It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.
I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice
> I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line.
I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour. Until we change that, the power will always be with these kind of companies.
Perhaps governments could levy punative fines in such situations. But that seems like a bandaid (and ripe for corruption). Ideally we'd have structural change that prevents this behaviour in the first place. Perhaps worker representation on company boards. Or progressive corporation taxation that more strongly encourages smaller companies and more competition.
"Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behavior". This is true, but what people seem to fail to grasp is that rewarding such behavior == buying the product. If people simply didn't buy it, they wouldn't do it. It's really that simple. It may be hard to not buy, of course. The alternatives may be worse, there may be downsides to not buying, etc. But nothing else will really be effective.
Do people really have a choice though? Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.
Another instance where companies can have more leverage than consumers is gaming. Console exclusives are a thing because they work; not giving consumers the option to play Pokemon on anything but the Nintendo Switch drives switch sales. Microsoft is better off working with other gaming companies to ensure Windows keeps being dominant, than building an OS to gamer's preferences.
I think time has proven many times that consumers aren't always good regulators for the market. The market is best regulated by organized entities.
Sure, but there's a power disparity here. I think the clearest example is smart TVs where there have been examples of consumers buying a TV, and then having ads retroactively added to the product a year later. There's not much a consumer could to avoid that. It's our regulatory environment allowing that.
Yeah that is definitely the kind of thing we need regulation to address. In the market, the only power you have is to purchase or not. It ruins the free market's ability to function if the company you buy something from can remotely vandalize it after your purchase.
You don't need a TV. If there are only smart TVs then simply don't purchase one.
Most consumers are unwilling to take an option that they perceive as inconveniencing them more than getting screwed by the company inconveniences them.
Telling people to just go without a TV is a little more than a “perceived” inconvenience.
The reality is that companies know they can get away with crap because they all get away with crap. And because they all do it, consumers are powerless.
This is why regulation isn’t a bad the thing that many HNers seem to recoil at. The real problem with regulation is when it’s defined by lobbyists rather than consumer groups. But even then, it’s really no different to the status quo where businesses are never held accountable.
If somebody "needs" a TV then they might "need" some hobbies.
A disturbing proportion of my family spend more than half of their free time watching television (typically while doom scrolling tiktok). They don't "need" TVs - they need to find interests.
Please make a list of things you don't need so that in case of any issues with the company or system that allows access to them you will know to just stop using them.
I've dropped many things in the past because of issues with the company/service. Amazon Prime, every single streaming service, I've been car free for over 3 years, and there are more.
Are there some things I would struggle with if suddenly there were issues? Sure. I had to significantly increase my internet spend because of the (much) cheaper option going to complete shit. I require the internet for my career but unless the entire world collapses I doubt I'll run into any true blocker that would prevent me from using it for work.
Most people are just afraid to change their lives substantively. I am too, but I'm also willing to do it for causes I believe in.
If people stopped buying cigarettes there would be no tobacco industry. But the true cost of smoking is not something that the smoker realizes until it's already too late. That's why we had to have huge public health campaigns to deter people from smoking, because the long-term effects aren't obvious when you're just stopping in at the corner store. We all live in our own little bubbles and it's often difficult to see how our actions, individual and collective, shape the world around us.
Consumers can make choices only if it is clear what the options are. In many cases, Microsoft hides behind weasel or made up words. And it takes a security researcher to peel back the layers of their bullshit.
The reason we are in such a position is because government contracts and government involvement with companies like Microsoft Amazon. They don't have to care about consumers when they have multi billion dollar Gov contracts.
Anti trust laws do not generally apply to these situations. The government has had an appetite for antitrust, but the cases are far from a slam dunk. We need modern laws for modern problems.
Idk. Our antitrust laws present a high burden of proof and so much subjectivity. The question “Are customers really being hurt?” has to be argued in court (and then argued on appeal at like 3 levels). I think it harms our whole market system, and arguably even harms the capitalist system, to have players with so much power, and the antitrust laws are focused narrowly on proving specific harm mainly in the area of pricing, which isn’t the whole picture.
Too many markets are utterly dominated by one or two big players. I know it’s a tricky problem because market share is hard to define (Does Amazon have 80% share of e-commerce? Or 30% share of all retail?) but I think we would be better off if there were a more aggressive set of rules about anti-competitive behavior that automatically applied to these huge firms, which didn’t rely so much on subjective judgment.
Which requires voting in politicians that would do that. Of course we're much more likely to elect politicians that get the support of billionaires in general so this shit ain't never happ'ning
By friends we mean IT leadership in organizations which really needs to be making the case for MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, or whatever instead of (but more likely in addition to) Windows.
Yeah exactly. But I don't think my local state university, my wife's accounting firm, or my clients are going to ever switch from Windows, no matter how user hostile it becomes. One could dream.
You can even keep that Office365 subscription going on Linux via the web apps these days. They are buggy as hell, but no more buggy than the Mac versions in my experience (haven't used the Windows versions enough to compare...)
I used to do a lot of document and Office work. If you had told me that 20 years in the future MS would still be around, automagic piracy enabled coding bots were a thing, and people were having problems because the buttons in Office don’t work, I would’ve flagged the third as unbelievable.
It’s absolutely adorable to include macOS in that list, as though good ol’ Tim Apple is the White Knight standing up for consumers and always doing the right thing. MacOS and Windows are working from the same playbook. The specifics vary, but leaving one for the other is like running from an abusive boyfriend to his slightly-richer and slightly-better-looking best friend who acts just like him.
I'd love if everyone switched to Linux and the walled gardens just died, but the most realistic outcome would be Microsoft and Apple having to up their game and improve their respective products. Right now they're driving hellbent for leather into OSaaS monthly computer subscriptions, eliminating use agency to the greatest degree possible, and exploiting every possible intrusion and usurpation of consumer privacy, vacuuming up every last bit of data and monetizing it to the greatest degree possible, without any concurrent return in value to the consumer.
The only way that stops is by having enough people leave that they change their behavior, and it's not sufficient to switch to the competition that is operating under the same perverted incentives under the same system with the same failure modes. No Windows, no Mac, no Chromebooks, no enshittified corporate quagmire of awfulness and despair.
The solution is simple - use Linux. Set your family up with Linux.
It's the year of the Linux desktop; it's never been easier or better, and it's never been more important to make the leap.
> I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour.
Consumers have the final say, our economic system fundamentally is consumer spending. (Ok, save for most recent year(s) of mag7 AI buildout. But generally that's the case for USA economy).
We have to stop taking out our wallet and just accepting things like sheep. (nearly) Every one of the "scrapped" computers could have run a *nix OS and been a middle finger to microsoft.
I think consumers largely have stopped taking out their wallet for Microsoft, at least enough of them to cause Microsoft to start walking back a little bit.
Nearly 1 billion PCs have stayed on Windows 10, 42% of the global desktop marketshare is still on 10 despite EOL. Linux has been showing consistent growth on the steam hardware survey as well, and time will tell but I have a feeling the MacBook Neo is going to put another nail in Microsoft's consumer coffin.
The problem for us is that's such a tiny margin of Microsoft's customer base. They aren't a consumer company anymore. For Microsoft to feel the pain, we need the big legacy enterprises to start ripping out Windows (and by extension, rip out Windows Server, Azure, M365).
Us here on HN are in a unique position to help, with many of us having influence on or even the authority to make technical decisions for the companies we work for. Its not enough to stop buying Microsoft at home, we all need to stop buying Microsoft at work.
> I think consumers largely have stopped taking out their wallet for Microsoft, at least enough of them to cause Microsoft to start walking back a little bit.
Microsoft has largely stopped asking consumers for money. The last paid upgrade was Windows 8, IIRC. Since then, Microsoft wants consumers to upgrade, so it's free, with full screen prompts at login, and sometimes the 'no thanks' button just does it anyway.
Microsoft sells consumer OSes to OEMs. I haven't been looking, but I assume they don't allow OEMs to install Windows 10 Home anymore; and maybe not even Windows 10 Pro. So when consumers buy a new PC, they're getting Windows 11. The only Linux option at most stores is Chrome OS, which Google is shutting down, and is just a browser for most users (it's a useful product! a lot of users just need a browser; but it's not a platform of empowerment)
Sort of related, I think this is why big tech loves “free, ad-supported” so much. Using Google search or YouTube or ChatGPT or Fortnite doesn’t seem like an action that is “supporting a company.” When none of the money comes from your pocket, you don’t really feel like you’re making an important choice to patronize one business or another.
It seems like another tragedy of the commons. Consumers ultimately have the final say in climate impacts by above companies. That isn’t to say consumers are guilt free, but the power of an individual is pretty small
You can do that, but the companies and institutions built on Windows will still keep paying whatever it costs for Active Directory, and thus all the bundled software that comes with it.
Individual consumer action does not a monopoly break.
Better yet: don't pick any poison at all -- both System76 and Tuxedo Computers (as examples, sometimes you can buy a latop without an OS and save the money, same goes for PCs) offer laptops with Linux installed: no Microslop tax, and hardware that's guaranteed to work with OSS.
Personally I'm a huge Linux supporter and user. I try my best to not to use any non-free software, and while I prefer macOS laptops, I always have an exit strategy if I decide to ditch the platform.
Recently, I decided to start making music again after a decade of hiatus. I got a nice audio interface and some hardware which can do nifty things. The catch?
None of the supporting software for my hardware runs on Linux. I either need to run a VM to configure these things, or use the macOS versions of the software. I chose the latter because it's not meaningful to passthrough all the devices to change some parameters and give device back to Linux. I also don't use Wine. I don't want to install something that big into my daily driver.
While Linux is great for many, many things, there are some things still sorely lacking in the ecosystem. Why can't I adjust monitoring/routing in a class-compliant audio device? Why my effect processors' USB protocol is not open so I can't play with it parameters from Linux?
And I think it is fair to acknowledge that Linux doesn't fit the needs of all people. The thing is, the flip side is also true. While I can pick up my (admittedly technical) hobbies under Windows, it is more convenient under Linux. Without the FLOSS ecosystem, I could not afford to do so at all.
That's true. I run almost everything under Linux. All my daily driver and work-related desktop systems are Linux for more than two decades now. Heck, we don't have any Windows machines used for work in the datacenter. However, I wanted to highlight that Linux is not "there" yet, and telling "just use Linux, duh" doesn't solve all the problems a user has.
For photography and graphic arts, Linux can handle many if not most of the work (I use Digikam and Darktable with great success, for example), yet when it comes to audio for example, it falls short due to a thousand papercuts.
That's the thing, not everyone is a professional photographer. Open source tools are fine for many of us. They are also great to get a taste of a field, to learn the basics, without a massive investment.
You don't have to be everything to everyone. You just have to satisfy a need.
I'm not a professional photographer though. I'm also not a professional musician, either.
Yet, Darktable allows me to process my RAWs to a point which I like. Similarly, my audio equipment allows me to create some music which I like, too.
I didn't push Darktable to professional levels, but I believe it can match bigger tools for what I want to do with it. I don't do photo manipulation, for example. Just process RAWs. I expect the same from my audio equipment for my music endeavors.
That's kind of my experience dabbling into Linux as well. You're effectively turning your laptop into a fancy tablet, which is okay only if you're not doing some professional work in specific niches that are mostly seamless with macOS/Windows. Niche hardware usually is out of the question.
Programming works fine on linux, better even than Windows unless you're developing for Windows. Most gaming (other than some online games with uncooperative anti-cheat) is as easy as on Windows, where games are also likely to need a bit of tinkering. Web browsing is obviously fine, and that's most of what most people do (and so most people would be fine with "effectively a fancy tablet"). 3d modeling is fine. The foss equivalents to most Adobe software suck, but that's not really specific to linux.
Recently someone did the incredible work of getting Photoshop to run perfectly in Wine, but it looks like the original reddit post detailing it got removed for legal reasons (which is nonsense, it doesn't make piracy any easier). Adobe seems to actively work against any efforts to run their software on Linux.
Not to address/counter your comment, but because it might be helpful: if that's a Focusrite interface, the company itself points to an open source project in its support documentation.
I haven't actually tested it, but it seems like it works for people, and it's solid enough to have the kernel component in the kernel. I found it while researching a possible move with my Vocaster One.
I have Scarlett 2i2G4. I may look into it. On the other hand, I have way more advanced stuff from ESI and Audient, which allows much more customization when compared to Scarlett, and they have no Linux support AFAIK.
If it's one of those and class compliant, you might be able to access all of it through alsamixer or one of the many frontends (maybe too many, maybe one for you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsamixer
The Audient situation appears to be a proper nightmare realm with non-class compliant stuff, but there is a tool with a list of caveats longer than you might want to deal with: https://github.com/TheOnlyJoey/MixiD
It's more best case scenario as an escape hatch and less problem solved, but it's something.
Well I'll test it when I have some time. ESI has a lot of routing flexibility on board, and I don't know how ALSA will present it to me, but I may report it here.
The problem is that I can't get one in a store. It's a product that is only available to those in the know.
In the ideal situation a lay-person would be in a store, and there would be two versions of the same machine, one with ads on the lock screen, one without.
2nd hand "Windows" computers are way way cheaper and are pretty easy to put some distro on. You can pretty much cleanse them from any Microsoft taint and use them for lots of purposes.
Normies will never get computers from them without help from fellow nerds, that then need to support them, they want their genius, the easiness to walk into a shopping mall store.
I recently made a decision between a Macbook and a Linux laptop. I went around and around on this, I really wanted the Linux laptop. I even considered Omarchy on one of the Panther Lake machines DHH says he's gotten it working on.
I made a decision I didn't want to make: I bought the Macbook Pro. If I was retired or completely cashflow positive in my endeavors, I'd pick the machine I want.
That being said, there were so many ecosystem, hardware, power management, GPU throughput and compatibility advantages with the Macbook Pro at the moment, and given that I'm firmly in founder/launch mode, I went with the safety option. My biggest risk is Apple making another anti-consumer choice.. I don't see the ads they've started pumping into their product, but I do miss GNOME.
I made a work decision, not a technology decision.
That said, Windows never entered the equation.
You probably made the right decision. In my opinion, DHH is underselling how terrible the keyboard on the Dell XPS is. I bought the lunar lake XPS and I hate the keyboard so much, I turned it into an expensive Jellyfin server and bought a $275 thinkpad T14 on ebay to use instead. Maybe the keyboard on the panther lake version is better, but my fingers just get lost with the flat keys. In addition, they are super low-travel and mushy. I gave it a few months and just couldn't handle typing on it anymore.
Thanks. I appreciate the report. The keyboard is important to me.. I do a lot of work on the road and don’t want a lot of peripherals. Apple keyboard and trackpad are great.
My “nice” mechanical keyboard is sitting on my old desktop, which is now a container store. It’s easier to not go back and forth.
Most people want a computer that works with their software. No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution. Especially because nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS solutions, that only a niche Windows program can actually do correctly.
> nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS
I'm interested in where that estimate + number are coming from. And I'd like to point out that I don't nearly see as many people pushing back against say MacOS for "not being Windows", despite the fact that the same issue would be there. I wonder why Linux gets special treatment in that regards, when modern distros make usage very accessible.
> And that doesn't even get into gaming.
Gaming on Linux works very well. And if something doesn't, it's usually by choice (e.g. BattleEye customers not enabling it on Linux) or by sheer incompetence / malevolence (e.g. EA Games and their shitty EA App that breaks often even on Windows, and even worse on Linux in a Wine environment).
