. A lot of this stuff barely runs on Windows/OSX.
Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.
I consider myself an advanced Linux user, and it still took me an hour this morning to figure out how to get a VPN to work on Open Suse.
Not a Windows user, have never been (since Windows 3.11). But if I were, I would think this is just PR unless they changed some fundamentals, like bringing back local user support without jumping through five hoops.
By changing two settings in Windows, you can fix the worst of it.
Using a local group policy, you can change when "Preview builds and Feature updates" and "Quality Updates" become available in Windows Update.
By delaying those with 30 or 60 days, you will never have preview updates applied to your system, and feature and quality updates will have at least 1 or 2 months' worth of fixes before you get them.
start > run > gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Manage updates offered from Windows Update >
1) Enable "Select when preview builds and feature updates are received". Set days to 60
2) Enable "Select when quality updates are received". Set days to 30 (max value)
Took the beta for a quick spin and... wow, the speed is truly astonishing!
Windows doesn't feel slow because the kernel or the filesystem is inherently "that" slow, it feels like a sloth overdosing on heroin because nobody at Microsoft gives the slightest crap about making it even a tiny bit faster.
It's staggering how the instant you double-click a file in File Pilot you're... back in the tar pit. (The Windows image preview app just spins... and spins... while it does God-knows-what with my CPUs.)
The contrast of going from one to the other makes the quality difference glaringly obvious.
Microsoft is trying to sell things like extended servicing agreements. They purposefully make Windows worse so they can sell you solutions to fix it. They purposefully keep it insecure so you need their updates. It’s about taking the customers hostage.
The SAME as Windows 2000 in terms of what is installed. NO TPM REQUIREMENT.
Even better: when installing Windows, there should be a "install minimal" option, and if you select it then it should be so fucking minimal - so little on there, that all you get is control panel and a way to install new software - NOTHING more.
That's your win, Microsoft. I'm 2000% certain nothing even slightly close to that will be delivered.
Yeah it’s funny how at this moment I’d pay more for less Windows.
But I’ve found my way on Linux long ago. Sure not all software is there and MS365 fully from browser has so many annoyances, but I love the OS minimalism, how clean it is.
My ideal windows in indeed win2000, but in a transparent VM so I can just do the Windows apps. I need LSW, Linux subsystem for Windows, essentially.
I live in Linux but still have some need for the Windows Runtime from time to time. If only Windows containers were at the level of the Linux ones, I’d flip the whole world up side down.
podman run ms365-full —license-key FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
I’d pay for that. But such a system only provides value, it does not extract it. It is a 180 of the way they have been thinking for a long time now.
its worth trying really really hard to get windows apps running through wine before reaching for a vm imho. once you open a vm you have to deal with ... well... windows.
I did it in the past, vmware (where the desktop was transparant so it was like Windows on Linux), CrossOver office, Wine (bottles).
Recently I tried to get Windows running using quickemu but that also failed.
All just so that I don't have to experience MS365 in the browser where I will regularly click "New message" (in Outlook) and start typing but my browser interprets all characters as shortcuts (as if I held alt or something??) messing up my inbox to various degrees before I become aware, ending up with a pile op messages in "archive". I hate the daily re-logins in Teams (which does not tell you it's logged out, your messages just hang and the menu is empty). Word simply deletes my last 2 sentences from time to time (even though it assures me on every frightened ctrl-s that it's all fine!!), etc, etc.
And we're not even talking about the hoops you have to jump through when a doc is not on SharePoint/OneDrive but on a NAS.
My first hand experience with Windows vs Linux this month:
A friend of mine recently bought a very expensive laptop to do some gaming. I helped him set it up and god that was a horrible experience. For example, we could not get rid of LinkedIn and other crap Microsoft wanted to force on him. Disabling copilot and removing Office required registry surgery. And the damn fans were always running because of some unknown activity in the background, maybe Microsoft is moving into bitcoin mining business?
He eventually got fed up, installed Ubuntu 26.04 as an experiment and a week later still seems to enjoy the experience. Games run fine on steam and his laptop finally feels like his own.
Most surprisingly, Linux worked fine out of the box. Windows 11 on the other hand needed a bunch of PowerShell and registry hacks to be copy pasted from various sources before it was even remotely usable. It's funny how it felt as if Windows was the OS for nerds with too much free time on their hands while Ubuntu was created for ordinary people. And my god, Ubuntu feels so much more fluid on the same hardware. The difference is *huge*.
But it's the kind of things you'd expect Windows to take care of automatically, or in the worst case, to prompt the users to install on first boot, especially if Linux (with overall less driver support from manufacturers).
And with a preinstalled Windows (tuned to the laptop) this behavior should not be observed at all.
I got a new computer a couple weeks ago, with a 5070, and installed ubuntu on it and it was incredibly slow. I looked online and found some claim that 24.04 has some incompatability with nvidia, tried installing a bunch of different driver versions and nothing helped, tried turning everything off in gnome tweaks and still slow, tried installing 26.04 and 22.04 but the installer hangs forever in both, tried linux mint 24.04 still slow, gave up and installed windows with WSL :/
I'm running Ubuntu on a 9950x3d and 5090 and it is not slow. Games in Steam with Proton are buttery smooth.
One hiccup was I had to disable variable refresh rate because moving the cursor didn't "count" as a reason to update the screen, so moving the cursor on its own (rather than e.g. moving a window) looked choppy.
But a choppy mouse cursor isn't "slow".
Tip: if you have a performance problem, run Claude Code (or an AI agent of your choice) and ask it to investigate.
Mac chose another path. You buy a pc and OS and the same vendor makes both. You can’t choose but at least you also never need to wonder whether your laptop and OS work together.
Microsoft took a more difficult path. They have close contact with OEMs, run certification programs etc. A massive apparatus to make it somewhat likely that hardware will ”just work”.
Both of these are valid models. I’d be happy to use either. I’m not very keen on doing this work myself though. I can buy a PC with Ubuntu but then it’s still hit and miss if I buy something new for it. There is no canonical store selling canonical gear like the Apple Store
This is a choice for you! I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer and whilst I've run Linux since I was in college (UK college, not US) I've always had a Windows install for gaming.
A few years ago, I finally decided I'd had it with Windows and their crap and uninstalled it. If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
I'm lucky in that a majority of games I play run fine on Linux, the only real game I'd love to play is Vermintide 2. My friends also run a mix of Linux and Windows and so we're fairly fine skipping games as a group if we can't play on Linux.