Linux unfortunately needs to be a Windows that's better than Windows to a lot of people unfortunately. It must support all their hardware and software perfectly and can never have any issues, only then will it be an accepted alternative. Probably because it's free and they want it to work on their existing setup.
Mac users paid money for their choice, so ironically they are more forgiven for the inability to run some Office VBA macros, work with that random MST dual display dongle or whatever. They rationalize their expensive purchase as a good decision and that it's good enough and possible to solve issues encountered like spending 5 times as much on Thunderbolt dock to do what the $30 MST dongle did or learn some entirely new $10 app to do what they did on Windows with something else.
Then at least let the company that makes your niche software know that you want a Linux version of it, even if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this chicken / egg problem. Nobody wants to use Windows, they want to use some specific application. If most software is available on Linux too, then consumers can actually choose their OS.
Most software is already available on Linux. I've successfully run Linux in corporate jobs where everything runs on the MS/AD/Azure stack. The issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background. Windows is really great at that - until it breaks. Then you're usually screwed. Like, if the problem is close to the kernel, you can't even fix it theoretically. Best you can do is wait for an official MS patch. On Linux things break more often, but you can usually fix them without having to resort to extreme measures. It's a fundamentally different usage philosophy that plays very hard into the strengths of techies. So non-technical users will always shy away from Linux.
> the issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background.
You may have to spend extra work to get things running; but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.
I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very technical distribution and some manual configuration is expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.
>
Then at least let the company that makes your niche software know that you want a Linux version of it, even if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this chicken / egg problem.
To solve the chicken/egg problem, the GNU/Linux distributions should generate some very (in particular binary) stable interface for writing applications (including GUI applications) on GNU/Linux - like WinAPI on Windows. With "stable" I mean "stable for at least 20-25 years". This interface must, of course, work on all widespread GNU/Linux distributions.
Even if we don't agree on a userspace ABI, this is still fine-ish, as long as you can statically link everything you need. Unfortunately the nerds maintaining the core libraries REALLY don't want you to do that, and the answer to "how do I build a portable Linux GUI program" goes more or less like:
"Build musl libc statically, set up a toolchain to use it, build libc++ for that toolchain, get libwayland, link that statically (which their build scripts don't support, roll your own), get xcb,libxau,libxwhatever and build those statically as well, and implement TWO platform layers, dynamically checking for wayland support. There's like 5 different ways to set your window icon. Yes, you need to implement all of them. Now for loading the graphics API......."
On Windows it's a call to RegisterClassW followed by CreateWindowW.
An operating system is a style of thinking about your work. WINE is a way to get Windows applications to run (by now run decently) under GNU/Linux. These Windows applications are nevertheless foreign bodies in the whole kind of thinking which GNU/Linux is built around.
I think that eventually, Win32/WoW64 will be the stable common API for Linux programs - or at least games. I won't be surprised if it outlasts Windows.
I don't want windows or linux, I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there. When I have to think about my OS, then the OS has a flaw. And currently nor Windows or Linux can deliver that anymore. Windows 7 after some customizations and Windows XP had this, but M$ destroyed it. Linux never had this and I don't expect that this will come in the future.
> I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there.
I guess you want a Mac. That's fine.
I value freedom and things not mysteriously breaking and functionality not disappearing, and am quite happy investing a the time and knowledge upfront, so I use Linux.
And then there are people who want to have a system which works out of the box initially and who don't want to learn anything and don't mind it breaking later, and they choose Windows.
> you have a product that is predatory towards you and you refuse to change your ways.
And honestly it seems like you refuse to learn even the smallest bit about human nature.
Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their computer. Walk into a room of 100 graphic designers who have spend the last 20 years using Photoshop exclusively and put GIMP in front of them and and at least 98 of them are going to say what the hell is wrong with you, they have work to do, take this uncanny valley garbage and get out of here.
I'm typing this on a System76 laptop right now but I understand expecting people to use Linux writ large is ridiculous.
I would propose a new law of interaction design: Whenever something is promoted as a tool that you wouldn't need to learn, then it's actually designed to use you, and you are the tool.
> Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their computer.
I see this point being missed over and over again in this thread. To people like you and I the computer is often the entire point. To normal people it's a tool. It exists to get the job done so they can move onto something else.
The solution that requires the least effort is objectively the best solution. Most of the time that still means Windows, and it won't change until the required level of effort changes.
If all the crap that people suffer through, and make YouTube channels dedicated to about how much Windows is hell, is not enough to get them to look elsewhere then "fixing" other operating systems won't get them to look.
They aren't looking and they aren't interested in looking. At this point they have no one else to blame.
I mean I kinda agree on what you are saying but then it logically follows that if you don't want to try out alternatives, don't want to push your government to enact better laws, don't want to spend time taking them to small claims court - basically don't want to do anything but suffer - then just suffer.
I don't know how to better explain this, but as I get older I find I just have less energy to address all the things. My worldview gets larger and my energy levels become less and eventually I need to just 'stop' progressing in a certain activity. It could be re-learning the TV's remote control like my grandparents, or it could be re-learning how to drive with an EV touchscreen on modern cars, or it could be re-learning an operating system that just presents a mountain where you just say: "I can't do it this time."
The vast majority of people do not test out alternatives to things they just need to use for work, they don't lobby their government even informally for different laws, have never gone to small claims court (or even been in a court room when it's in session). These are all minority "activist" activities for lack of a better word.
The tin foil hat interpretation of this is that it is all by design, by whatever cabal runs everything, to subjugate the masses and control them directly or indirectly. The generous interpretation is closer to an extreme version of Sturgeon's Law[0] where this is just a natural, even inevitable, byproduct of most things being garbage. Like most things the truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle.
It is a solution. Once you do it, your problem is solved, that makes it the solution.
If you aren't willing to go with that, you can stay with Windows and just accept the constant abuse.
As for gaming, I've been on Linux for two years now and I haven't had a single game not work.
And as for a better solution, Teach kids. Once I'm an ornery PTA parent I'm going to push for programming and *nix of some sort to be taught to the school, even if I have to volunteer to do it myself.
Well acktshually, gaming is a really good example. Valve did a lot of good with Proton to the point that a lot of games work and work well.
Perhaps ironically, Wine may be the best stable API on Linux. I'd like to see a concerted and well-funded effort to make Wine run certain Windows applications well. We might not be able to replace the Adobe Suite short-term by a FOSS alternative for most of its users, but we might be able to get Wine to run the Adobe Suite, Affinity Suite, and whatnot well enough to make it possible to switch and keep running these applications.
<< No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
It actually is. It may not be the best solution, but it absolutely is one of available solutions. = Not being able to ( or wiling to ) learn ( and adjust ) as needed is part of the reason we are here.
I am not being nitpicky here. Reasonable people don't hope things will change; instead, they change things they can.
Not even that! Most people want a computer that lets them get the tasks they want to do done, in the way that uses the lowest effort.
If they want to edit a photo, and they're used to Photoshop, then Photoshop will be lower effort than a competitor just as Photoshop is lower effort than darkroom editing film. Competitors have to be lower effort or offer significantly better features than incumbents. Product cost is a part of the effort needed to use that product, but far from the entire thing.
> Most people want a computer that works with their software.
I suspect that most people don't run much software at all outside of their web browser and wouldn't notice any difference between using chrome in windows and using chrome in linux. Gaming is not the barrier it used to be either.
> Why is that argument always applied against Linux, and never against for instance macOS, which also can't run Windows software?
There's a certain type of technical user that gets joy from coming up with arguments, good, bad, or just pulled out of their butt, explaining why people can't use Linux. I'm not going to spend my day trying to understand people's unusual preferences.
Well, considering that you can run almost anything (excluding games and specialized graphics software) with 99.99999% guaranteed result via WinApps, I don't see what the issue is for a hypothetical member of the majority population.
It's not 2016 anymore, you don't have to switch to LibreOffice if you need an office suite of apps.
That obviously would be preferable, but if you're an avid Microsoft ecosystem user, just use WinApps. It's simple enough to the point that a child could use it.
I know it's a bit ironic given TFA's focus on shoving Copilot and Recall down users' throats, but I really do believe that an OS-level AI agent could solve these usability issues. We need to solve a lot of trust issues, but the capabilities are essentially already there for a non-technical user to tell a Samantha-like OS AI "please get this working", and it will.
Even skipping the first step (which requires a second readme) the next step involves opening a terminal. Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work, what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.
Linux is an important operating system, but anyone under the delusion that it is desktop ready right now needs to actually watch someone use it. I say this not because I hate linux, but because I love it. I want someone to make it usable for a desktop, and people claiming that it is usable right now are not helping that.
> Even skipping the first step (which requires a second readme) the next step involves opening a terminal. Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work, what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.
I strongly disagree with this; I believe that an OS should be whatever the user needs it to be. In my case, I am a power user that loves the command line, and while I agree that I may not represent the majority of users, I do not care for your assertion that my way of doing things is somehow invalid.
I agree on the facts but I think the gatekeeping effect is probably helpful for the current users.
If we had a giant influx of computing illiterate people, the platform would enshittify. They would move towards android-type lock downs and user hostile stuff. More and more binary-only proprietary software, they might fork systemd etc and make sure that the proprietary binaries only run under certain unmodified setups etc. Of course there would be escape routes to various other, nonpopular distros, so the skilled people would be fine again, but there would be a barrier again.
I think this is fundamental. Once the general public starts entering an arena, it won't stay the same. Eternal September etc.
I agree that most users won't be able to follow Winapps' guide, but "The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work" is just false. That is the point of an OS for computer illiterates, not the "entire point of an operating system".
I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage their applications and work processes rather than their computer.
It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from their computers - that as long as they can "save" their work, and "send" it from one app to another, they'd be able to get all the productivity that they are looking for.
I had commented this above, but the OS should be flexible enough to do whatever the user needs it to do. "What it needs to do" is pretty broad, but I think that's the point.
It should be possible to get creative and business work done on a computer while knowing almost nothing about an os but I use Windows at work and the situation with the file save dialogue in office is a farce. I can't imagine how confusing it is for someone who has no conception of what a file is.
Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken from paper based office work. You have container folders and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can contain folders can contain folders. The real world has some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you understand nesting, files and folders are quite intuitive.
Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.
> Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.
I agree with most everything else you said, but would slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links). While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel that we shouldn't be beholden to it.
This is actually an interesting example. To me it sounds like it actually should be less confusing to a person who has no preconceived notion of what a file should be, and only wants to save their work and reopen it later, not worried about what shape the saved object takes.
On that note, I remember how absolutely ecstatic I was when I first set up Sublime Text and discovered that unsaved editor tabs always reliably survive restarts; it essentially flips the script, whereby I've lost multiple saved files by accidentally deleting them, but I've never accidentally lost work in unsaved tabs, and I've never actually had any interest in figuring out where and how these tabs get persisted - it just works.
There’s a big difference between working on a computer and working with a computer.
The people doing the former use computers for ‘real work’. They are using a computer as an end in itself, care about operating systems and have strong opinions about systemd. The people doing the latter couldn’t give two shits about any of that and just want to get their presentation finished on time.
Problem is, both sets of people have to use the same machines. It’s also why software like GIMP will never become widely adopted in professional environments because it’s designed for a completely different userbase.
That's barking up the wrong tree. Github shows instructions for software developers. A normal user would just install Winapps from package manager, like with all the other Linux software.
Cool. Windows can't do 99% of the things I and anyone not grasping at straws can do with Linux.
It is getting tiring, I don't say Linux is perfect, but KDE has been better than Windows for years, Linux doesn't bit rot like an average Windows install and Linux is in practice surprisingly more stable, but no-no-no, Linux can't be this time again. Quick... ehm "there is a piece of software that only works on Windows". Have you ever thought the reverse holds too, but times 1000?
If you call yourself an IT-professional, you only run spyware.exe in a vm or in a box with all networking gear ripped out and you don't making stupid excuses.
As a VERY long-time Linux user, I agree. Multi-monitor setups, where you can unplug the monitor and have your windows gather back onto your laptop screen requires WAY too much configuration. Having your audio switch back to internal laptop speakers requires homebrewing a script. On my 2020 Dell XPS, I still haven't figured out how to enable the subwoofers - so I'm stuck with ThinkPad quality audio. I have 3 ThinkPads (one with straight ArchLinux, 2 with CachyOS) and there's always some little piece I'm annoyed with. The X1C has good battery life, the T480 and P14s are meh. I JUST bought my first HiDPI Lenovo laptop this weekend. Getting that to be a decent tradeoff between readable text and mongo-duplo-massive UI has been "fun". (Yoga 15.3" Aura edition - I really like it) But running apps in Wine is darn near impossible - the text is for ants!
All of these issues go away with Mac and Windows. I'm not giving up on Linux, I'm just a realist.
No need for such childish reaction, dismissing other's viewpoints achieves nothing for your side of arguments, at least nothing good and one of the reasons some skilled folks won't migrate, we have enough toxic communities elsewhere.
Also quite a few inaccuracies - what the heck is 'bit rot' on windows? I had 1 same Windows 10 install running on desktop for 8 years as primary personal PC and installed tons of software and games, both official and... some other types. 0 issues.
On laptop whole lifetime with original install is the default for everybody I know, for me 6-7 years (simply the length of ownership). We don't talk about Windows 95 or ME era here where frequent installs were basically mandatory and a well-practiced chore.
Historically I wouldn't refer to it as "bit rot", but generally "registry bloat" with a combination older, no longer used .DLL's hanging around, rather than being removed on software uninstallation or upgrade.
In the past a good "registry cleaner" would help - but those are no longer reliable with newer versions of Windows - there are many virtual entries that get cleaned-up by overly aggressive utilities.
> I had 1 same Windows 10 install running on desktop for 8 years as primary personal PC
I actually have a desktop still running that got a launch party host Windows 7 Steve Ballmer edition install that's just been upgraded as time has gone on. Very much a Ship of Theseus machine but technically only ever migrated the OS image around, never reinstalled. That's 17 years of a Windows install so far, and its perfectly fine. That one install has made it through multiple motherboards and OS upgrades. It'll end up dying and being replaced once I get too uncomfortable with 10 EoL, this board is still useful to me but it doesn't have a TPM so Windows is dead to this machine.
For better or worse, well mostly worse, most of the software people use these days is either directly running in the browser or is electron based so running perfectly fine on Linux.
Gaming on Linux is a mostly solved issue for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming. If a game isn't using some root kit level anti-cheat or copyright protection, it is going to run just fine. Same with running most other software.
The only part where Linux is sucks is for certain creatives fields. If you need Adobe products you are out of luck. Video editing well you use Da Vinci or free software. There are some good DAWS but no Ableton.
Yes, you have to compromise but Linux is definitely getting there. Not everything runs on Mac either and people cope just fine.
>>for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming
Turns out, a lot of people do exactly that. Hundreds of millions of people play CoD, Fortnite, Battlefield, Apex and many many other games which won't work on Linux at all.
I think the state of gaming on Linux is absolutely incredible - what used to be a very esotheric and "roll of the dice" process 20 years ago now is extremely simple and it mostly just works. But when I play games with friends every week it's almost never a game that would work on Linux.
Good news re: gaming is with SteamOS/Bazzite gaming on Linux is finally near-turnkey. Only thing I had to adjust on my bazzite computer was zram, otherwise I’ve never had to open the terminal (unless I wanted to). Expedition 33 ran perfectly day 1.
I do agree with your larger point though. It’s the same reason everybody doesn’t change the oil in their car on their own or cook their food every night over ordering out. Only it goes even further because by this point most people expect a computer to just do what it’s supposed to do (or they think it’s supposed to do) the first time they try. I can’t imagine asking my parents to start inputting terminal commands. Even just the process of something like running etcher and prepping a usb drive to install linux is a whole thing.
Or Accessibility, which the Linux desktop is notoriously bad with, since, what, 20 years. The constant push to rewrite things typically forgets making Accessibility a priority, for the sake of "progress".
Linux is just no good option. Linux has it's own issues that make them unusable for people that don't want to put time and effort in their OS itself.
Current example: Slidly incompatible unix tools, still not 100% complete, but rewritten in rust.
Windows has only one major advantage over Linux, it comes preinstalled with all required hardware support.
Both installing Windows and installing Linux can be difficult for most people. I have done both professionally and when installing Windows I have encountered frequently more serious problems, which required much more time to solve than the problems encountered when installing Linux.
For those who have someone else to install and configure Linux, it is at least as easy to use as Windows.
My parents, more than 80-years old, have used for many years Linux without any problems and they have no idea what Linux is, they just know the applications that they are using for viewing and editing documents, e-mail, Internet browsing, music or movies listening or watching, TV watching or recording (with TV tuner) and so on.
What bugged me for years is that I ended up paying the microsoft or apple tax that way. In the end I figured out a more efficient way around that than any of the rebates/refunds: just buy second hand hardware. Someone else paid for and used the windows license, I just need the box.
I have two left hands (and one of them is backwards) and components spontaneously disintegrate when I touch them. I know I'm not capable of building a computer so I bought mine from Tuxedo computers, who sell computers running GNU/Linux. I might be the GNU/Linux whisperer who manages to not have any major issues, but that doesn't correlate with the type of technical aptitude which would let me turn a heap of components into a working machine. I even managed to break a laptop by trying to replace the CMOS battery.
Making any hardware changes whatsoever to a laptop is dramatically more complicated than building a desktop. It very much is just a matter of 1) buying compatible parts (there are websites for this, or if you shop in person they'll be more than happy to help), then 2) matching plug labeled A to socket labeled A.
Hah! You're like one of my family members. We keep her away from anything electronic because the failure rate in her presence can not be accounted for by accident alone.
Oh, and laptops are nasty. They are put together in ways that can easily confound you when you have plenty of experience. Lots of it revolves around little pieces of plastic that are marginal when new and that just want to break by the time the device needs service. It's a conspiracy!
Anyway, at least you know it can be done. The conditional still holds.
This is another way they rip off consumers. In a perfect world, the license would be resalable for someone else, just like you can sell a used Blu-ray. During piracy cases, they clamor about their "intellectual property". Ok so that means it's not physical, and once one person is done, they can sell it to someone else who needs it.
Look at the mobile YouTube client. The bottom navigation bar has the "+" create button stuffed right in the middle of it, larger than any other button. What % of users creates YouTube content? Probably <1%. What pp of those do it in the mobile YouTube client? Probably 0.1%. Yet the button is there, with no way to disable it.
In general, why don't apps have a "creator" toggle, off-by-default, that optimized the entire UI for viewing / consuming? Just how apps like Uber have either an entire separate app for 'partners', or toggle.
I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders. And YouTube has no competitor, so they can go buckwild with anything that synthetically increases KPIs.
I think the only app in recent memory that I have seen right the ship is Spotify. The past year they have introduced a lot of toggles for things like the shuffle algorithm, the dumb looping album art videos, audio loudness normalization being split out into normalization and compression ('volume'), etc; About the only thing that's missing is a toggle to disable podcasts, just like YouTube needs a toggle to completely disable shorts.
Any PMs reading this, be our hero. Fight the good fight.
A while ago, they introduced the Home page with algorithmic recommendations; okay, it sucks that you can't choose whether Home or Subscriptions is the default, but at least you can choose between the algorithmic recommendations and the chronological subscriptions feed.
Then they introduced Shorts. These are algorithmic ally recommended TikToks which you can't disable, they always litter both the Subscriptions page and the Home page. This sucks.
Then, recently, they added algorithmic recommendations to Subscriptions. So if you're on Home you see only algorithmic recommendations, and if you're on Subscriptions, a lot of your screen is still taken up by algorithmically recommended videos from channels you subscribe to.
Every one of these steps is in the direction of making sure you watch what YouTube wants you to watch instead of what you want to watch.
I keep mental tabs on the number of videos you can see from the home page on desktop.
We crossed an all-time record recently.
We get a 2 rows x 3 column grid now. The upper left is an ad, the lower row are clipped in half to coach scrolling, bringing the total to 2 thumbnails.
I feel like a junkie whose dealer tripled their prices and cut the drugs with 80% filler; sobriety by cartoonish consumer exploitation
There seems to be a pretty wide gulf between "segregate consumers and content creators" and "please let me make it so that I can remove/disable the huge central button I never use that takes up a lot of space and is super easy to accidentally hit"
> I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders.
Exactly.
I am in an engineering design software developer organization bought by an investor from the founders approaching retirement (they worked 3 decades on this software helping construction engineers designing better homes).
Ever since the lead up to the sell - changes were tuned to lure in investors, for the liking of investors - our organization is focusing on maximising revenue. Fast. That is THE focus. New marketing strategy, sales strategy, licensing strategy changes, reshape organization to have more informed decision making in sales (i.e. collecting and processing much more data on increasing number of contacts). Company meetings are about EBITDA, sales goals vs. actual, streamlining organization. Luncbreak discussions evolve around how to license existing features differently so it would trigger/force up/cross sales.
What is not on the agenda for maximising revenue: features and engineering. We are a "sales oriented organization", says our new CEO prodly - brought in during the sale. Addressing user needs and becoming more popular for the eventual income boost takes longer than the sales cycle of less than 5 years (the investor wants to sell the company in 5 years time). Engineering is in the way, accounting books need to look much much better much sooner for the eventual profit. Only sales tactics work here.
I see ralted pattern elsewhere, in tools I have the misfortune to use (SaaS and other subscription based products). Shameless self-promotions (cross-sale) distact your focus all the time, 'features' good for the assumed 'cutting-edge' image of the organization, privacy offensive practices (data for running sales campaigns), 'offerings' that help you with the ideas they force on you for some sizeable extra cost.
It will not end well. Takes long time to fail, but without valuable features and engineering there will be no value left for the users to buy eventually. No user wants top notch marketing, licensing, and sales strategy for the benefit of the organization.
On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase in two kinds of posts: 1) That’s it, I’ve had it, windows is dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a distro. 2) I’d love to get off window and move to Linux but I can’t because it doesn’t have an app that works identically to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.
I hate to sound like an apologist but it seems unfair to me to lump MS and Apple into the same bucket here.
Yes, Apple has a 'walled garden' to an extent, but I've never once worried about MacOS serving me an ad from a third party, and their privacy controls are top notch and seem to get better as advertisers attack methods get more sophisticated.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to jump through a few hoops to get an unsigned app installed, and each time it's been relatively painless.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).
lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.
A single product meant for all the users will inevitably be a poor fit for most of them. We need more variety of products for the different segments of the market. Alternatively we need more knobs to tune things to user needs. One promise of AI is enabling folks to personalize product experiences, but so far it's all been surface level.
I think the desktop Linux ecosystem is an example of something healthier, but it goes too far in the other direction. There are too many options to choose from that it's hard to find the one for your needs.
I don't think "care" is the right word here at all. We simply don't have options.
This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition, but competition eventually leads to winners that then consolidate their positions and we end up with no real choices.
You're telling me people would pick a worse OS because they don't care even if they had real options? I don't believe that for a second.
Right, and even when there are options that doesn't mean you actually get to choose what you want for all things you care about, e.g. there might be option A with feature a (e.g. no ads) and option B with feature b (e.g. no vendor lock in) but none with both a and b - so you only really get a choice for the things you care most about. Which is effectively why gradual enshittification is effective: Most users will put up with minor anti-features rather than jump to a different platform that will require new programs and/or relearning.
> This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition
The fact that governments allow Microsoft to abuse its position to force OEMs to install Windows is the biggest problem. This would never happen in a market where regulation ensures healthy competition.
That version of capitalism sailed 40 years ago in the USA, antitrust enforcement has slowly disappeared which creates a race to the bottom for other countries who would like their companies to compete against USA's companies. If they enforce antitrust then the behemoths created in the USA by absorbing competitors without antitrust enforcement can eat their lunch, even though it's better for consumers.
Unfortunately this also allowed the USA to have companies so large that they basically control the government, changing this now will require massive political will and a political body untethered from corporate interests. I really don't see that happening in the USA, it's been thoroughly captured after so many years driving on that path.
I totally agree. There seems to be absolutely zero focus on Glass Steagall or Citizens United so I can't see how this actually happens without political revolt at this point.
Yes, the neo-liberal economy we've ended up with has drifted quite far from well-regulated Capitalism. I'd still argue that we owe a lot of our rights to hard-fought socialist policy though.
Sometimes companies will make more money by refusing to give consumers what they want. Collusion is also extremely profitable. A competitor that isn't interested in playing along can be bought out, but once shareholders get involved they're going to insist on screwing over their customers just like everyone else does anyway because they'd be leaving a huge pile of cash on the table otherwise and short term profits are all shareholders care about.
"by refusing to give consumers what they want." in practice consumers don't really want that, that much. The companies do similar things due to the similar ways consumers react to them. That's the point of this rely chain.
There are lots of things consumers want. They'd love a cell phone that didn't spy on them, they want a smart TV that isn't full of ads, they want an ink jet printer that doesn't refuse to print when there's still ink available. These aren't huge asks but because subjecting customers to them make companies money it's difficult, if not impossible to avoid.
What makes you think a competitor that "plays fair" can compete with a competitor that takes advantage of the system and extracts as much value as they can?
That argument doesn't really hold when the barriers of entry are so high. Believing that one of the biggest tech firms in the world is doing something undesirable and having a better idea that many people would in fact pay for is not the same as having the resources to become a unicorn with a huge global customer base that can practically implement that idea.
Plus, specifically for Microsoft, competing doesn't mean an alternative to Windows. It means an alternative to the entire enterprise stack, especially Office & M365.
Google hasn't enticed the big entrenched MS orgs to move over to Workspace, so if Google can't how can a smaller startup ever hope to accomplish that in the face of these behemoths that can just outlast them in a race to the bottom until they are insolvent or get bought by said behemoths?
Microsoft doesn't just sell an OS, or some services, they sell "IT in a box"
This is about markets. It has nothing to do with capitalism. And in fact, it is usually _because_ of healthy competition that this type of enshittification happens everywhere because quality is hard to compare for the buyers and so the sellers are forced to compete on cost.
How the hell can healthy competition breed enshittification? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Now tell me how that competition enshittified eating at restaurants?
For me, nothing stands out. If a restaurant charges nonsense fees, under-staffs to increase profits, reduce portions with the same value, etc. I can simply go to another one. Restaurants that enshittify will almost inevitably close.
But if we look at a closely related industry like the food delivery apps, we see the same exact signs of enshittification we see on the tech world due to monopolies (or oligopolies to be more exact) like:
- Increased/hidden fees
- Increased delivery times
- Crappy apps with ads everywhere
- Ineffective review systems
- Pay-to-win search
- Dynamic pricing
They can get away with it because realistically, you don't have any other options. The cost to entry might not be that high but the network effect all but prohibits competition.
> Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Yes, and you correctly point out: On the average restaurant visit, nothing stands out. A good restaurant only needs to provide not-terrible food and not-terrible service to be almost indistinguishable from all others. Quality of a restaurant visit is hard to measure and compare. Price is easy to measure. Thus, the rational consumer will prefer the cheaper option (and even at the same price, a restaurant with lower costs will be more profitable, thus expand more easily).
The same thing happens on Amazon and other market places: When it is difficult to compare quality, price always wins out. Some products are interchangeable with well defined specs, like a 16GB RAM stick is obviously twice as good as 8GB RAM and so it can be twice as expensive and still sell. But when I'm looking for a new light for my bicycle there are no standardized specs to compare. All the product descriptions and pictures are exaggerated. I have no reliable information to tell if the lamp that is twice as expensive is really twice as good (and from personal experience: they never are), so I'm buying the cheapest one cause I expect all of the products to be equally crappy no matter the price.
It’s an option issue, I use an extremely modified version of windows, and same one for the last 5 years I think with the updates, local accounts, no ads, no telemetry, tweaks etc. I still don’t like tons of things about windows but compared to Linux desktops it’s heaven (for me). Don’t even get me started on macOS desktop experience it’s a fucking miserable (again for my personal taste).
A lot of windows UI design decisions are pretty good. They mess it up now and then like windows 8 (tablet design mess) disaster, especially now with WSL 2.0, it delivers everything I need.
Do I still hate it , yes for the reasons explained in this article and other stupid designed features like search index, windows defender , mix of legacy and new dialogs, for the shitty design of powershell and then the mess of mixed shells, terminal etc.
List goes on, but comparatively I’ll pick windows desktop over anything out there at the moment. It’s a personal choice but I assume majority of windows user feel this way (or cannot afford macOS :))
I've noticed recently that my Windows 11 start menu isn't a 50% gray empty blob anymore. I always disable "recommended apps" (eg. ad supported app suggestions), so 50% of the space in my start menu was unused, yet it was still there of course. Kind of refreshing to have a somewhat normal looking start menu again with something as revolutionary as a list of apps right when you open it. Let's see how long it takes before they mess it up again.
Speaking only for myself, this sort of behavior is a great way to break the Trust Thermocline [1]. The point where I am so frustrated, so fed up, so expectant that said company will abuse me again, that I refuse to do business with them at all, under any circumstances, no matter if it is inconvenient to avoid them or not.
Exactly. This behavior is blindly driving to "line go up" without realizing they just dug their own grave. 2025 was a series of existential missteps for Microsoft. This is a historic moment. These suits would rather die than try to build trust.
The underlying philosophy for these companies seem to be "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Some of us are done forgiving, but I am not sure there are enough of us to reverse this cultural trend.
A view from my small corner on the inside: taste isn't merely not incentivized, it's actively disincentivized. It's not selected for during the interview process, if you demonstrate a little of it nobody cares, if you demonstrate too much of it you clash with everyone else's priorities which quickly becomes career limiting. So people willing to fight for taste never advance.
This isn't some nefarious plot to screw over users. Taste is not prioritized because nobody has it and thus can't recognize it. Can't value something you don't even recognize. This is orthogonal to talent btw. Lots of people there who are insanely good at what they do, who produce the most hideous API specs you've ever seen, as one example.
A much more mundane (and almost certainly true) explanation is that people who put all that crap in legitimately thought it's a good idea. Taste is its own thing and it's just not in Microsoft's DNA.
That's how the world works for everything: software, politics, social stuff (good or bad), war, etc. People are bad at judging gradual/slow changes but when you push a bit too far, you have already gained so much that you can usually just say sorry and move on
Too late now. Multiple people having anything to say when choosing hardware and software, including me, will no longer advise or approve buying windows machine or using windows in general.
This is not general. This is true only on markets which are full regarding available customers, and there is no foreseeable growth.
What we can see in IT in the past 10-15 years (especially after around 2015) is the slow progress towards this state from a rich and competitive (and personally I think a way more fun) one.
I worked for dying companies (e.g. Ericsson), for slowly moving ones (e.g. Santander), and for several now dead startups, and what happened with Google, Microsoft, etc is that they slowly moving from the "startup" market - there is still available non conquered market segments - to the dying, slowly moving one - where there are a few large players, and it's not possible to grow in any meaningful way with your own skills. The only difference now compared to the decades until the 90s is that antitrust checks and balances are dead, and they can artificially inflate their own power, which haven't happened in this scale for at least 100 years. And it caused world shattering problems back then, and it will now too.