That is a problem of any operating system switch, you need to figure out what software is compatible or weather there are suitable replacements. It's the same even if you switch between iOS and Android.
That said, Linux used to be a tough cookie because there were so little support for software people wanted to run and the alternatives didn't do it any favours, plus the barrage of problems you used to get installing it on a random machine was discouraging, at best. Nowadays your chances of running it well on a random machine is pretty damn good and getting the software you need is lot more feasible. But don't go YOLOing a linux install, see if meets your use cases. There is nothing wrong with waiting until it's good enough.
I'm just down to Creative Cloud now. It's the only thing I still need Windows for. Everything else runs on Linux or there is a suitable alternative. So I've got several Debian machines running at home and at work, and one Windows machine that I boot only for photo editing.
Install Windows 11 Education edition (which rips all of the AI shit out mostly with sane defaults for schools). If you need the ISO, Microsoft's default Win11 ISOs have it. Use https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/ to get a good autounattend set up to rip out the extra bloat and set up a clean install. Activate with Massgrave HWID. You're done.
I have a feeling that my fat ass switching over to Linux is going to outrun their attempt to roll back decades of accumulated tech debt, institutional incompetence and burned bridges.
I feel like your sentiment mirrors my thoughts exactly on this.
Since this isn't the Reddit comment section (I hear people here prefer a bit more elaboration and argumentative nuance with their $BEVERAGE), I feel compelled to add some of my own personal experience.
I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity. Copilot, for example, is just another gadget Microsoft simply cannot not put in. In '95 is was Clippy, but the deliveries never stop, and frankly I feel like an old man that finally decided to kick a bad habit because I truly see now all the empty talk from Microsoft I've heard countless amount of times before, wrapped in different packaging, and that Windows is like it is _by design_ and that it's bad for my health (in a different way than Linux can ever be, I feel).
Ever since Windows '95 the addition of slop has been accelerating, admittedly Microsoft _were_ much different then, but it's the _curve_ I am referring to, not that they were always _as bad_. Frankly, the "churn" is insane now, I think it's one or the other adage I can't recall where "available operating system" fills "available resources" and Microsoft are there to prove it.
The problem is also they are experimenting on their users to no end. I don't mind being part of the "user experiment" for "user experience" but how many decades do they need to arrive at the same fundamental conclusions -- that people prefer less bloat, and fewer interruptions in their face? Occam's Razor tells me it's rather that Microsoft is pretending to care but their agenda is their own alone (surprise).
Just the other day I had to spend 2 hours trying to "fix" some very-background OneDrive update because I suppose I am sucker enough to use OneDrive -- one of the least liked of Microsoft products I've had the misfortune to use -- with Windows using my laptop as a BitCoin farm, wasting cycles in some infinite loop produced by what evokes comparisons to those monkeys with typewriters. Half a dozen Powershell commands and 3-4 reboots later the `wsappx.exe` process finally was healthy enough to idle. These things happen constantly to people everywhere and there's little Microsoft can or wants to do anything about. It's a cost they're willing their users to pay.
To stop rambling, one of these days -- summer vacation perhaps -- I will remove the blasted thing finally (after decades of using both Windows and Linux) and grit my teeth through Linux, which I have tried avoiding only because I am on a Thinkpad and there's always another tweak that's needed for the whole thing to work as well as Windows does on a _good_ day. To be clear, I prefer Linux by and large, it's just that I want to avoid spending weekends configuring sleep, power states, Trackpoint, full-disk encryption, the docking station, etc.
The fact I am going to do it anyway, just to rid myself of the Windows experience that's just been getting worse and worse, says it all really.
You're probably correct. Windows can be fixed, but it's stuck in the hands of MS who never will, so true ideas on how to fix it are little more than intellectual exercises.
> I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity.
I'm not so sure that Windows is unfixable. It could probably be fixed, but doing that would require rebuilding every burned bridge back to its old standard, and probably then some, and that's something the relevant people aren't going to agree to do (since they were the ones who burned them).
Mandatory updates? Now they aren't any more.
Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.
Shitty start menu? Now you can pick which one you want, all the way back to the Windows 7 one.
Shitty right click menu? Now the old one is back.
All AI? Now there's a toggle on install to enable/disable it all.
Now settings menu sucks? Here's the old control panel back as standard.
Telemetry? How about no?
If MS did all of these things (and probably more), their trust level would rise skyhigh, since they'd be doing tangible things to fix the pain points we've all talked about. Now they've hit one point out of probably 50+, and many of the remaining ones are much harder to fix than updates being forced.
someone tries to scam, steal, beat you up. they then make efforts to stop doing that, and their trust would rise skyhigh? what does someone have to do to earn that kind of loyalty? would you apply this to anything else?
If they've given all the money back that they've scammed and otherwise made all the people they've hurt whole again, and are then continuing to provide a service people find use in, then yes. I'd probably need some time to be convinced that that's what's happened, and that they've truly changed. MS obviously isn't there, but there are theoretical worlds where this can happen.
Obviously, Microsoft can't give people back their deleted Onedrive files, but they can make good on a promise that it will never happen again (given that their efforts are founded in reality and not marketing speak), and hide behind a shield of 'that wasn't our intention'. Same goes with most other things you could complain about Windows.
If you have no reason to believe that Windows will screw you over, since MS has course-corrected on all major points of contention, then why not stick around? (The answer is that MS may change course again, but for those who haven't jumped ship, I'm sure this will provide good enough reason to stick around. It's not like the ship isn't providing them any utility. They've stuck around this long for a reason.)
Microsoft degrading user experience plus lower price on Mac computers it maybe their downfall. E.g., removing local accounts, unwanted advertising, arbitrary decisions (forced TPM requirement), etc.
> This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates
I just can't, gotta ask - what about c++ updates? What about integral os components that were migrated to the store and if you disable it, you won't get updates? What about defender updates (not definitions but app update) that won't get applied if you have another anti malware?
The thing I hate about windows updates is that microsoft can't even update all their own stuff with a single button.
edit: almost forgot - why is office not in windows update, and what the hell is wrong with teams and why it is seperate from office updates
Just updating windows is a complete and utter mess and every single Linux distro is 100x better
I really like Windows. I just wish Copilot could be made fully optional.
Honestly, I can live with Windows 11 being a little slow, and I can deal with File Explorer issues. I can write my own tools to manage some of that, and PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks. Those parts do not bother me that much.