I would leave this field happily, even when I'm exceptionally good in it, because it's more and more disgusting. Only if there would be any good alternatives, which wouldn't require me to loose at least a decade of my life. But unfortunately, the balance is way more fucked up to easily change my lifestyle at this point. And it will be just worse than this.
I think private interests should not run what is effectively public infrastructure, like Windows. Or, put another way, infrastructure of national importance should be publicly controlled and governed with transparency and public interests in mind. Either that, or true capitalist competition has to be reenabled aggressively: forbid walled gardens, split up the Googles, etc. This centralization of public utility and power in the hands of private individuals, coupled with an uncompetitive market, is nonsensical. Competition or nationalization.
Windows is not public infrastructure. If the government's reliance on it has reached the level of "national importance", then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not Windows' ownership.
Public infrastructure should be built on open-source, period.
Why is Windows not public infrastructure? Because it's privately owned, or because it's not relevant to enough of the public? I argue that it is public in function. My thinking matches yours as regards OSS.
The government haven't yet mandated you use windows. Yet. It will be soon, like with androids and iphones, for user identification so the government knows who sends every network packet.
This is an interesting point when the question is "how do I build a Windows app?" and a decision needs to be made. React is definitely one of the options that some consider when this question arises.
I think you miss the more common reasoning though. This starts with "can we build a Windows app?" The answer to that was "no" for many more people until relatively recently. The .NET Framework wasn't as available by default until the second half of the 2000s which caused some Windows app devs to hold off beyond the performance reasons and WinForms vs WPF. Electron and React go hand-in-hand here as they made a (crappy) Windows app easy.
What I feel popularized this was the webview approach on mobile. In 2010, there were a ton of frameworks popping up for hybrid mobile development. This was carried forward to desktop although some of us had been embedding IE webviews much earlier. This let people say "yes" and it went from one thing to the next with diversions into React Native.
I recently began developing an app for Xbox Series X/S. The only framework that will work is UWP. When you look at the UWP docs, this is at the top of the page highlighted "If you are starting to develop Windows apps, we recommend you consider using the Windows App SDK, and WinUI rather than UWP. Although still supported, UWP is not under active development. Please see Start developing Windows apps for more information."
So no, React is a (poor) solution, not the problem. The problem is Windows can't nail down a solid SDK for it's platforms.
I too would absolutely blame a plumber for trying to fix my leaking pipes with a screwdriver instead of e.g. a solder patch. Not everything is a screw, not even in the developing world.
We can blame both. If my repair bill was higher because the mechanic chose to use a ridiculous electric screwdriver that used tons of power to achieve what a normal screwdriver can and stripped the screws in the process then I'd also be upset with both the mechanic and the ridiculously inefficient tool.
So React, the most popular front-end library and used my hundreds of thousands of successful apps, is the ridiculous electric screwdriver? See how weird that sounds and makes it obvious you guys can't give an honest assessment?
React is a javascript library. Javascript needs its own runtime. Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and save having to run an entire javascript runtime for no reason?
Only someone who has not tried to write stuff in "native windows" would ask this question. If you want a real answer, go try and develop a Windows native application real quick. I'll wait...
I would hope that the windows developers who are working on the windows shell would know how to write a windows native application in C. If it's that bad, they should improve the API, not just write it all in react instead
I have no issue with user-facing applications doing whatever they want, electron apps bundle an entire chromium to do their thing, but there's a win32 and win64 api in C for a reason, to make OS level stuff fast
Using an entire javascript runtime and framework to make your OS start menu is using a ridiculous overpowered electric screwdriver that strips heads. Using native windows controls is using a proper manual screwdriver that just works
Its popularity or success in other apps has nothing to with the windows situation.
Other apps are successful despite being slow and bloated, since performance isn’t a primary concern of users. In contrast it’s critical for OS internals like the start menu, so a javascript runtime and framework is just the wrong tool for the job.
"Shit tastes great! Millions of flies can't be wrong!" ;)
React only makes sense as a layer on top of the browser DOM, because the DOM itself cannot be fixed without rewriting it from scratch, so making it usable for non-trivial UI needs to happen in the 'framework layer'.
But without the DOM as the thing that needs fixing and the restrictions of the single-threaded browser-event-loop, the React programming model simply doesn't make a lot of sense. Using the "React-paradigm" outside the browser (e.g. SwiftUI, React Native) is pure cargo-culting, it only makes sense for onboarding web-devs who are already familar with React - but makes it harder to create UIs for anybody else.
The actual problem in the context of Win11 is of course that Microsoft doesn't have any sort of longterm strategy for Windows system APIs (not just UI frameworks). The only long-term-stable API is Win32.
Seen in the context of the thread, with the both of you never addressing the actual problem at hand but instead reflexively and vigorously defending React against an alleged attack, I'm sorry to say this reads like an admission.
Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.
This is what the Steamdeck is. But it took an absolutely massive amount of work over a decade from valve just to get gaming working. No laptop manufacturer could afford to do the same for fixing wine for desktop software since they aren’t getting a cut of the software sales like valve does.
How long would it take for some MBA to come there and say hey if we install this full of crap we could make multiple euros per unit... And then fill it with crap, spying and other things?
Purely hypothetical, hasn't happened yet. The reason is that Linux system vendors are lead and staffed by people who are idealistic like the average Linux system customer. They know their clientele, they know it would be bad for business.
Good luck getting the average person through the setup process
AI is part of the problem with what MS has shoved in to things but it may be part of what can help with the underlying issue of this behavior by corporations.
The average user increasingly will not need to be walked through in certain ways, they’ll only have to be aware something, some way, is possible. Because we are most of usthe average, meaning outsider to knowledge and understanding of things their functioning on a computer. I can strip out tired windows behavior to some extent and certainly stand up a Linux desktop. But I didn’t know how to easily manage retrieval of data from an old disc image that refused to mount. But I knew it was there and not impossible so I asked Claude. A one shot prompt that a few minutes later had Claude reading raw bytes in someway and finding the location of a few files I needed.
So there is potential for AI to fill some gaps in this way and make some things easier and more in reach of average users. It’s potential only though, so continuing to work and ensure open models remain a thing, it’s important. Just like the Internet enabled a lot of things previously out of reach of people. And yeah, that was not an un mixed blessing with the rest, so all the more reason to move forward thoughtfully.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
Yes, when there isn’t real competition. And that’s in part due to a long history of anti competitive practices but also simply because Microsoft is too big and should be broken up.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate
I get the impression that many companies are working through this with AI-assisted coding.
How bad can the product get before the revenue loss is greater than money saved by firing programmers and deploying AI slop?
For products like Windows and Office,
the subscription model and enterprise account revenue provides a huge cushion for decreasing quality before they even have to apologize and roll back.
One point that wasn't mentioned is that we've been through this cycle many times before with Microsoft, and we will again.
It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft went "all in" on Windows for developers and power users. WSL was drastically improved, developer tools were revamped and open sourced. The press adored the "new" Microsoft. Many developers moved over to Windows because they "got the best of both worlds".
And then, they just went back to the same old shit. The thing is, the shit phase of this cycle lasts longer than the non-shit phases.
This next phase is just words, so far. But, mind you, even if Microsoft does produce releases to back up those words, they'll be back to their same old shit within a year or two, once again.
And the whole process will repeat.
PS: And regardless of this supposed change of direction, if you listen to recent statements from Satya and other senior leadership, they are still spewing the same platitudes about agentic computing and software. So what's really going to change long-term?
I remember being excited about Edge, I even started using it because it was fast and had a couple of built-in features I liked. It was a big improvement over the old IE, it felt like Microsoft was going the right direction, but then they kept using dark patterns to change my default search engine to Bing.
Now you have "rounded edges" in Edge that add a content area limiting margins to all sides. Also, they took an open source browser and do not provide the source for Edge. So much for love of open source.
Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.
But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.
Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.
We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory.
Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.
Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.
> Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows
I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.
SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.
I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.
> giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
Prior to SharePoint 2013, Microsoft used sparse columns. It made for massive tables and was poor design.
Moving to XML blobs for user-defined schemas was the correct choice. The table schema became significantly smaller and user-defined schemas (for Lists/Libraries) could become much more complex.
I don't think so. The web version is mostly incompatible with the Windows or Mac desktop versions.
Have you compared the UI of Word/Powerpoint/Excel with alternatives like Apple Pages/Keynote/Numbers or Google Docs/Sheets? For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons, abysmal font rendering and insane defaults.
> For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons
In the case of Office I actually consider it a strength. Office has to take into account a large number of use cases, most people will use only a fraction of what is available, but not everyone use the same fraction. So that "unrelated button" may be someone else's essential feature. The "insane defaults" are what people are used to. I don't know about Apple, but I tend to get to the limits of Google Docs/Sheets rather quickly. It may cover 99% of my needs, but Office gives me the missing 1%.
That's for the traditional Office Microsoft are sabotaging, the web versions are only a shadow of it, and by most points worse than the Google suite, and that's the problem.
As for font rendering, I am sure that Apple is ahead, it has always been their strength. Microsoft may be the king of the office, but when it comes to art and creative work, Apple has always been on top.
The font rendering is a dealbreaker for me. I have to use Word periodically for exchanging files with customers where we have zero say in the mechanism. That is, when they say "here's our version of the contract for review before we give you $$$", and it's in Word that doesn't open cleanly in something better like Pages or Google Docs (yeah, I said it and I meant it), then Word it is.
I can't stand using it a moment longer than I have to, and never, ever use it for anything other than this kind of legacy doc compatibility situation. The font rendering is so, so bad that I just can't look at it. If MS ever cared to fix it then I bet that could move their Mac adoption by at least a few percent, which would work out to a nice chunk of change at their scale. But alas, no. We get stuck with something that looks like they took a photo of an LCD calculator screen and downscaled it.
Windows used to exist in a competitive environment where they had to fight to remain relevant. For a long time now they have become complacent, no matter how many ads, product placements, and user abusive features they push, people will tolerate it.
The situation has only just changed now that Apple and Valve are getting close to threatening the Windows monopoly.
I do not think so. The Windows - OS/2 war was a big fight that Microsoft won on merits. Windows 95 was revolutionary at the time, folks queued at the malls on the release day to get it, bugs and all.
They fought the compiler wars with real engineering, giving Borland a run for the money. Different people have different opinions about Visual Studio. As a Linux user since 0.9 I did not like its architecture and focus on GUI at the expense of everything else, but I still saw it as a consistent framework done by excellent engineers. And so on.
On the desktop, I don't believe Microsoft has had significant competition for quite some time, likely back to Windows 95. In the server space, NT fought really hard against the UNIX giants of the time.
Frankly I don't know why we still have laptops. Honestly I think my mobile with a usbc base for screen and usb would perfectly work in a hardware pov. I don't know if Android would work, and besides of that a small fixed pc for whatever needs power.
because phones are not general computing devices, and really shouldn't be. They are too important to modern society to be unlocked for their full potential.
That said, I doubt the average person on a laptop even needs a general computing device, so your point does make sense. Though, is carrying around a screen and a keyboard and cable any better than carrying a laptop?
I could see an argument of it being cheaper, but that would take years, possibly decades, of multiple competitors in the space for the market to make that true.
Now, if we could have a decent folding keyboard and monitor that fit into the same case as your phone, that would be a game changer, but I don't think anyone is risking the investment to develop that.
People want a full-size keyboard. Adding a couple of millimetres underneath that keyboard allows you to put a whole computer in there.
We have laptops because it makes sense. Look at Apple's Macbook Neo. The tiny logic board on that computer is the least of Apple's worries. The most expensive components are the display and case. Why not charge 100 bucks more and not have to worry about this thing being a phone accessory?
The only way it would make sense to use your phone is if the keyboard and monitor can fold up so small that they can attach to the phone and still fit in your pocket. Otherwise, just using a laptop is going to be better every time.
It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products).
Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.
Microsoft has indeed lost their way with Microsoft, but not in the sense that they became evil ghouls. They've always been evil ghouls. No, what's happened is that Windows became a minor part of Microsoft's profits. The whole company is not focused on Windows the way Apple is with the iPhone.
The higher ups no longer care about Windows as a product itself. They only care about Windows as a storefront to their other efforts (OneDrive, Office, Copilot, etc.)
I mean, at least their software used to be pretty good. The Windows NT kernel is arguably a better design than Linux. I complain about NTFS now, but thirty years ago it was better than most other filesystems. And Windows NT at least didn't jam a billion ads down your throat.
Granted, MS has always been a pretty evil anti-competitive company, so I'm not trying to sanitize them much here.
I'd read "Microsoft lost their way" as a description of how the speaker's worldview has changed, as they've gained experience and perspective.
Microsoft is often good to their customers. Generally in situations where badness has a poor RoI, or they're trying to lure you deeper into their clutches.
That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend that decision.
In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's about 14/user/month.
At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly cost for something that is comparable to something you can get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and intuitive it is.
The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive with it, than the free version?"
The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as well.
Not 'But it costs $X million!'.
Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day?
Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their monitors.
This is exactly right. You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month, then make it harder to do their job to save $14? That's idiocy.
The person responsible for picking our work laptops asked me for advice selecting our new Macs since our old model was being replaced:
"Do we really need to spend an extra $1000 for 64GB of RAM instead of 24GB?"
"That'd save us $300 per year, or about a dollar a day, over the deprecation schedule, and it'd make our devs slower. We spend more than this to have lunch catered."
"You know... good point. 64GB it is, then."
And that's how we opted for beefy machines on this hardware cycle. The guy I talked to is extremely smart and competent, but just hadn't looked at it from that angle. Once he saw it, he instantly bought in. There are dumb ways to save money with massive negative ROI, and cheaping out on basic equipment and resources is one of them.
I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.
> I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.
I, living in Germany, rather wonder myself quite often why US-American tech startups don't act much more frugally: this would give them so much more leeway/runway to make their startups succeed.
Half of the time it's startups subsidizing each other in a circle to have users. Like if you're a VC, you "force" your companies to use tools made by your other companies. So everyone will use the chat app made by one company the VC owns, the CRM software, all the different SaaSes etc. So it's just money moving in a circle, but then all the apps get to claim good sales and user numbers.
A big part of it is that if you're in a very competitive realm, where most of the startups you hear about are working, then every day counts. If you can spend $1M to develop a product in a year or $2M to develop it in 6 months, that extra million gives you a 6 month head start in sales, revenue growth, and publicitity. Depending on the numbers involved, that frugality could cost huge amounts of money overall.
Note that you don't hear so much about the many, many startups doing slow growth things in less glamorous fields. I know a few companies making agricultural products for small farmers. Yes, frugality makes perfect sense for them. They're not going to have a hockey stick growth curve where they go from $0 to $10M to $1B over the course of 2 years. Their revenue graph will look more like a traditional manufacturer. They're doing things the way you describe, but they're not all over tech and non-tech news sites.
So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There must be massive discounts above certain threshold.
yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.
How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise.
And if you put it to a vote, "would you rather upgrade from Teams to Slack for $9 per month, or get $9 of taxable income more per month?", I think there's a very good chance you'd be switching that week.
(I don't love Slack by any means. Still, I'd pay $9/mo out of my own pocket not to use Teams.)
It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a winner takes all Ferengi style system.
Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365 subscription is net positive for the bean counters.