What bothers me is Copilot being pushed into the operating system experience itself. I wish it could simply be treated as an optional feature.
Windows is an operating system. An operating system is the foundational layer that governs the user’s work. Because of that, AI should be an opt-out assistant, not a premise that changes the default behavior of the system.
When I move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Copilot feels like something that damages the user experience itself.
If Copilot were at the level of GPT or Claude, I probably would not complain as much. But I do not understand why the quality gap feels so large.
This reads... Weird? As in, I know it's marketing speech but expressions seem misused and ideas don't follow from each other:
>You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Not... the other way around? Updates decide when I happen?
>Last month we said we would reduce where Copilot shows up across Windows, focusing on bringing AI where it’s most valuable. [...] in Notepad, we’ve replaced the generic Copilot icon with a clearer “Writing Tools” label that better describes what it does.
For 2 months now the „put in admin credentials“ dialog is so fundamentally broken - ui-wise, it is unbelievable (in the sense that I do not believe it actually made it to production even though I see it with my own eyes).
There are so many anecdotes about slop by now, the working parts become the anecdotes.
By now Windows, for me is more like a reality TV show than an OS.
...and there's clearly huge market-demand for Windows LTSC amongst retail customers, and yet, MS's C-levels already decided for them that no amount of love nor money - excepting a sufficiently large enterprise licensing contract - can legally entitle you to a license - or even official media - for Windows LTSC.
It reminds me of when Adobe ended perpetual licensing and switched to cloud(TM)-only, subscription licensing for Photoshop, et al: many of us (myself included) assumed that Adobe was surely making a foolish mistake to abandon perpetual-license customers, but it turns out[1] that was the plan all along: those customers are a vocal minority who can demonstrably afford to pay more, the rest of the customer-base doesn't care enough to switch to a competitor. Over 10 years later (2013), we haven't seen any of Photoshop's then-promising upstart competitors come close.
...on that basis, I don't think MSFT's recent backpedalling on Windows 11's disrespect for its own users is in any way a response to us power-users complaining online - or even because any number of us did fully migrate off Windows and onto Linux, but instead because of all the recent talk overseas from foreign governments (France, Germany) taking active steps to secure their digital-sovereignty and deploying more Linux desktops; and a good way to get people (and decision-makers in government and large businesses) personally interested in digital-sovereignty is by pointing out how shitty their own corporate desktop UX has gotten.
I'll gladly eat my hat when/if MS graciously allows regular retail consumers, and not just large organizations - and those of us with a $2000/yr MSDN Subscription - the privilege of paying for an OS without advertising built-in to the shell and having hard dependencies on proprietary online services.
> We know there’s a lot of excitement for Taskbar customization – and that’s coming soon.
This will never not be funny to me. These clowns really did remove something that existed for decades and then spend more than a decade trying to edge their users to the fact that they were gonna bring it back. In 500 years when somebody looks up enshittification on Wikipedia, this should be the first example.
This announcement terrfies me. I dont think MS now has developers that are competent enough to reliably change core parts of Windows like the Explorer (taskbar). This plan will not only introduce bloat with reduced performance, but will also reduce core stability further. (Explorer has hanging issues since the april update). So please, please, please @Marcus. If you want to add stuff, please do it in side apps. Leave the core alone, that's above your ability currently. For the core please only focus on bug fixing and removing bloat again.
I recently got locked out of my machine because logging in with the mandatory Microsoft account-backed primary user of my machine didn't work anymore. It said I was offline and I had to use the "previous password" even though I didn't have a previous password for that account.
Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password because it was tied to the Microsoft account and you can't change the password locally.
I don't need Copilot managing my inbox through AI, nor do I need a more exciting widget experience.
I just want an OS where if something like the above happens there's a way to fix it without having to reinstall. It doesn't seem like much to ask.
Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)
Also years of Windows muscle memory here, especially the keyboard shortcuts. I’ve used Windows since 1997. I’ve decided I’m done. A new PC arrives in a month. It’ll be running Ubuntu. I’m done.
Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to? Maybe test code in a VM? (Although that gets you right back into Win11.)
Ubuntu will also introduce AI. Why not use pure Debian? (and the distribution flame war starts)
I have no problem using Debian (I’m actually a Linux sysadmin by profession) so I have no problems later switching distros. But as of today, I’m happy with Ubuntu on my road laptop and I would no doubt be happy switching the home PC, too. (Actually the road lap is Lubuntu and it currently has zero visible AI influence.)
> Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to?
Yes: DirectX. Just make sure that it runs in Wine or Proton.
Nit: DirectX is a bunch of APIs and libraries, not a language. Same for Wine and Proton.
These suggestions are like telling someone that that is being harassed to maybe wear something different.
While it would, yes, likely avoid the problem happening again, it shifts the responsibility to the party that should not be at fault.
Meanwhile the harasser is like “what’s wrong? I took an anti-harassment class?”
It's more like telling someone in an abusive relationship to leave the abusive relationship.
Do both. Insist that the authorities reform the abuser AND leave the relationship.
In a real life abusive relationship that would look like both calling the cops and leaving. In the case of software, demand reform and also switch OSes.
The day I can’t make a local-only account on windows (for personal use, work is a different matter unfortunately) is the day I stop using windows.
It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts. I can skip it, which is nice, but just don’t show the screen. If you’re installing linux you either know what you’re doing or you don’t: if you do you know it’s possible and don’t need it jammed in your face, and if you don’t you’re probably not quite tall enough to understand it isn’t needed and you probably don’t want it anyways.
What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is.
Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user base.
The incentives are alomost perpendicularly misaligned.
Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. People are looking for the exit, finding there is indeed a door, and stopping them will take far more than just some reassurance from the DJ boot.
It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500.
The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
Which company would you say is the example(s) of the latter? Sounds like utopia I'd like to be a part of.
They want to be Apple. Apple sells hardware, services, and takes a huge cut being a software store.
Microsoft sells software. They turned office into a service but it's still software. Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
Microsoft's strategy for turning into Apple is kneecapping their own software.
> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge.
Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.
Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night.
Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.
Avast does this well. It has "do this" options for now, in an hour, in a day, and "next century".
Regularly being presented with a "Set up Windows" after boot forcing you to click "no thanks" on a bunch of Microsoft services is exactly the kind of thing that irritates me. I've politely declined their services about 10 times already, make it stop!