18€ a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat application seems absolutely insane.
Define absurdly expensive here. I can probably guarantee that for small to medium sized business paying Slack or Microsoft for chat software is miles cheaper than self hosting it yourself.
My Google-Fu says Slack costs $18.00 /user/mo for their Business+ subscription plan. That's still relative peanuts compared to the yearly salary, let's say 60k/year, of developer you hire to self-host and maintain an on-prem Matrix/Jitsi instance with all the equivalent bells and whistles of Slack/Teams, but guess what, even then your clients/partner will send you MS Teams invites for calls, so you still have to pay for it anyway.
Then isn't it easier if you just fork out the cash for Teams so you can focus on your product instead?
Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks.
We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.
Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.
Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent.
XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.
Generally Windows NT line to Windows 2000-7 was pretty decent. Even Vista once Service Pack 1 came out was pretty decent. Vista Service Pack 2 is basically Windows 7. Win 8 and everything after has been garbage.
Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been wonky, but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.
They had a "last release in the series was best pattern" with Win 3.11 / NT, Win 98 SE / 2K and XP SP2 (which merged the consumer and business tracks).
After that, it's been strictly downhill. 7's additions vs XP are purely hostile to the end user, including escrowed disk encryption and DRM. 8 was the beginning of the pivot to mandatory cloud. 10 added mandatory telemetry and ads. 11 added nonsensical AI crapware, and turned the ads to 11.
> Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been wonky, but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.
Don't worship Windows 8/8.1.
It also introduced WinRT, an API that gave the programmers a lot less freedom; the roadmap was clear: applications should from now on be developed for the WinRT API, and only be distributed via an app store (Windows Store). The old WinAPI shall be legacy, and will only be provided as long as Microsoft is willing to.
Windows 8's ARM version (Windows RT) was incredibly locked-down; here applications could only be installed via an app store (Windows Store). It was clear that Microsoft had similar plans for the x86 version.
Actually, because of programmers' and users outcry regarding this, Microsoft pedaled back in this regard with Windows 10 (but started introducing a lot more telemetry).
Also, Windows 8 was the Windows version that started the tight integration of the local user account and the Microsoft account. Windows 8 and 8.1 were the first versions of Windows for which the "How can I avoid setting up a Microsoft account when installing Windows?" tutorials started.
No, Win8 was all about the Metro/RT nonsense, the attempt to convert Windows into a touch-centric locked-down App Store platform.
While a fair bit of that lived on in 10, it was far less obnoxious. Although they still managed to break things like Sticky Notes in the process of converting them to 'store apps'
Completely agree with your timeline and rating, 2000 was the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with, before it was such a bad shitshow that MS-DOS 6.22 seemed like coming from another planet.
Hated 10, was forced to it basically only due to gaming, a common assholish trick MS uses whenever it can. But when looking from 11 perspective, 10 was fine compared to that heap of disorganized badly designed crap.
Yet again time to be ashamed to work for MS, this time its sticking around like tar spit on a white shirt.
Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom?
The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.
I haven't had that many issues on Windows "native" client. So I really don't get what the critical issue is... To me it has long looked like good enough.
Teams if you only use it for meetings is great, truly. It's easy and simple. Messages in the attached chat rooms of recurring meetings is really convenient. DMs work seamlessly and sort in between those meeting chats.
The problem is that the "teams" in teams are a cobbled mess that works like a combination of forums posts and chat rooms. If you have coworkers who really like that functionality, you're forced to interact with the garbage underbelly of the app. My opinion of Teams shifted drastically when we got a new PM (former MS employee) who started putting things there, making them hard to keep track of.
Well I genuinely like Teams. Being forced to work on a mix of Zoom & teams in my new work, I have found an appreciation of using M365 connected tools - Outlook,claendar, teams, sharepoint, copilot etc just work very well together for me.
Teams is not that bad if you are using Office and OneDrive anyway, as it integrates well with those.
Most of my team members are using different named chats for discussion instead of channels, which are used for more important notices. Somehow it works, and our channels on slack were also basically chats anyway.
My only gripe is that Linux does not have a “native” client anymore and the web client is full of bugs on Firefox. But it’s Microsoft, what can you expect. It’s not that bad except for memory consumption on other platforms.
I use Firefox on Mac when I'm stuck in a Teams meeting. The native client attendees invariably have more problems than I do with connections, authentication, forced updates mid-meeting, etc.
I'm guessing the native client has been going downhill, based on frequency of issues people report. I hope they kind of forgot about the web client, and won't enshittify it as quickly.
I don't like either very much. Both Teams and Zoom try to stay resident after you're done. I use both from the browser now because they are both abusive.
No but it’s hard to get excited about two different flavours of shit sandwich. Teams is terrible piece of software no doubt but slack is worse, marginally
I strongly disagree, and not because of the "Microsoft is associated with bad things and that's a form of violence" points other people mentioned.
The end result of treating domestic and sexual abuse like Serious Important Subjects that people should only talk about in a Serious Respectful Tone isn't that people become more mindful of abuse dynamics, it's that they avoid bringing up the subject at all.
In practice, yes, abusive practices of corporations echo abusive practices of violent partners, and the parallel is worth highlighting. Bringing up the fact that both of them will use grand gestures to stop you from questioning their pattern of behavior isn't disrespectful, it's useful information.
If anything, abuse victims should hear that message more often.
The underlying point about power imbalance and gradual normalization of bad behavior is fair, but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
> but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
Twitter literally runs CSAM-as-a-service.
While Microsoft is not quite that evil, building the North Korean computer surveillance system with "Recall" comes pretty close. Other examples include things like Facebook's regular doxxing of it's users with their real name policy.
It's a crass comparison, but not unreasonable on both sides. Abuse goes beyond just physical violence, and the practices of these tech companies really do match those other kinds of abuse. The other half is that software has eaten the world, and these changes really do affect people's lives.
> but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
It's imperfect. We have way more choices in domestic partners than we do with operating systems but I think there are a lot of similarities though too. User-hostile software like Windows is intentionally designed to develop dependence and learned helplessness in users. Windows will gaslight you. Microsoft will victim blame. Many shared tactics. It's a fair comparison to make.
One more similarity is how hard it seems to be to break up with an abusive partner: when I saw the "Windows anounces Recall - Linux increases its Steam market share by 25%" meme, I checked under https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/, and yes, in May 2024 it went up - from 1.9% to 2.32%. But in February 2025, it was back down to 1.45%. It has rebounded since, to 3.38% in January this year, but dropped to 2.23% in February. Not sure where these big fluctuations come from - maybe Linux gamers don't really play that often, so they only log on to Steam sporadically?!
I disagree. Microsoft's actions have real world consequences, increasingly including violence. They're building a surveillance machine that is already being used like organizations such as ICE, and that's not even the worst of it. Look at how they are trying to tip the balance of power from employees to employers with telemetry in Windows 11, Office 365, LinkedIn and GitHub.
Like domestic abusers, things only expand and escalate from here.
The title is supposed to be provocative and hyperbolic. Much of what is provocative and hyperbolic could be considered to be in poor taste, that is the entire point.
The guy is an ex-Darknet Vendor and regularly interacts still with people that build ransomware, hack the US government, sell online drugs and he is quite pleasant compared to these people.
> The guy is an ex-Darknet Vendor and regularly interacts still with people that build ransomware, hack the US government, sell online drugs and he is quite pleasant compared to these people.
It’s _almost_ as if we don’t use “people that build ransomware, hack the US government, sell online drugs” as a baseline for “pleasant”.
The point I was making that the norms for many of us isn't this behaviour of everyone is walking on eggshells. I find it infuriating that people will get bent out shape if they hear the truth. I prefer it when people talk plainly and speak how they feel. He is unfront and honest, which I appreciate much more than a snake in the grass (which is how many people behave in spaces where language and behaviour is tightly controlled).
I find it honestly ridiculous that people are complaining about provocative & hyperbolic title, to the point where I believe they are concern trolling.
I also appreciate the callout but don’t believe it’s in bad taste. There are enough analogs, and it makes you question the type of people who run the companies and make the decisions. In MSFTs case, Bill Gates was an associate with a known pedophile and likely an abuser himself.
I completely understand it being triggering but shying away from it because of that protects perpetrators. A lot of executive circles are filled with abusive freaks and their decision making reflects that.
A article mapping out those connections would be a good thing to do. That’s not what this article is, though. This is about Microsoft having poor quality software and a business model that is adversarial to their customers.
He is someone that cares about operation and information security. Modern Consumer operating systems basically throw all of that out of the window. On top of that he hate Microsoft.
Yeah, fully agree. The idea domestic abusers care about flowers is ludicrous. They’re violent and mostly remorseless about it. Anyone who dealt with it personally would chuck the flowers in the bin.
While I have many grievances with Windows 11, I am particularly upset about the taskbar. Back in Windows 10, I used a double-height taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. I forget the name of the specific setting, but all windows would appear as their own item, and, the taskbar would ensure that all items retained the same width.
The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get past not being able to at least make a double height taskbar. But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10 also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would resize all existing items to the same dimension.
This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running Windows 10.
Yes, it seems like UI designers only solve the basic use case: beginner user with 3 apps open on a 14" laptop, each full screen, or tiled side-by-side.
I imagine them presenting their design on a static PowerPoint slide, and upper-management says "beautiful", and they move on to CoPilot features, never looking back.
The Teams... team... took several years to let us pop out chats to their own windows. The minimum size of the window was almost half my screen for a long time, which was annoying since it had a mobile app and my phone is way smaller.
Someone would send you a document and it took over the entire Teams window. You had to exit it in order to chat with the person about the document. The concept of having more than one 'thing' on screen at the time was completely missing. My only explanation was that the developers had never used a computer before.
I am particularly needy when it comes to the taskbar. I installed a few mods:
* Windhawk - can tweak taskbar with extensions similiar to gnome tweaks imo (free)
* DisplayFusion - qol for multi monitor setups (paid)
I would give it a try if these two applications help you, honestly there's just so many settings to explore -- but afaik static width was something I needed and got done through Windhawk.
It's so mind-boggling that they have control over the default browser home page and the news feed on everyone's taskbar and they choose to show gossip and one weird trick that doctors hate. Don't they feel embarrassed that they pollute their brand like this? Is the revenue from the clicks really worth it, or do they just not care?
While crazy to us, I bet we're in the minority. Average computer user might actually like it or at worse (to MSFT) not even notice it. Their web experience is bombarded with "1 weird trick" ads everywhere.
I don't think it's about revenue from clicks; they probably believe that it is what customers want, because those customers click on it. That surely means that they want it.
No worries, this is just how manipulative relationships work: they always aim for unidirectional communication.
You're obliged to consume the most important news from the most important entity on the planet Earth (Microsoft/Facebook/X/...), eat piles of informational crap that get dumped onto you, waste you emotional energy on processing the whole thing, participate in drama and show your admiration. Why? Because you're very convenient when in this state, you're mendable and coercible for whatever action the entity wants you to do without saying it directly.
But when it's time to listen to you and your concerns - surprise-surprise, nobody's home. It's one way only, see you next time, maybe.
P.S. Forcefully installing an attention-pollutve app like News in the Start Menu is nothing less than a way to control you. And for an insatiable ego, the sense of control is everything. This is why it keeps coming back, again and again, as if it's a lucky reoccurring coincidence. A Windows Update repairs the system? Yes, plus it repairs the system of control. Security patches are very convenient vehicle for that - once you eat it, you'll be served special dishes you never asked for.
Use this https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 or something similar, unfortunately without this level of tweaking it will be a shit show, not deeply modified windows feels like browsing the internet without an ad blocker.
I presume that it's a difference between Windows OS editions. I turned it off too, but it wasn't as easy as one click, I had to use Group Policies to decrapify the adjacent aspects of the system. Group policies are not available in Windows Home edition, for example.
I just went into the settings for the widgets, turned off the "Start" or "News" experience or whatever it is and it's never come back. Just using the toggle it offers in settings. While I was at it I went into the taskbar settings and just turned off the widgets altogether, never came back. I wonder if sometimes we just assume the worst and resort first to "hack" ways to disable some of these things and when a new update comes along from your company or whoever, it gets re-enabled. Instead of just using the built-in functionality for turning things off.
No no you don't understand. "Here's a picture of some gross toenails" is the sincere best most valuable advertisement that the fourth most valuable company in the united states is capable of delivering. If anything better existed, they would be using it.
As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows platform today.
- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;
- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.
- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.
- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements.
But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
Don't forget general familiarity. I don't know about today, but Apple was once very big on giving large discounts to education specifically for the purpose of getting students familiar with their machines.
Excel is the biggest blocker for my dad, and why I keep losing the argument to get my parents to move to Linux or Mac.
Pretty much all their other stuff is stuff that either works fine on Linux or is just in the browser anyway, but the only thing that I don't really have a rebuttal to is when my dad points out that he uses the full-fat excel and a lot of the more modern features.
I would so rather they move to Linux, and just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it. Annoying since I'm still expected to play tech support for them and Microsoft's recovery tools do not work, and as far as I can tell have literally never worked for anyone in human history, and I'm not entirely convinced that the people at Microsoft have ever tested them.
> just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it
Just curious, is it about different tools / workflow / the new thing to learn (and those are valid reasons!) or are there some technical issues with for example Winboat?
They've never used Winboat (or anything Linuxey really), so it's definitely not a fault with Winboat itself.
Honestly I think they really just don't want to change and they're trying to look for ways out because they know that "I don't want to!" isn't going to fly with me if I'm expected to be tech support.
This is exactly what I do with my personal computing. I would prefer to be on linux, but a lot of people still sends me data in excel spreadsheets for processing, and lets be honest: apple hardware is fucking awesome.
The feeling of being able to work away from my desk and dont care about battery, is so goooooooood.
And I have to admit. Even if I dont like macos, my macbook with m1 and 16gb ram is probably the fastest laptop I ever own.
Excel for Mac has gotten a lot better - but I'm not surprised if it is still its own thing - with edge cases in format, macros, visual basic, linking to databases and data sources etc.
I imagine excel under wine is better than the port to Mac in some respects.
I'm honestly not sure. I'm sure my dad Googled something to use it as an excuse to not change.
As I said in a sibling comment, I think they really just don't want to change and they are looking for excuses; I suspect even if I could prove that there's absolute feature parity between the two versions they'd just find another reason.
It very depends on which part of the software is needed. SOLIDWORKS is usable on a windows VM via Parallels thanks to their GPU acceleration (it's totally unusable via Virtual Box/VMware on a Mac). Would love to hear the other thousand smaller ones. Davinci for professional video editing is a multi-platform. No idea about Mastercam.
>Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
I was thinking about this compatibility problem the other day. Usually someone moving between office suites (MSFT Office, Google Drive, LibreOffice) complains stuff broke, then they give up / drop it / work around it. I was imagining an ideal path would be to document these cases of incompatibility as bugs/issues in LibreOffice. Describe the difference and how it should work, then LibreOffice fixes their software to better match. I don't know if this already happens. Personally I avoid all office software like the plague and try to work with plain text files and vim. I just hear about these issues enough that I'm mildly invested in the situation by now.
I tried to tell a friend about WYGIWYM stuff like LaTeX, groff, and Typst the other day. He seemed more interested in "figuring out" why stuff broke when changing between office software. I tried to tell him that MSFT doesn't follow their own spec and everyone else has to reverse engineer it, resulting in implementation differences. Plus MSFT's own implementation being proprietary so it can't be easily copied. I'm not sure the weight of the situation got across to him.