When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work either directly on Linux or at least via things like Proton (courtesy Valve Software).
I got one of those external drive enclosures for an NVMe drive after I upgraded.
The only reason I still have Windows is the little screw securing the drive into the enclosure is in the wind and I can't be bothered to find it (for backup of all of my things so I can delete windows and install linux)
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible
I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.
I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.
Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.
What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.
Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.
Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.
Windows has been “this bad” for a long time.
You had Windows ME which was a terrible, buggy OS. I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose all their data on Windows ME.
Shifting personal windows to the Windows NT foundation provided a massive relative boost, but even that took until XP SP2 to reallt settle in, which was followed by the disaster that was Vista.
Then Windows 7 came along and it was genuinely really good. Probably peak Windows.
And then you came to an actual straitjacketing of windows in Windows 8, where the entire desktop Windows ecosystem was relegated to being a single app no better than calculator in the mobile first, completely undeveloped Windows 8 interface.
Windows 10 got us back to sanity, and barring a few minor UI mishaps Windows 11 was originally a nice refinement. This was the longest stretch of Windows being decent as a personal computer. The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop.
That was nearly a decade of enjoyable and productive Windows. Unfortunately, now we have AI, and Windows is once again being destroyed to serve the its AI master.
But I really wonder, is wanting a "little OS" just a hacker thing? For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS. I don't have a solid take on this yet.
"For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS."
I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is.
The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc.
For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.
The problem is that "to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run" changes when they want it to run something new. They don't care about cloud backup for their data? One hard drive failure, and suddenly they do. And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later.
But there needs to be a way to turn something off that you don't want, and to not get nagged about it repeatedly thereafter. But for that to work, there has to be a clear, easily findable way to turn it back on later.
been on linux for a month now, i found the exit and stepped through it. the pain points change from getting shafted by m$ to doing research and learning how to make the system work. at least the second option gives me some agency, and now its all set up i wish i had of switched sooner! ive got to say valve is doing the lords work, along with all the other linux enthusiasts.
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run.
Citation needed. “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc.
Even interpreting that as “all the functionality, but limit applications to utilities for managing the hardware”, I think there people who want that, but I doubt that’s what people, in general, want. Having to choose (and, likely, pay for) a photo manager, a simple word processor, etc. is just too much of a hassle for many.
Also, why would any commercial entity develop such an OS? The margin is in the
There is a huge difference between having a text editor included and running it by default on startup to pretend fast launches.
And then there is the whole world of nearly impossible to avoid 'services' you realy do not want but will keep popping up regardless of your wishes ('Telemetry', Onedrive, Copilot, Edge, Recall, Bing adds in the start menu ffs...).
Let us also not forget being forced into a Microsoft account against your wishes ... does it still feel like it's your computer?
Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows.
Libre Office (and a couple others) is pretty close to MsOffice. Not exact, but close.
“Linux” needs to do nothing of the sort.
People who want to save their work by moving to a platform without those issues need to be willing to either do the work or pay for it.
I've never read a more archpilled comment
"i hate how the current system is, i see some other guys have something that doesnt have these issues, what the other system needs to do is make their system exactly like my current, so that I dont need to spend ANY effort myself"
few moments later
"i hate how the current system is"
"We should throw away the gdp of the us for a year or two so people can then have the same productivity" year of the le nukes desktop
Linux is doing just fine without normies.
I literraly can’t name one feature since Windows 7 what was worth it, even on the contrary: every update made the system worse.
I had to restore Notepad, Calculator and Paint from Windows 7. What the hell Microsoft?
On Windows 11, when you reconnect to a monitor or set of monitors that you've connected to before, it will automatically return your open windows to the layout across those monitors that you had when you last disconnected (assuming those windows are still open).
This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked that way.
I can name features, but everything I can think of are technical features rather than obvious surface level stuff: DX12, better support for SSDs (Windows 7 doesn't natively support TRIM), HDR (I guess, but it still seems broken to me). And none of these are things that couldn't be implemented in Windows 7. The UI has nothing to do with these things, and there's no reason we couldn't have them without the trouble Windows 10/11, other than the fact that MS doesn't want to do things that way.
I used to run all three major OS' where I saw no real difference in me using it for the apps etc I needed. As I leaned more heavily on the development side, linux kind of prevailed. Windows 8.1 and Yosemite were the last of the other two I've used for real. Never had to look back to other two since, be it for work, games or whatever.
Even occasional need for Adobe things stopped. I would still really like to see Adobe suite on linux, but if they don't want my money that's cool too I guess. I suspect the software tools people use for work is what's holding them back mostly, like Altium, CADs etc. Funnily enough, Microsoft office is just fine without OS native version most of the time.
WSL is a great feature and was a part of Windows 10.
So you install an launcher to run linux. Ditch the launcher i'd say.
WPA3, DNS over HTTPS, WSL2, Windows Sandbox, Per monitor DPI scaling, QUIC, DirectX 12. The list can be made pretty long.
Funny that you mention wsl as a great windows feature - the ability to get out of windows.
Wine is a great thing on Linux too…
There are two mentions of "reliab[ility]" (I searched for the first five letters to be sure I got other morphological forms of the word). It appears twice: once near the top, as a general goal, and once at the bottom, as part of the general goal. Nothing in between, like saying "we'll be using {less AI | more AI debugging | more human screening | magic wands | secret sauce} in an effort to improve reliability". So at least as far as this post goes, hardly even lip service. Given the number of botched updates reported earlier this year, that's astonishing.
Disclaimer: I switched to Linux last year.
It fascinates me to speculate about who this is for. At least among people I've talked to, the ones who still want windows (instead of the obvious alternatives) cite wanting things to "just work", often claiming that they "don't want making the computer work to become a second job" or similar. I personally don't think these preferences reflect the reality of how much effort using e.g. a linux distro is in this day and age, to be clear, but these are the beliefs I encounter. Are there really people who want to deal with providing feedback and stress testing an operating system and its various software components and features, but doing this for a corporation that sets the terms of their transparency efforts and ultimately does this for profit and will still grab the reins and exert control against their users' will when they feel like it?
Windows insider builds have always been for people who like being on the cutting edge, it's the same as people who run nightlies for Linux.
Some people just enjoy testing and the pain that comes with it.