Microslop is saying “I’m sorry that you’re offended” and will continue to abuse their users. All of this is a PR campaign to fix their image so that they can raise more money.
Just a guess, with Macbook Neo releasing, M$ likely got scared of mass exodus to MacOS (the average PC user can now consider a Macbook and it likely wipes the floor with all Windows laptops out there) and decided to throw in a damage control piece.
Hilariously, the MacBook neo has the same taskbar issues since it was what Microsoft copied. No one is getting replaced so I’ll guess they’ll just add some customizations to make it more Mac-like to win users back.
Unfortunately Apple is learning to be as annoying too. I don't want to upgrade to Tahoe which is inscrutable to me. Maybe remind me next year. But they pop up every week reminding me to "upgrade" even though most the problems are unfixed. They have pushed iCloud in the settings application as if it is an adboard.
Hopefully they stop but I recognize these steps from Windows slippery slope.
Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.
The reason, i opine, that so few people switch from Windows to any Unix flavor is that Windows users are waiting for the two productivity suites which make Windows at least marginally usable (cygwin and msys) to be ported to any of the Unix flavors.
Play on Lennox is just non-free wine. And no offense to the wine people, but it seems like perhaps they have hit a wall on what would be Windows 10 translation.
I bought my first x86 PC in 1994 to install Linux on. I wanted a Sun workstation but couldn't afford it.
I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like they have Stockholm Syndrome.
My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac.
The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. It's got the price of entry down to where it's now the obvious recommendation for less-technical friends/family wanting an affordable-but-nice laptop for light home/office/student use.
I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real Mac running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.
> I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real Mac running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.
Maybe, but I somewhat doubt it, for a few reasons:
- Kids like iPads for gaming/video watching, and the overhead of computer interfaces for them might discourage laptopping (understandable for littler kids; regrettable loss of tech familiarity for older ones, but true regardless).
- Parents/rough users like iPads 'cuz there aren't moving parts or gaps to get hammered and damaged, though the screen is a risk.
- Cellular iPads/huge phone-alikes are pretty popular, and the vast majority of users are unfamiliar with the idea of hooking a computer-shaped device up to cellular internet.
- iPads are easier to MDM-manage/lock down. You can do that on MacOS too, of course, but a lot of folks find it easier to regulate kid/employee/etc. use of an iPad because the management system is familiar and simpler.
- iPads feel like a big phone. That's a pretty intuitive switch for a lot of folks who either don't have keyboarded computers at all, or associate them with non-fun (work/school) computing. Silly distinction to draw, to be sure, but very significant in the minds of many users. The single-brick/touch aspect of iPads is desirable enough that a fold-out laptop isn't going to overlap with a lot of those users.
I don't think Ipads are selling well. I have an old style basic one (from 2019 I think?), and the only thing I use it for is to read articles and occasionally look at emails, for which it's perfectly adequate.
Tablets can do very little that you can't do on a phone.
Phones got larger and more capable, tablets now seem somewhat redundant. But a laptop with a keyboard and 'real OS' can still do many things that aren't practical on a tablet or phone.
Thus, the MacBook Neo. For the average user who only occasionally needs a general-purpose computer, it's powerful enough. As the geek in my friends-and-family circle, it's what I will be recommending to most of them if they ask.
If they have a budget of ~ $1000, then I'd recommend an AMD Linux laptop. For folks here, I'd recommend similar, but pave it + put Devuan or similar on it.
For low end laptops, if you can tolerate Apple's terrible window manager, rapidly declining stability, and creeping ads (they leaked expansion plans that are coming soon), then the Neo probably wins.
Mac’s are way more expensive than most people need. If anyone asked me today, I’d say buy a cheap laptop and I’ll install Linux on it for you. Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs come up. Problem solved, hundreds of dollars saved over the Mac.
Is there a full equivalent of Total Commander there? I don't mean just something with 2 panes, I mean full equivalent. Those I have seen were clunky, slow and lacked features thus completely breaking the flow. When I see folks doing something more complex in File explorer or similar stuff I rather walk away, make a tea/coffee, have a chat or two, come back to watch them hopefully progress a bit, when it would take few quick operations in TC. Its like doing java development in Notepad vs Idea, both work but man I always thought engineers craved efficiency...
That program is so powerful when used in skilled hands, it saves me tons of time every day, easily 30-60 mins compared to other colleagues doing similar tasks. Editing files directly in archives (or archives in archives), quick file comparison, tabbed panes, dir sync, ftp client, etc.... and tons of customizations of behavior and visuals, plugins ecosystem, and its freakin' fast and stable.
Another one could be Notepad++, ie mass edit of lines as cells in spreadsheet is a powerful feature.
When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.
I opened a blank document and pasted a fairly large markdown text. Converting it to word (or html) formatting is easy, there are online tools and/or any other LLM can do it. This one time I opened the Copilot willingly and was excited about getting it done with a few keystrokes: "convert to word formatting".
It generates a formatted response but cant edit the document. How stupid you have to be to integrate copilot and not allow it to update text in a text editor??!
Don't care about windows. Haven't used a windows computer in over 20 years. Happy Ubuntu user here. What bothers me is the upcoming Android restrictions. I distribute an app that none of the app stores want to touch with a 10 foot pole. That's fine -their store, their choice. But now, to distribute the app from my website I have to jump through hoops and pay their stupid fees through a credit card (at a time when I'm trying to stay anonymous because of the nature of the app). I don't know what to do.
I like Ubuntu. My only regret is having an nvidia GPU and not getting an AMD one before computing components became unaffordable. Nvidia on wayland is 100% busted and juggling DEs for gaming vs productivity work is inelegant.
No idea why anyone would buy a Windows machine over a mac unless in this day and age unless they can't afford one, Microsoft's OS dev philosophy has been trash for years.
For that matter, Linux has been better than Windows for decades.
Yes, Linux has some jankiness, I don't dispute that, but when people say that they're often smuggling in an assumption that Windows doesn't have jankiness, which is decidedly not true. People are more used to Windows and its shittiness and they forget how much bullshit they actually put up with for it.
Windows Update, for example, is awful software and if anyone who works on it is reading this, you should consider getting out of the software game because you are not good at your job and considering how consistently bad Windows Update has been for its entire existence I don't think you'd be good at other software jobs either.
Windows Update bricked my mom's laptop doing an automatic update to Windows 11, I believe because they broke some boot keys, and since Microsoft's restore and repair tools don't actually work, my parents called me in a panic because there were of course tons of irreplaceable files that they couldn't access. I had to walk them through flashing a Linux USB, walk my dad through booting off that USB, walk my dad through setting up tmate, and then I had to mount the NTFS drive and rsync the files to my personal server. Just to reiterate: I had to use Linux to save Windows because Windows' tools do not work.
If Microsoft used a filesystem that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, I could have set them up with recurring filesystem snapshots and this could have been fixed at the filesystem level. You know, like what has been readily available on Linux since like 2010 with btrfs and other Copy on Write filesystems.
To be clear, before I get a lecture, I'm aware that updates are a hard problem when you have a diverse set of hardware, but I should point out that it's not like my mom installed the OS on some arcane custom built rig, this was an OEM install on her laptop, so they don't have that excuse. Additionally, I update every Linux computer in my house literally every day, and I have never had it so thoroughly brick the boot process as I had with my mom's computer.
My elaborate point here is that Windows has lots of jank, more than Linux, but people just act like that's part of the deal, but don't extend anywhere near that same level of courtesy to Linux.
The solution for "Windows" is to use the current US derangement to convince the EU, China and even the Russians that, as a matter of national security, it's in their best interest to come to the negotiation table and create an international organization that "adopts" WineHQ[^1] and any other projects that focus on a Win32 compatibility layer. It can be financed with increased sales taxes for any PC software distributor that doesn't natively support Linux.
Even if they fix it, and that's a big if - It doesn't really mean anything when they have a ton of MBAs and product managers working internally to make it creep back in. It's going to take a decade to grow trust again and I don't think they're up to the task.
Beating is a normal English idiom. While I do sympathize with anyone suffering from abuse, I highly doubt anyone is actually suffering from use of the word.
I agree with stndef. "Flowers after beating" is a very direct evocation of physical abuse in an intimate relationship. Whether or not you think it's appropriate.
There are all kinds of language registers for communication. From formal business speak to 'locker room banter'. What is appropriate or otherwise depends entirely on the participants of the conversation. So, it depends on what kind of conversation we're trying to have.
I think this post's usage is meant deliberately to be a bit edgy, to illustrate how badly Microsoft has behaved.
An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
Personally, data point of 1, I think it's a bit distasteful, and would prefer to participate in a community that doesn't routinely use that kind of langauge.
> An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
I think you guys complaining about provocative title and not not the substance of what is said, is what people are taking issue with.
If I didn't know better, I would honestly think it is concern trolling.
> I think it's a bit distasteful, and would prefer to participate in a community that doesn't routinely use that kind of langauge.
The entire point is that it is provocative and hyperbolic to make a statement. Often to make a statement you have to act outside what is considered polite norms and ruffle the feathers.
If Sam had given this a nice polite title (as per your preference), not as many people would have taken notice of it.
I hope you can take on trust that this is a genuine, exploration of the original point about language. And FTR I have a very low opinion of MS and have had since the late 90s.
There are usually all kinds of twists and turns in a HN discussion. And it's not like we're discussing the background colour or something far off-topic, the title is a pretty noticeable part of the article. I don't think it should be verboten to discuss these things.
I agree that transgressive speech is an important tool, and tone policing is generally bad news.
> I hope you can take on trust that this is a genuine, exploration of the original point about language.
I find it hard believe that any discussion like this is genuine and I am deeply suspicious of people that complain about hyperbolic and provocative language.
Moreover, I think complaining about it like people have is here is verging on being ridiculous tbh.
Again if I didn't know better (i.e. I don't think this is happen) I would actually think it deliberate to run interference.
I don't think it's fair to expect people to autocensor based on ill-defined, circular notions of taste and appropriateness, at least not in edge cases where these notions clearly vary from person to person. If the reasoning is something like "an abuse victim might read this and feel bad" or "a stupid person might confuse social license for edginess with license for being a bad person", then that's a discussion we can have.
> An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
I don't understand how HN's news guidelines apply to a blogger writing an article on their own blog. The controversial language was found in the article. It wasn't found in the thread you're replying to.
I their point was: the comment they were replying to ("Beating is a normal English idiom") was being disingenuous.
Saying something like "the benchmarks took a beating in the new version" would be inoffensive but "flowers after the beating" is much more specifically about abuse in a relationship.
I don't think "Whether or not you think it's appropriate" was meant to say, don't worry it's fine. I think it just meant, let's not justify by pretending that it's about something different than it obviously is.
It’s actually more triggering / offensive that you brought up abuse when no one was talking about abuse. This site is for adults who understand the concept of analogies. You just wanted to bring up the topic of abuse for whatever reason. Why?
The article comes back to the abuse analogy multiple times. If you want to defend that as fine, go for it, but in no way is it a new topic that the poster here brought up.
Oh please, TFA has a title of "Flowers after the beating" - its a direct reference to domestic abuse which attempts to equate Microsofts behaviour and that of a domestic abuser.
Username checks out, but you might want to check with your mother about how she feels about this comparison.
TFA brings up abuse not stndef.
An analogy is "a thing which is comparable to something else in significant respects" and stndef is right to point out that microsoft behavior, while abusive, is not comparable to domestic abuse "in significant respects". Not even close.
The TFA title is sensational for effect and in very poor taste.
> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions
sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?
as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.
mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.
Not only is it enabled hy default ... it magically gets enabled by default after some days, desktop spotlight feature that pushes some lock screen wallpapers and trivia overriding my personal wallpaper, Edge trying to do the same thing to homepage, edge trying to steal browser favourites and extensions from other installed browsers once every few weeks, edge stealing default app linkage for PDF viewing, copilot in various flavours appearing on taskbar, start menu, edge, ...it's mayhem out there.
Death by a thousand cuts. So many micro abuses by the OS that keeps reminding you who has the power.
I do get lockscreen wallpapers, but in general I find them quite pretty and interesting. I've never tried changing to a fixed lockscreen wallpaper, though I I do have a fixed, custom desktop one. I can't think that people are obsessing about the lockscreen???
I don't see any of the other things you do. I use Edge as my default browser, with uBlock installed and it all seems to work. There is a Copilot icon, but I think I could remove it if it irritated me, which it doesn't. My Asus Zenbook has a Copilot key which irritates me much less than other aspects of the keyboard layout which have nothing to do with Microsoft.
All in all, I like Windows 11. I don't see how it has made things worse than any of the other NT versions.
Oh I didn't mean a specific file. Lock screen wallpaper has three options, custom image, custom slideshow, and Spotlight. The former two have the "Get tips (...)" checkable, the latter doesn't.
For some people the threshold for "ad" is an uninterruptible segment that they are forced to watch, or a typical banner ad placed on screen. For others it's the visual presence of any set of pixels that can be connected to a business entity or revenue stream.
I have the same experience. I'm on a Windows Surfuace 7 Arm laptop right now. There's no Copilot icon next to the start menu. I press the start icon and I don't see a single ad anywhere. There are no ads on my screen. I use Edge and I don't see anything odd while I shop. Granted, I run "Pro." Maybe the home edition has more of this?
I pay for a 365/OneDrive subscription and it works well. I get the apps on desktop/laptop/phone and 1 TB storage for a decent yearly rate. I log into the PC and laptop on the same account and useful things sync.
I've done mild tweaking to turn a few things off, like the icons in the "search" bar, but nothing's been "hacked". On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?
Macs don't need Apple accounts at all. I just set up three Macs with no Apple accounts, not needed for intended use. They all work fine. Apple accounts are only needed if access to Apple services is desired.
> On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?
Really? Isn't this only for App Store and other Apple services? You can still do your everyday basic things, including downloading and installing software from internet.
Recently I got tired of having random changes occur to a Windows installation I use for one purpose: running X-plane. I took the drastic measure of disabling both inbound and outbound network access in Windows firewall by default and turning off most of the pre-installed rules. Then, I allowed outbound access from the things that really need it. Spurious network traffic dropped to zero and surprises are gone. If I cared more, I'd explore profiles for enabling only useful network activity in more situations, but this has been really good for my use case.
X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.
I think nowadays the only safe and sane way is running Windows isolated as a VM (e.g. QEMU on proxmox). I did this with my gaming server. The VM sits on ZFS which I can snapshot before any Microsoft stuff happens, to revert any action. I can cut off the network card virtually and shutdown the guest whenever I get tired of it. I could even disguise the CPU/QEMU config, so that the anti-cheat from Star Citizen didn't recognize it was running in a virtualized environment. Pair this with Moonlight+Sunshine and you can game without issues on any remote client. Why I prefer Windows for gaming? It is just (still) the default and provides the least barrier and setup effort for most games.
Shameless plug: My products (FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit) can filter all types of potentially unwanted traffic from your Windows PC to Microsoft cloud: namely, Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and many more — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools (e.g. various GitHub scripts) can’t achieve.
https://www.prime-expert.com/
I admire your effort to increase user privacy but it's very difficult to argue that allowing a piece of proprietary closed-source software to make fundamental changes to your operating system is a good idea.
For starters, it doesn't explain what exactly it does. This is all I could see on the info page:
> Privacy Enablement Center: Politely ask already installed Windows 10/11 to phone home less, or add Privacy Enhancing DNS Proxy to already installed Windows, in order to block Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and other types of potentially unwanted Windows network activity — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools can’t achieve.