Right, but it's hard not to claim those people would likely get more out of an OS they could customize more, and also that it's considerably more exploitative of those people across the divide of corporate product versus community project
Sometimes it’s just about using the path of least resistance. I’ve also contributed to Apple Maps’ and Google Maps’ data, even though I’d prefer to exclusively contribute to OSM and other open platforms instead. But, it was just easier to go through a quick form in the (Apple|Google) Maps app, because that’s where I was at that point in time. Maybe the excuse is laziness and/or force of habit?
Edit: I also imagine the reach of the mainstream platforms to be much higher (e.g. Windows vs. Linux or Google Maps user reviews vs. <is there even an alternative?>).
> obvious alternatives
First of all, in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11 (except Apple). For example, even if a model supports Linux in the US as many Lenovo Thinkpads do, in Singapore it's just not sold without Windows.
Second, Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI. Bettery life is shit now, and hibernate is disabled by default in most OS. Also, hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one (windows presaves memory to disk continuously, while in linux you have to wait until the whole ram (+ vram, if gpu) is saved/restored). It takes time. Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it. So linux is really a bad choice for laptop. But Windows 11 is much worse, especially if you don't really like ads.
I don't really understand the rationale behind disabling S3 sleep...
Was it simply that getting every device and driver to properly support it was hard, so the easiest option was to remove it and have the machine always powered up?
> Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI
> Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it.
Would you or someone else here mind explaining this?
ACPI defines power state of power-saving capable offbrand fake IBM computers(among other things, and also the "fake IBM" part is almost completely moot at this point).
ACPI power state S0 is everything running. S1 pauses CPU and CPU I/O bus. S2 puts CPU to reset. S3 cuts power to CPU. S4 cuts off everything(not actual power off). S5 cuts off everything(actual power off).
S3 and S4 are often referred to as Sleep and Hibernation. In Sleep, RAM contents are kept as-is, and sleep handling code just restore CPU internal states that gets lost. In Hibernation, OS usually dump RAM contents to disk, and write back to RAM upon bootup - S4 and S5 aren't always clearly separated and both Windows and Linux tend to go through standard boot processes, then do the state resume using RAM dump they find on disk.
For SOME reason, Microsoft forced laptop vendors to quit supporting S3 in favor of their custom "S0iX" state, which is more or less just machine running at full power, which can be extremely wasteful as far as sleep state goes.
The official explanation for this pressuring is that everybody want notification and this is the only way Windows could possibly handle notifications. A lot are skeptical about that.
1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k...
> hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one
Part of this is that hibernation can't be cancelled mid way, which is dumb. Ideally a computer is like a light switch - you can turn it on and off instantly whenever. To get closer to that, if you turn it off, but then immediately on again, the hibernation should be cancelled and return you to your desktop.
Also, the whole idea of a 'hibernation image' which is read from disk in one huge 10+ second read is best for hard drives. Now that everyone uses SSD, it should all be demand-paged in.
True. I have Fedora and FDE, if I enter Hibernate it's a crash on bext boot.
Why would they use windows and not macos for "just working" ? Even office moved to web for most companies
I used to daily drive Windows 10 for many months before official release. It was great. I wish I could stay on development builds that still had Windows 7 style Start menu.
Sadly now I use Windows 11 just because manufacturer of my laptop didn't bother to ensure that their sound driver worked corrctly on Windows 10.
My mouse lags for seconds when gpu is busy, even with something as trivial as alt-tabbing from a game.
> Are there really people who want to deal with providing feedback and stress testing an operating system and its various software components
Feedback is there on their feedback site. They just wouldn't listen.
> You want to see what we’re doing, understand our decisions, and see progress through shipping. Second, a shared sense of pride.
So basically: - recent changes are all crap - so why did you make them?
Shareholder value had to be increased, don't you understand?!
More likely: "People needed to get promotion packages, don't you understand?!"
I would guess many of the bad changes are caused by perverse incentives which do not even help shareholder value.
My mental model remains that the Windows team is mostly governed by designers on Macs who want to see a user-visible change to get their promo and never use Windows.
Because mortages need paid, and when you’re working as a programmer, you deliver what the top brass wants
> The theme is simple: fewer disruptions, more clarity, more control. This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates, and gives you more flexibility to time updates around your schedule. We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Finally, like seriously, so many times I have to "shutdown" (aka restart) for an update before going to bed. I don't want to have to babysit my desktop computer when I want to finish up for the night.
Migrating off windows, win server and exchange saved us a lot of money and was suprisingly not as challenging as we had feared.
They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles.
Installing Tiny11 and then running a debloat over its corpse results in a much faster and less memory hungry default clean install.
> Second, a shared sense of pride. We want to be proud of what we build...
Yep, that's marketing. You don't care about your users.
I guess their intent was to instil a sense of pride and accomplishment for those who’ve sunk intangible investments into their platform.
Yes, they do admit that.
> a broader shift to make AI in Windows more intentional and realign the experiences to those that provide the most value to users
To be fair they are claiming a shift away from their previous policy of not aligning the product to provide value to users...
> realign the experiences to those that provide the most value to users
Aside from the fact that nobody actually takes what Microsoft says seriously (they are professional bullshitters [with full time PR firms perfecting their bullshit] and have been for 30 years), it's funny that even this line can be reasonably interpreted as pushing more blatant nonsense onto consumers as long as it's what C-suite types think they should be paying for.
Notice that what provides the most value to users is not at all necessarily the same thing as'what our users want'. And it isn't even clear that Microsoft is thinking of consumer users here as opposed to corporate users and corporate IT departments, which are in most cases these days their actually direct customers. Most home user consumers don't pay for Windows directly.
Windows is scamware.
>We’ve also made changes to the Power menu so you’ll always see the standard Restart and Shut down options without having to install a pending update first. You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Multiple times I've wanted to shutdown my laptop so I can go home and Windows says no, sit here for 5 minutes.
I don't trust sleep mode to not keep running and overheat, so I wait.
Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day. Music production on Linux isn't really practical. A lot of this stuff barely runs on Windows/OSX.
Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.
I consider myself an advanced Linux user, and it still took me an hour this morning to figure out how to get a VPN to work on Open Suse.
Not a Windows user, have never been (since Windows 3.11). But if I were, I would think this is just PR unless they changed some fundamentals, like bringing back local user support without jumping through five hoops.
Too little too late. I've already fully migrated to Fedora 43.
By changing two settings in Windows, you can fix the worst of it.
Using a local group policy, you can change when "Preview builds and Feature updates" and "Quality Updates" become available in Windows Update.
By delaying those with 30 or 60 days, you will never have preview updates applied to your system, and feature and quality updates will have at least 1 or 2 months' worth of fixes before you get them.
start > run > gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Manage updates offered from Windows Update >
1) Enable "Select when preview builds and feature updates are received". Set days to 60
2) Enable "Select when quality updates are received". Set days to 30 (max value)
It's fascinating that one of the top features insiders are interested in is making File Explorer more dependable.
They took a real punch to the gut when File Pilot rolled out and showed them what their own devs should have been doing.
Directory Opus has been doing that for decades.
Hadn't heard that name since the Amiga days and had no idea it was still around!
Took the beta for a quick spin and... wow, the speed is truly astonishing!
Windows doesn't feel slow because the kernel or the filesystem is inherently "that" slow, it feels like a sloth overdosing on heroin because nobody at Microsoft gives the slightest crap about making it even a tiny bit faster.
It's staggering how the instant you double-click a file in File Pilot you're... back in the tar pit. (The Windows image preview app just spins... and spins... while it does God-knows-what with my CPUs.)
The contrast of going from one to the other makes the quality difference glaringly obvious.
Microsoft is trying to sell things like extended servicing agreements. They purposefully make Windows worse so they can sell you solutions to fix it. They purposefully keep it insecure so you need their updates. It’s about taking the customers hostage.
The Windows we want:
The SAME as Windows 2000 in terms of what is installed. NO TPM REQUIREMENT.
Even better: when installing Windows, there should be a "install minimal" option, and if you select it then it should be so fucking minimal - so little on there, that all you get is control panel and a way to install new software - NOTHING more.
That's your win, Microsoft. I'm 2000% certain nothing even slightly close to that will be delivered.
Yeah it’s funny how at this moment I’d pay more for less Windows.
But I’ve found my way on Linux long ago. Sure not all software is there and MS365 fully from browser has so many annoyances, but I love the OS minimalism, how clean it is.
My ideal windows in indeed win2000, but in a transparent VM so I can just do the Windows apps. I need LSW, Linux subsystem for Windows, essentially.
I live in Linux but still have some need for the Windows Runtime from time to time. If only Windows containers were at the level of the Linux ones, I’d flip the whole world up side down.
podman run ms365-full —license-key FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
I’d pay for that. But such a system only provides value, it does not extract it. It is a 180 of the way they have been thinking for a long time now.
its worth trying really really hard to get windows apps running through wine before reaching for a vm imho. once you open a vm you have to deal with ... well... windows.
I did it in the past, vmware (where the desktop was transparant so it was like Windows on Linux), CrossOver office, Wine (bottles).
Recently I tried to get Windows running using quickemu but that also failed.
All just so that I don't have to experience MS365 in the browser where I will regularly click "New message" (in Outlook) and start typing but my browser interprets all characters as shortcuts (as if I held alt or something??) messing up my inbox to various degrees before I become aware, ending up with a pile op messages in "archive". I hate the daily re-logins in Teams (which does not tell you it's logged out, your messages just hang and the menu is empty). Word simply deletes my last 2 sentences from time to time (even though it assures me on every frightened ctrl-s that it's all fine!!), etc, etc.
And we're not even talking about the hoops you have to jump through when a doc is not on SharePoint/OneDrive but on a NAS.
The minimal install should be so minimal that you feel naked, like you need to immediately start installing stuff to get anything useful done.
I do not care what you give people who don't select "minimal install" - that's their problem.
Just switch to Linux people!
My first hand experience with Windows vs Linux this month:
A friend of mine recently bought a very expensive laptop to do some gaming. I helped him set it up and god that was a horrible experience. For example, we could not get rid of LinkedIn and other crap Microsoft wanted to force on him. Disabling copilot and removing Office required registry surgery. And the damn fans were always running because of some unknown activity in the background, maybe Microsoft is moving into bitcoin mining business?
He eventually got fed up, installed Ubuntu 26.04 as an experiment and a week later still seems to enjoy the experience. Games run fine on steam and his laptop finally feels like his own.
Most surprisingly, Linux worked fine out of the box. Windows 11 on the other hand needed a bunch of PowerShell and registry hacks to be copy pasted from various sources before it was even remotely usable. It's funny how it felt as if Windows was the OS for nerds with too much free time on their hands while Ubuntu was created for ordinary people. And my god, Ubuntu feels so much more fluid on the same hardware. The difference is *huge*.
I installed CachyOS for my 8-year old son and his desktop instead of Windows.
It's been wonderful.
Not the main focus but, FYI, a number of pieces of hardware will default to full tilt fans unless you have their tooling running to manage things.
NVIDIA GPUs were infamous for doing this with nouveau on less ideally supported cards, for example.
But it's the kind of things you'd expect Windows to take care of automatically, or in the worst case, to prompt the users to install on first boot, especially if Linux (with overall less driver support from manufacturers).
And with a preinstalled Windows (tuned to the laptop) this behavior should not be observed at all.
Gaming on Linux works pretty good now. Setup is easy thanks to Steam and other launchers (e.g. heroiclauncher).
I got a new computer a couple weeks ago, with a 5070, and installed ubuntu on it and it was incredibly slow. I looked online and found some claim that 24.04 has some incompatability with nvidia, tried installing a bunch of different driver versions and nothing helped, tried turning everything off in gnome tweaks and still slow, tried installing 26.04 and 22.04 but the installer hangs forever in both, tried linux mint 24.04 still slow, gave up and installed windows with WSL :/
What was slow?
I'm running Ubuntu on a 9950x3d and 5090 and it is not slow. Games in Steam with Proton are buttery smooth.
One hiccup was I had to disable variable refresh rate because moving the cursor didn't "count" as a reason to update the screen, so moving the cursor on its own (rather than e.g. moving a window) looked choppy.
But a choppy mouse cursor isn't "slow".
Tip: if you have a performance problem, run Claude Code (or an AI agent of your choice) and ask it to investigate.
>What was slow?
Everything, huge input delay in every interaction, clicking on anything, opening menus, typing, tabbing between windows, everything had 1-2s of delay.
>disable variable refresh rate
I think I tried this but dont recall, there were a few things related to monitor refresh I tried that probably included this
In case it helps I have the same experience on Windows right now. :_(
Try CachyOS instead. Ubuntu is not great.
If you wanted to run Ubuntu from the beginning, it would be better to search for a computer designed for it, not for Windows.