That sounds an awful lot like using the hosts file or a firewall such as Portmaster[1] to block known tracking domains, no?
Pure hosts file solution won't cut it for several reasons:
1) certain domains (the most offensive privacy infringers) are whitelisted by Microsoft's DNSAPI.DLL to always bypass hosts file lookup (DNSAPI.DLL is a place where hosts file parser lives on Windows, so this parser just ignores hosts file records which don't align well with data vaccuming purpose of modern Windows versions)
2) hosts file can't blacklist domain hierarchies (domain + all subdomains), it can blacklist only apex domains
3) some domains to block are not quite domains, rather domain names regexps (set of domain names to block is not finite)
So, I would say it's rather list of regexps to block than list of domains to block (in our product it's compiled to highly efficient finite state machine in C, plus a user-friendly list of categories to choose blocking preferences from); but in principle you are right: all of it currently boils down to DNS packet interception.
Windows 10 was not as good as Windows 7 for its time (and even now). After 8/8.1 things started to go downhill. Windows 7 was a really good polished OS with beautiful and consistent UI. Windows 10 UI looks like a Frankenstein, and MS fired a lot of QA folks, now the testing is primarily done on the insiders and regular users. Also these privacy / telemetry / ad problems started from Windows 10.
The conspiracy version of this is each bad windows release is purposefully extra bad so the next "good" version is perceived as artifically well.
It's a shame too, I feel like the underlying OS has some really good engineering in it, but the layers of cruft and anti-features on top make for a poor overall product.
Yes, I have also read / heard that Windows is actually very well engineered at the low level (despite the claims), and even surpasses Linux in some aspects. For example, Windows handles low RAM situations much better than Linux. During swapping Linux can become so unresponsive that even the OOM killer can fail and the only solution is hard reboot :(. But all I see people claim about Linux's superior memory management, which I think is believed largely because of the memory overcommitment. It can reduce the average RAM consumption because Linux, by default, maps the allocated pages to a read-only zero filled shared page, and allocates actual memory only when page faults occur during page writes. But this can make the worst case scenario much worse when no physical RAM or swap space is available.
Maybe it would be a good idea for Microsoft to split Windows into a version for business that supports all the cruft that has accumulated and is needed, and another version where they start from scratch. Something that is lightweight and respects the user. A man can dream.
I see people saying the opposite and saying MS should sell windows Enterprise or LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel) version to consumers. These have less of the bloatware and forced features that most people are complaining about.
I have 10 Linux machines and 1 Mac at home. I never use windows for anything personal. At work we have windows laptops that I really only use for email /web and to connect to a remote Linux desktop where I do all my work. The windows enterprise version we have seems to have far less of the crap that people complain about.
This already exists, but you have the markets backwards. Microsoft wants to force the cruft onto everyday users; it subsidizes the cost of the operating system license. Home users can be conned into paying for OneDrive or Copilot subscriptions much more easily than enterprises can. On the other side, Windows Server is their lightweight version, and it's made for the only customer that Microsoft respects: ones that paid in full upfront.
It's a whole new set of unknown bugs, security issues, lack of essential features, and app compat issues.
And the internals of NT are quite good and still largely modern. There's not a lot worth replacing (my only thought would be to rip out the file system filter driver model though I don't know what would replace it).
Back in the day windows NT was serving this purpose and a lot of pro users would use it over windows 98. (At least in 3rd countries where all licenses are pirated).
It actually used to work well, and I think there are still some windows editions like this they are more strictly separated and not that good for daily en user usage.
I like your dream. I think financial incentives make it unlikely, though. The writing's been on the wall for user-friendly general computing OSes for awhile, I think. So Microsoft's incentive is to treat Windows like a loss leader (even if it's not) and use it as a funnel for services/subscription revenue from their other products.
I hate that/wish it weren't so, but I think the last ~15y of M$ decisionmaking makes a lot of sense in that context.
Another aspect to this is that I really doubt consumers would go to linux if there was any pay-wall or 'donate for more features' type aspect to it. Something that really isn't emphasized much is how lots of OSS/linux work is done by the various big corporations often for goals that are not aimed at the small scale users, and it's a happy byproduct that many aspects of their system may run better just by swapping OS, all free to them. Similarly Valve's efforts seem tightly focused on what matters to their products/services and being available to everyone is a byproduct.
The windows cost gets hidden/de-emphasized when buying a PC, or other users just ignore it which is seems to be below MS's pain tolerance for lost revenue on those users. If there was a price of admittance to linux for any other company to devote resources to work on it where it couldn't be treated as a loss-leader for something else, it'd be an even tougher struggle to migrate users over. (and it's likely right now most people moving to linux are somewhat enthusiasts)
One major thing is the mandatory MS account. And it's (or more precisely its laxing / removal) not listed in the improvement list. Optional online account is fine and I might even use it. But mandatory online account is a big NO. This is disrespectful and an invasion of my privacy and control over my computer. I bought a PC / laptop and I want to use it the way I want, without any permission from some fucking server.
Has it always been a case of incentives with Microsoft?
Builders - let's build awesome stuff with great experience.
Execs - need to meet next earnings reports goals. Let's sneak a few features to help M$FT stock price at expense to our users.
Product suffers... Execs then allow builders to make the products better. Then execs step in again because they need some quick wins. Visual Studio and .NET really seemed to exemplify this a few years ago as Code was eating into Visual Studio's user base.
I for one hope ending quarterly earnings reduces patterns like this in companies.
I wish there was a better alternative for average users. It's easy to say, especially on HN, that using Linux or Windows LTSC is a way to avoid these issues (and I do.)
Buyers of PCs, laptops and other devices with Windows pre-installed. I guess that the cost of the Windows licence is included in the price of each device.
That's true, I meant that as a reference to the article where they mentioned people paying $139 at retail for Windows. Which seems bonkers. Why would you do that.
There's nothing "gross" about it. You are making a mountain out of a molehill, and honestly the kind of behavior you're displaying here would be absolutely miserable to deal with at any job. Nobody likes someone who complains about trivial non-issues like this.
If MS brings back normal local accounts, I'll switch back. This is insane, imagine I have bought a kitchen stove or a washing machine which requires to setup an account on some website.
I would just like to add forcing users to use bing online to search their local files to one of their cards. I think that’s the main one they missed, but it’s a good article.
No they're not. They're going to continue making enormous amounts of money from corporate IT lock-in, Azure, and AI.
Windows' biggest competitor is iOS, and many people have stopped using Windows entirely and just rely on their phones. Microsoft has had record profits since that started happening.
Funny you mention iOS - my MegaCorp-issued iPhone has Microsoft entune for device management and Active Directory membership, Microsoft Authenticator for single sign-on, and really high quality versions of Microsoft office apps - Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel. Microsoft is all-in when comes to iOS.
Over Peak I had to update a shared Excel file on SharePoint each night - because as we all know, Excel is the finest multi-user database in existence. I had no problems doing that from my iPhone.
I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).
I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.
This is one of the areas that annoy me due to how limp microsoft is with the requirements...
Either give a solid set of requirements that let a dev assume things about a windows 11 system (good hardware security, in particular), or fuck off entirely.
Unfortunately Linux doesn't run well on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (which is perfectly functional other than the lack of Windows security updates). I'm very unlikely to buy or recommend a Microsoft computer again, even though I liked the hardware.
I check out the status every so often. Not much is upstreamed yet, so it requires a patched kernel and some mucking about, likely on an ongoing basis. I'll probably try it at some point but not until I have moved my uses for that machine onto something else.
For what it's worth, I have a surface laying around somewhere. It doesn't run Windows any more. I have plenty of older Linux machines that are still supported.
Moving forward, I'm sticking with hardware where everything works without setting the Linux 'taint' bit (i.e., zero proprietary code in the kernel). Most laptops made in the last few years with an AMD CPU + GPU meet that requirement.
I'd require that even if I was running windows, given how badly I've been burned on short hardware support lifespans in the past. For instance, I also have an Intel OEM reference motherboard that never had Linux video drivers. It no longer boots windows.
Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better product. People who know they need Windows will always have the option to install it themselves.
There was a rumour 1-2 months ago about Lenovo and Asus meeting Microsoft execs and warning them that if win11 issues continued to cost them support hours and devicw returns they would be forced to find an alternative.
I've installed Win 11 in VMs and linux on bare metal quite a few times this years.
If you count "time to unobstructed desktop + working hardware drivers", Debian beats windows by a large margin. (10 minutes vs. 1-2 hours). Also, with windows, you need to type weird crap like this into a terminal:
In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.
Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.
For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.
It is completely impossible to comply with European privacy law if you are using up-to-date Windows for your business.
The US CLOUD Act compels companies to provide access to data on machines they have the technical ability to access.
Starting in Windows 8, Microsoft granted itself the ability to pull locally-stored documents out of (non-onedrive) folders on all machines for "debugging" purposes.
Since then, EU courts overturned the Privacy Shield deal with the US because our laws are in direct contradiction with their privacy protections, so no, there isn't some backstop that lets Microsoft be the good actor if they get a bogus warrant.
If the EU could ban Windows, I'm sure they would have done so already.
Note that this policy began in the Windows 8 days, and didn't originally have the Microsoft 365 branding attached to it. Now that Windows 11 mandates login, they changed the wording.
Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.
They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!
They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.
It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.
Did they increase profits and/or stock price or not? That's the only relevant question. Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.
Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.
> Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.
I don't understand this point. Are you suggesting that less people being happy with their product and thus less people buying it is not related to the valuation of the company and their stock?
> Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.
Huh?
I get you're trying to make a point about the bottom line, but that doesn't mean the bottom line is impervious to bad product decisions or that the people who are paying for their products are not in fact their customers.
Parent is pointing at the fact that the relationship between our perception of MS products and their financial success is highly inelastic. The bottom line isn't impervious to bad product decisions, but there can be a large number of user hostile decisions that PMs push through that still increase revenue on the whole even at the cost of user satisfaction, before they move past the optimal point in the payoff curve.
Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.
"By October 2025, Microsoft had systematically hunted down and killed every single workaround for creating a local account, the `oobe\bypassnro` command, the BypassNRO registry toggle, the `ms-cxh:localonly` trick, even the old fake email method."
I don't know how it is for Windows 11, but for Win10, activating it is super-trivial, even without downloading some crack .exe. With that in mind, I never bought Microsoft's claim that it hates "pirates". In particular one work around that is even published on github - which is owned by Microsoft - so there is no way Microsoft does not know about it. Why does it not take that github site down?
Clearly Microsoft does not have anywhere near as much as a problem with pepole using Windows as such. I switched to Linux more than 20 years ago so I don't care much about Microsoft anymore. I do have a secondary computer run Win10. I don't see why I would want to switch to Win11 ever though - it only has drawbacks. And Win10 was already really bad. Microsoft used to be objectively better; all that trend to AI or ads, lowered the quality. It seems that corporation past a certain size, become super-lazy.
The forced telemetry and blocking local user accounts is particularly egregious. I've been running Shutup10 for over a decade now, disabling their telemetry after every update. It's outrageous that they force mt to do this.
And local accounts, all the methods required following a guide, using a hidden hotkey like shift-F10 and typing in an obscure command. Nobody did this by accident, or was coerced into it. These were sophisticated users who did not want to login to a MS account. Microsoft not only didn't care about their users' preferences, they actively fought us. It's downright offensive.
And like a battered spouse, we lived with it, we took the hits, because we wanted to play videogames. Well, now Windows is no longer required, thanks to Valve's work on WINE. And suddenly they're apologetic and conciliatory. No thanks, Microsoft.
If it starts to get better after it absolutely cannot get any worse and users start to parade their experience switching to other platforms like badges of honor, is that really a win? After so many got their time and money wasted?
I mean I guess there is no reason to care, since their main products work in a browser, powerbi users and gamers can endure anything and old people will just get their grandchildren to fix their windows.
Wait the local user account workarounds are totally gone now? I assume that means the only reason why it still works for me is because my iso is still on a previous version, good to remember…
Would rather seed 9front torrents at this point than use Windows 11 after seeing how they shoved slopware into everything immediately. Just fuck off with that noise.
And these apologies they’ve been rolling out - to whom? For what? Gabecube is going to eat their gaming market share, servers are already predominantly Linux. I’m sure they’ve got tons of enterprise customers. Fuck ‘em, they can keep them.
Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years. Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them, but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm probably leaving some stuff out.
Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.
Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.
Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.
Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.
Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.
Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.
Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely unhelpful logs, but gave up.
I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.
I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well. It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.
But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.
the funniest thing in this whole "fixing windows" campaign is that you can download "fixed" (read: not enshittified) windows TODAY instead of waiting for microsoft to deliver on these promises
reduces focus on AI, better performance, more stable updates, etc are all already here with windows 11 LTSC, why the hell would i move back to the GA release and deal with their crap?
Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.
I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.
I agree completely about each being good for its own thing. I quite like iOS as a phone OS. The limitations often bother me, but since it's tiny screen that needs to fit in my pocket, I'm creating my own limitations anyway so I'll use it less (1).
I switch around enough that I try not to do crazy amounts of personalisation in my desktop OS. Probably this evens out the OSs and there are aspects I like and dislike about each. I guess I prefer KDE Plasma to Windows or MacOS. I choose that for my own computer, but I spend far more time in Windows. I'm not sure I agree it it much worse from a UX perspective. It allows keyboard only usage very easily, which is something I struggled with in MacOS.
1) I'm only focusing on the UI - there are some things I struggle to forgive, like not being able to set add my own ringtone or alarm tone, or not being able to have the volume of a ringtone increase as the phone rings like on every ancient feature phone.
I've given this a little more thought, and I agree more with "Windows really does suck from a UX perspective" then I was thinking when I wrote my comment.
I really should have included the recent escalation in hostility towards users in my thoughts - built in ads, pushing unwanted products, trash news in new tab pages etc.
I used linux on Desktop 15 years ago, tried it once in a while every few years. But there was always something. Often video driver, tearing, hardware video decoding, or a specific game that I played a lot. And now it would be that my DJ software does not run on it.
Still use it on my server though.
I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.
The last time I tried to use Linux, I said "fuck this" when I had to open up a text editor for something so basic as making a shortcut with command line arguments. This is the easiest menu in the world on Windows, but it took me looking up a bunch of things to get it to not work on Linux.
The real crime, by a lot, it middle click. I did not realize how often I use middle click scroll until I switched to Linux and it didn't work anymore.
Yeah, it's kind of annoying. But middle click scroll is something I use literally every single second of every single day on my web browser. It's a deal-breaker.
Ok that's fair ig. I used to be a fairly heavy user of the middle click scroll feature on windows like a decade ago. Made the switch to Debian w/ Awesome, and that habit just casually fell away. The switch is probably a 3 day annoyance at most. IMO arrow keys and scroll are fine. On laptop trackpads two finger scrolling and momentum scrolling are far more accurate IMO. Also if you have the mx master mouse, it has a crazy good scroll wheel that you can "throw".
Also you can turn on Firefox specific middle click scroll feature "autoscroll" which is the same thing. They may have similar stuff for other browsers. Long story short, in less clicks than it takes you to turn off stupid notifications and ads on Windows, you can get a semi decent middle-click-scroll feature where you need it the most.
Depends on whether using someone else’s windows machine leaves you crazy annoyed.
My windows machine is also “fine” for the most part because i turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could not. Even so, every once in a while, typing “code” and being taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to shreds.
And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.
macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and customizations to make it sane for basic things like window management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount of tweaking needed for power users.
And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...