This is the one thing I want from an OS: I want it to work for the hardware I have, and the hardware I get tomorrow.
Without having to google whether it will, or what hardware to buy.
Without having to google some workaround or configure anything to get the most of it.
Your expectations are not reasonable. Imagine complaining about MacOS not working on a Windows laptop or vice versa.
You should buy preinstalled the OS you want instead.
Mac chose another path. You buy a pc and OS and the same vendor makes both. You can’t choose but at least you also never need to wonder whether your laptop and OS work together.
Microsoft took a more difficult path. They have close contact with OEMs, run certification programs etc. A massive apparatus to make it somewhat likely that hardware will ”just work”.
Both of these are valid models. I’d be happy to use either. I’m not very keen on doing this work myself though. I can buy a PC with Ubuntu but then it’s still hit and miss if I buy something new for it. There is no canonical store selling canonical gear like the Apple Store
Hard to overstate the sunk-costness of it all
Except I can't because of the games I play?
This is a choice for you! I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer and whilst I've run Linux since I was in college (UK college, not US) I've always had a Windows install for gaming.
A few years ago, I finally decided I'd had it with Windows and their crap and uninstalled it. If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
I'm lucky in that a majority of games I play run fine on Linux, the only real game I'd love to play is Vermintide 2. My friends also run a mix of Linux and Windows and so we're fairly fine skipping games as a group if we can't play on Linux.
>If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
yes ive reached that point too.
Especially because technically games run pretty amazing on Linux. The issue is always the anti-cheat that they decided to implement.
There's at least one anti-cheat that "works" on Linux so they have options.
That is a problem of any operating system switch, you need to figure out what software is compatible or weather there are suitable replacements. It's the same even if you switch between iOS and Android.
That said, Linux used to be a tough cookie because there were so little support for software people wanted to run and the alternatives didn't do it any favours, plus the barrage of problems you used to get installing it on a random machine was discouraging, at best. Nowadays your chances of running it well on a random machine is pretty damn good and getting the software you need is lot more feasible. But don't go YOLOing a linux install, see if meets your use cases. There is nothing wrong with waiting until it's good enough.
I'm just down to Creative Cloud now. It's the only thing I still need Windows for. Everything else runs on Linux or there is a suitable alternative. So I've got several Debian machines running at home and at work, and one Windows machine that I boot only for photo editing.
Anyone have a good guide to (re)install Windows without any of the bloat? Preferably using Group Policy vs registry changes.
I've seen Tiny11 referenced but haven't seen a good guide for it.
Ars Technica Made a guide:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/what-i-do-to-clean-u...
Install Windows 11 Education edition (which rips all of the AI shit out mostly with sane defaults for schools). If you need the ISO, Microsoft's default Win11 ISOs have it. Use https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/ to get a good autounattend set up to rip out the extra bloat and set up a clean install. Activate with Massgrave HWID. You're done.
Windows can ensure its quality quite easily: restore support for Windows 7.
The same people who made Windows that bad are now tasked with making it slightly better.
Yeah, I wouldn't bet on this.
Windows won’t be able to run Doom soon.
I have a feeling that my fat ass switching over to Linux is going to outrun their attempt to roll back decades of accumulated tech debt, institutional incompetence and burned bridges.
I feel like your sentiment mirrors my thoughts exactly on this.
Since this isn't the Reddit comment section (I hear people here prefer a bit more elaboration and argumentative nuance with their $BEVERAGE), I feel compelled to add some of my own personal experience.
I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity. Copilot, for example, is just another gadget Microsoft simply cannot not put in. In '95 is was Clippy, but the deliveries never stop, and frankly I feel like an old man that finally decided to kick a bad habit because I truly see now all the empty talk from Microsoft I've heard countless amount of times before, wrapped in different packaging, and that Windows is like it is _by design_ and that it's bad for my health (in a different way than Linux can ever be, I feel).
Ever since Windows '95 the addition of slop has been accelerating, admittedly Microsoft _were_ much different then, but it's the _curve_ I am referring to, not that they were always _as bad_. Frankly, the "churn" is insane now, I think it's one or the other adage I can't recall where "available operating system" fills "available resources" and Microsoft are there to prove it.
The problem is also they are experimenting on their users to no end. I don't mind being part of the "user experiment" for "user experience" but how many decades do they need to arrive at the same fundamental conclusions -- that people prefer less bloat, and fewer interruptions in their face? Occam's Razor tells me it's rather that Microsoft is pretending to care but their agenda is their own alone (surprise).
Just the other day I had to spend 2 hours trying to "fix" some very-background OneDrive update because I suppose I am sucker enough to use OneDrive -- one of the least liked of Microsoft products I've had the misfortune to use -- with Windows using my laptop as a BitCoin farm, wasting cycles in some infinite loop produced by what evokes comparisons to those monkeys with typewriters. Half a dozen Powershell commands and 3-4 reboots later the `wsappx.exe` process finally was healthy enough to idle. These things happen constantly to people everywhere and there's little Microsoft can or wants to do anything about. It's a cost they're willing their users to pay.
To stop rambling, one of these days -- summer vacation perhaps -- I will remove the blasted thing finally (after decades of using both Windows and Linux) and grit my teeth through Linux, which I have tried avoiding only because I am on a Thinkpad and there's always another tweak that's needed for the whole thing to work as well as Windows does on a _good_ day. To be clear, I prefer Linux by and large, it's just that I want to avoid spending weekends configuring sleep, power states, Trackpoint, full-disk encryption, the docking station, etc.
The fact I am going to do it anyway, just to rid myself of the Windows experience that's just been getting worse and worse, says it all really.
Windows isn't fixable because Microsoft isn't fixable.
Microsoft's biggest and most consistent product is contempt for its users - consumers especially, but also business users.
When you understand that all of Microsoft's offerings are vectors for that contempt, the rest falls into place.
A user-centric Microsoft is an oxymoron. The company is literally incapable of it.
You're probably correct. Windows can be fixed, but it's stuck in the hands of MS who never will, so true ideas on how to fix it are little more than intellectual exercises.
> I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity.
I'm not so sure that Windows is unfixable. It could probably be fixed, but doing that would require rebuilding every burned bridge back to its old standard, and probably then some, and that's something the relevant people aren't going to agree to do (since they were the ones who burned them).
Mandatory updates? Now they aren't any more.
Onedrive stole your files and deleted them? Now Onedrive is enabled/disabled on first setup.
Shitty start menu? Now you can pick which one you want, all the way back to the Windows 7 one.
Shitty right click menu? Now the old one is back.
All AI? Now there's a toggle on install to enable/disable it all.
Now settings menu sucks? Here's the old control panel back as standard.
Telemetry? How about no?
If MS did all of these things (and probably more), their trust level would rise skyhigh, since they'd be doing tangible things to fix the pain points we've all talked about. Now they've hit one point out of probably 50+, and many of the remaining ones are much harder to fix than updates being forced.
someone tries to scam, steal, beat you up. they then make efforts to stop doing that, and their trust would rise skyhigh? what does someone have to do to earn that kind of loyalty? would you apply this to anything else?
If they've given all the money back that they've scammed and otherwise made all the people they've hurt whole again, and are then continuing to provide a service people find use in, then yes. I'd probably need some time to be convinced that that's what's happened, and that they've truly changed. MS obviously isn't there, but there are theoretical worlds where this can happen.
Obviously, Microsoft can't give people back their deleted Onedrive files, but they can make good on a promise that it will never happen again (given that their efforts are founded in reality and not marketing speak), and hide behind a shield of 'that wasn't our intention'. Same goes with most other things you could complain about Windows.
If you have no reason to believe that Windows will screw you over, since MS has course-corrected on all major points of contention, then why not stick around? (The answer is that MS may change course again, but for those who haven't jumped ship, I'm sure this will provide good enough reason to stick around. It's not like the ship isn't providing them any utility. They've stuck around this long for a reason.)
yes at some point broken trust dictates that no amount of fixing will ever fix it.
Microsoft degrading user experience plus lower price on Mac computers it maybe their downfall. E.g., removing local accounts, unwanted advertising, arbitrary decisions (forced TPM requirement), etc.
> This update moves Windows toward a single monthly restart by consolidating OS, .NET, and driver updates
I just can't, gotta ask - what about c++ updates? What about integral os components that were migrated to the store and if you disable it, you won't get updates? What about defender updates (not definitions but app update) that won't get applied if you have another anti malware?
The thing I hate about windows updates is that microsoft can't even update all their own stuff with a single button.
edit: almost forgot - why is office not in windows update, and what the hell is wrong with teams and why it is seperate from office updates
Just updating windows is a complete and utter mess and every single Linux distro is 100x better
I really like Windows. I just wish Copilot could be made fully optional.
Honestly, I can live with Windows 11 being a little slow, and I can deal with File Explorer issues. I can write my own tools to manage some of that, and PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks. Those parts do not bother me that much.
What bothers me is Copilot being pushed into the operating system experience itself. I wish it could simply be treated as an optional feature.
Windows is an operating system. An operating system is the foundational layer that governs the user’s work. Because of that, AI should be an opt-out assistant, not a premise that changes the default behavior of the system.
When I move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Copilot feels like something that damages the user experience itself.
If Copilot were at the level of GPT or Claude, I probably would not complain as much. But I do not understand why the quality gap feels so large.
This reads... Weird? As in, I know it's marketing speech but expressions seem misused and ideas don't follow from each other:
>You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Not... the other way around? Updates decide when I happen?
>Last month we said we would reduce where Copilot shows up across Windows, focusing on bringing AI where it’s most valuable. [...] in Notepad, we’ve replaced the generic Copilot icon with a clearer “Writing Tools” label that better describes what it does.
We've reduced AI by renaming the button?
For 2 months now the „put in admin credentials“ dialog is so fundamentally broken - ui-wise, it is unbelievable (in the sense that I do not believe it actually made it to production even though I see it with my own eyes). There are so many anecdotes about slop by now, the working parts become the anecdotes.
By now Windows, for me is more like a reality TV show than an OS.
Man, Microsoft still struggling with shit macOS solved decades ago.
On the other hand, Apple still refusing to fix shit in macOS people have been asking for decades.
Will I still have the urge to stab myself in the hand repeatedly?
"trust me bro"
Yeah exactly. They already have a fixed distro that is Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC.
...and there's clearly huge market-demand for Windows LTSC amongst retail customers, and yet, MS's C-levels already decided for them that no amount of love nor money - excepting a sufficiently large enterprise licensing contract - can legally entitle you to a license - or even official media - for Windows LTSC.
It reminds me of when Adobe ended perpetual licensing and switched to cloud(TM)-only, subscription licensing for Photoshop, et al: many of us (myself included) assumed that Adobe was surely making a foolish mistake to abandon perpetual-license customers, but it turns out[1] that was the plan all along: those customers are a vocal minority who can demonstrably afford to pay more, the rest of the customer-base doesn't care enough to switch to a competitor. Over 10 years later (2013), we haven't seen any of Photoshop's then-promising upstart competitors come close.
...on that basis, I don't think MSFT's recent backpedalling on Windows 11's disrespect for its own users is in any way a response to us power-users complaining online - or even because any number of us did fully migrate off Windows and onto Linux, but instead because of all the recent talk overseas from foreign governments (France, Germany) taking active steps to secure their digital-sovereignty and deploying more Linux desktops; and a good way to get people (and decision-makers in government and large businesses) personally interested in digital-sovereignty is by pointing out how shitty their own corporate desktop UX has gotten.
I'll gladly eat my hat when/if MS graciously allows regular retail consumers, and not just large organizations - and those of us with a $2000/yr MSDN Subscription - the privilege of paying for an OS without advertising built-in to the shell and having hard dependencies on proprietary online services.
[1] (This article has some hallmarks of LLM "assistance" but gets the point across; and cites sources at the bottom): https://secondactsbiz.substack.com/p/adobe-the-transformatio...
> We know there’s a lot of excitement for Taskbar customization – and that’s coming soon.
This will never not be funny to me. These clowns really did remove something that existed for decades and then spend more than a decade trying to edge their users to the fact that they were gonna bring it back. In 500 years when somebody looks up enshittification on Wikipedia, this should be the first example.
This announcement terrfies me. I dont think MS now has developers that are competent enough to reliably change core parts of Windows like the Explorer (taskbar). This plan will not only introduce bloat with reduced performance, but will also reduce core stability further. (Explorer has hanging issues since the april update). So please, please, please @Marcus. If you want to add stuff, please do it in side apps. Leave the core alone, that's above your ability currently. For the core please only focus on bug fixing and removing bloat again.