I've installed linux (debian LTS with XFCE) on my mom's computer and she recently called me to thank me. She says her computer is much quieter now (meaning fewer notifications). She only needs a web browser and a text editor.
So you're right, it's great for power users, it's also great for other users.
Window management: only if you are the kind of power user who needs complex layout. I have used Windows for decades and have used Mac on and off, and have even bought one of those window management app on MacOS, but never needed to use them. In rare occasions where I need several windows open, side-by-side on each of dual screens is usually good enough, if not I probably am working in a terminal where I use tmux.
Gaming: that's a fact but again doesn't matter to most people. Most people play video games on phones/tablets/consoles if they play games at all. PC gaming is a relative minority, and (regular) Windows laptops can only do lightweight gaming anyway. The amount of people who decides what "everyday computer" they should buy based on whether they are going to play games on it is very small. Plus, you get much better ROI by buying a PS5+Macbook Air than spending the same amount of money on a gaming laptop.
you need a ton of third party tools to make it behave like Windows, that's what you mean.
I'm perfectly happy with my "vanilla" macbook. Runs Baldurs Gate 3 and my final fantasy ps2 emulator just fine, and even trackmania was quite easy to get installed and runs well.
Can't comment on that hash thing, but I don't see why that would be a problem? It's not linked to your name or something. Windows does a ton of things too that I find inexcusable, such as changing settings or permissions after updates, those have an actual impact on my daily experience with these things
I have a desktop computer that I use for gaming so it had windows forever. Lately it started running laggy. Occasional frame drops and stuff. Reinstall, bios update etc nothing helped.
For debugging I installed Bazzite (Linux gaming distro) assuming compatibility would be shit but I can at least test native linux builds of some games to see if there is a hardware issue. The thing runs perfectly. I've been playing propert windows games on Proton with higher / more consistent FPS. It is kind of funny at this point. Granted I do not play any competitive / multiplayer games.
I guess Valve did a great job on the Steam Deck sw.
I've been running Fedora (or a flavor) on my gaming PC for two years. All my games work. I understand some competitive games with intrusive anti cheat are incompatible, but with the success of the steam deck I don't think the gaming argument is holding much water these days.
I was playing RE9 at 4K on my Debian 13 last weekend. The vast majority of games work, even some live service games. 5 years ago you would face significant issues, today that simply isn't the case.
I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora recently. Most of the games I play work without issue but I know there are some which categorically refuse to work (mainly some specific anti-cheating software reasons).
- They are rapidly iOS-ifying the desktop experience
- All core services and apps experience significant performance degradation (to thenpoint that Spotlight regularly fails to find installed apps) which are currently only offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
- Services become more and more pervasive, with ads throughout the system
> offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
I'm really afraid of that one. MacOS engineers don't have to worry about performance optimizations anymore, because the chips gobble it up anyway. Ever more powerful hardware is how we ended up with the awful performance of modern-day computing.
You're probably an iCloud services user. Try a Mac without an iCloud account - it's nagging you pretty heavily to set it up, get an iCloud+ subscription, use TV and Music and Game Center subscriptions, and so on.
Oh please. Unless you’ve never opened system settings and got the device with a user account pre-configured for you, you have been exposed to iCloud several times.
Does it make one especially edgy to pretend to use an Apple device while never having heard the name of their single cloud offering? Whatever floats your boat, mate.
> I don't know what that first one means. You mean the glass design?
Not just glass. It started with Big Sur at least. It's forcing narrow and/or devoid of controls interfaces into every app, breaking decades-old system behaviours (misbehaving controls, wrong or non-functioning keyboard shortcuts, mobile-like interfaces in desktop apps etc.). It's eschewing MacOS-native development for shoddy half-assed ports of iPhone software even for first-party apps. Etc.
> I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see them?
I've seen notifications for Apple Music, and I've seen ads in the System Settings
This used to be the case but looking at Macbooks now they are not much more expensive than a Windows laptop you would actually want to buy. And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now i think it's about even.
> And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now.
I dont know any private person in my circle that actually sold their laptop until it wasnt broken or so painfully old that the used value was mostly for spare parts. That may change a bit with the skyrocketing pc part prices but still.
This used to be case before the M series. Now each year a new M processor gets released that are "cheaper" than the previous generation MAC - better processor, more RAM and more storage for similar price than last year model.
This impacted their price in used market.
are you a creative professional? because I see that argument quite often as if people use Adobe CS daily, and then its mostly people who do basic stuff (that photopea or gimp can handle fine), but they like to feel "pro" by launching their pirated version of photoshop.
Gimp is ass, what takes me 5 minutes in Photoshop needs an hour in GIMP. Also I edit photos occasionally in lightroom.
I actually daily Linux, but I still have to dual boot for gaming and Adobe.
Also Linux isn't flawless either, Fedora broke sleep on my full AMD PC since like a month now and no agent could successfully debug it.
> Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram
This hasn't been true for at least a decade. And it's especially not true for the M* series Macs.
Even Macbook Neo can handle editing several layers of 4k video files in several apps while running everything else https://youtu.be/Mo6o8RKn7jE?is=opeCYMDbt7bUAdvS Try that on "the same performance/ram" Windows Machine
I turn off OneDrive so I dont think I have seen those. But in what way are those ads? OneDrive is part of Windows, like iCloud is part of the Apple ecosystem
It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.
I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice
> I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line.
I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour. Until we change that, the power will always be with these kind of companies.
Perhaps governments could levy punative fines in such situations. But that seems like a bandaid (and ripe for corruption). Ideally we'd have structural change that prevents this behaviour in the first place. Perhaps worker representation on company boards. Or progressive corporation taxation that more strongly encourages smaller companies and more competition.
"Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behavior". This is true, but what people seem to fail to grasp is that rewarding such behavior == buying the product. If people simply didn't buy it, they wouldn't do it. It's really that simple. It may be hard to not buy, of course. The alternatives may be worse, there may be downsides to not buying, etc. But nothing else will really be effective.
Do people really have a choice though? Many people don't choose what OS they use for work, and even when one can pick, the environment we exist in is one where being less productive is often hard to afford.
Another instance where companies can have more leverage than consumers is gaming. Console exclusives are a thing because they work; not giving consumers the option to play Pokemon on anything but the Nintendo Switch drives switch sales. Microsoft is better off working with other gaming companies to ensure Windows keeps being dominant, than building an OS to gamer's preferences.
I think time has proven many times that consumers aren't always good regulators for the market. The market is best regulated by organized entities.
iPhone adoption in the enterprise wasn't because of IT. When consumer preference is strong things tend to happen.
Sure, but there's a power disparity here. I think the clearest example is smart TVs where there have been examples of consumers buying a TV, and then having ads retroactively added to the product a year later. There's not much a consumer could to avoid that. It's our regulatory environment allowing that.
Yeah that is definitely the kind of thing we need regulation to address. In the market, the only power you have is to purchase or not. It ruins the free market's ability to function if the company you buy something from can remotely vandalize it after your purchase.
You don't need a TV. If there are only smart TVs then simply don't purchase one.
Most consumers are unwilling to take an option that they perceive as inconveniencing them more than getting screwed by the company inconveniences them.
Telling people to just go without a TV is a little more than a “perceived” inconvenience.
The reality is that companies know they can get away with crap because they all get away with crap. And because they all do it, consumers are powerless.
This is why regulation isn’t a bad the thing that many HNers seem to recoil at. The real problem with regulation is when it’s defined by lobbyists rather than consumer groups. But even then, it’s really no different to the status quo where businesses are never held accountable.
If somebody "needs" a TV then they might "need" some hobbies.
A disturbing proportion of my family spend more than half of their free time watching television (typically while doom scrolling tiktok). They don't "need" TVs - they need to find interests.
The trick is to use the TV as a monitor and not connect it to the Internet.
This is what I do with the smart TV that I was given after a relative was tired of it freezing up/apps crashing. Haven't had any issues.
Go to a shop and try to find a non smart tv.
“You don’t need a TV”
Please make a list of things you don't need so that in case of any issues with the company or system that allows access to them you will know to just stop using them.
I've dropped many things in the past because of issues with the company/service. Amazon Prime, every single streaming service, I've been car free for over 3 years, and there are more.
Are there some things I would struggle with if suddenly there were issues? Sure. I had to significantly increase my internet spend because of the (much) cheaper option going to complete shit. I require the internet for my career but unless the entire world collapses I doubt I'll run into any true blocker that would prevent me from using it for work.
Most people are just afraid to change their lives substantively. I am too, but I'm also willing to do it for causes I believe in.
If people stopped buying cigarettes there would be no tobacco industry. But the true cost of smoking is not something that the smoker realizes until it's already too late. That's why we had to have huge public health campaigns to deter people from smoking, because the long-term effects aren't obvious when you're just stopping in at the corner store. We all live in our own little bubbles and it's often difficult to see how our actions, individual and collective, shape the world around us.
So does North Korea's. This is Goodhart's law in action - the metastasis of PM culture rewarding "engagement".
Consumers can make choices only if it is clear what the options are. In many cases, Microsoft hides behind weasel or made up words. And it takes a security researcher to peel back the layers of their bullshit.
The best solution would be competition. But go ahead try to compete, you will be crushed.
The reason we are in such a position is because government contracts and government involvement with companies like Microsoft Amazon. They don't have to care about consumers when they have multi billion dollar Gov contracts.
None of those. All we need is enforcing laws that are already on the books. Antitrust laws. Break up big tech.
Anti trust laws do not generally apply to these situations. The government has had an appetite for antitrust, but the cases are far from a slam dunk. We need modern laws for modern problems.
Those laws used to apply, until the courts adopted Robert Bork's "consumer welfare standard" in the 80s, under Reaganism.
Analyzed well here: https://yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf
Breaking up Apple would be glorious. Great hardware without an Orwellian OS on top.
Apple only holds on monopoly position on the smartphone market for people with lots of money.
They aren't a majority in any other market segment.
Idk. Our antitrust laws present a high burden of proof and so much subjectivity. The question “Are customers really being hurt?” has to be argued in court (and then argued on appeal at like 3 levels). I think it harms our whole market system, and arguably even harms the capitalist system, to have players with so much power, and the antitrust laws are focused narrowly on proving specific harm mainly in the area of pricing, which isn’t the whole picture.
Too many markets are utterly dominated by one or two big players. I know it’s a tricky problem because market share is hard to define (Does Amazon have 80% share of e-commerce? Or 30% share of all retail?) but I think we would be better off if there were a more aggressive set of rules about anti-competitive behavior that automatically applied to these huge firms, which didn’t rely so much on subjective judgment.
Which requires voting in politicians that would do that. Of course we're much more likely to elect politicians that get the support of billionaires in general so this shit ain't never happ'ning
> consumers have little power here
Don't buy their products, and tell your friends
By friends we mean IT leadership in organizations which really needs to be making the case for MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, or whatever instead of (but more likely in addition to) Windows.
Yeah exactly. But I don't think my local state university, my wife's accounting firm, or my clients are going to ever switch from Windows, no matter how user hostile it becomes. One could dream.
When I went to university 17 years ago, all of the computers (except the Macs) had dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.04.
I'll give you five guesses which OS I never booted into.
That's a bit of a trick question, because if you'd booted into Windows, it would have eventually broken the dual-boot.
You can even keep that Office365 subscription going on Linux via the web apps these days. They are buggy as hell, but no more buggy than the Mac versions in my experience (haven't used the Windows versions enough to compare...)
Even on windows it’s a struggle.
I used to do a lot of document and Office work. If you had told me that 20 years in the future MS would still be around, automagic piracy enabled coding bots were a thing, and people were having problems because the buttons in Office don’t work, I would’ve flagged the third as unbelievable.
It’s absolutely adorable to include macOS in that list, as though good ol’ Tim Apple is the White Knight standing up for consumers and always doing the right thing. MacOS and Windows are working from the same playbook. The specifics vary, but leaving one for the other is like running from an abusive boyfriend to his slightly-richer and slightly-better-looking best friend who acts just like him.
I am only 1 person. FAAMG have reputation management teams/marketing teams that are paid to lie all day.
I'd love if everyone switched to Linux and the walled gardens just died, but the most realistic outcome would be Microsoft and Apple having to up their game and improve their respective products. Right now they're driving hellbent for leather into OSaaS monthly computer subscriptions, eliminating use agency to the greatest degree possible, and exploiting every possible intrusion and usurpation of consumer privacy, vacuuming up every last bit of data and monetizing it to the greatest degree possible, without any concurrent return in value to the consumer.
The only way that stops is by having enough people leave that they change their behavior, and it's not sufficient to switch to the competition that is operating under the same perverted incentives under the same system with the same failure modes. No Windows, no Mac, no Chromebooks, no enshittified corporate quagmire of awfulness and despair.
The solution is simple - use Linux. Set your family up with Linux.
It's the year of the Linux desktop; it's never been easier or better, and it's never been more important to make the leap.
> I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour.
Consumers have the final say, our economic system fundamentally is consumer spending. (Ok, save for most recent year(s) of mag7 AI buildout. But generally that's the case for USA economy).
We have to stop taking out our wallet and just accepting things like sheep. (nearly) Every one of the "scrapped" computers could have run a *nix OS and been a middle finger to microsoft.
I think consumers largely have stopped taking out their wallet for Microsoft, at least enough of them to cause Microsoft to start walking back a little bit.
Nearly 1 billion PCs have stayed on Windows 10, 42% of the global desktop marketshare is still on 10 despite EOL. Linux has been showing consistent growth on the steam hardware survey as well, and time will tell but I have a feeling the MacBook Neo is going to put another nail in Microsoft's consumer coffin.
The problem for us is that's such a tiny margin of Microsoft's customer base. They aren't a consumer company anymore. For Microsoft to feel the pain, we need the big legacy enterprises to start ripping out Windows (and by extension, rip out Windows Server, Azure, M365).
Us here on HN are in a unique position to help, with many of us having influence on or even the authority to make technical decisions for the companies we work for. Its not enough to stop buying Microsoft at home, we all need to stop buying Microsoft at work.
> I think consumers largely have stopped taking out their wallet for Microsoft, at least enough of them to cause Microsoft to start walking back a little bit.
Microsoft has largely stopped asking consumers for money. The last paid upgrade was Windows 8, IIRC. Since then, Microsoft wants consumers to upgrade, so it's free, with full screen prompts at login, and sometimes the 'no thanks' button just does it anyway.
Microsoft sells consumer OSes to OEMs. I haven't been looking, but I assume they don't allow OEMs to install Windows 10 Home anymore; and maybe not even Windows 10 Pro. So when consumers buy a new PC, they're getting Windows 11. The only Linux option at most stores is Chrome OS, which Google is shutting down, and is just a browser for most users (it's a useful product! a lot of users just need a browser; but it's not a platform of empowerment)
The past: Nobody got fired for buying IBM.
The present: Nobody got fired for buying Microslop.
Windows OS is just an onramp for their cloud services. That's their focus, now.
Sort of related, I think this is why big tech loves “free, ad-supported” so much. Using Google search or YouTube or ChatGPT or Fortnite doesn’t seem like an action that is “supporting a company.” When none of the money comes from your pocket, you don’t really feel like you’re making an important choice to patronize one business or another.
But the money is coming out of our pockets. The costs of the ads are added to product prices, which everyone is paying.
It seems like another tragedy of the commons. Consumers ultimately have the final say in climate impacts by above companies. That isn’t to say consumers are guilt free, but the power of an individual is pretty small
> Consumers have the final say, our economic system fundamentally is consumer spending.
Only if consumers have viable alternatives to choose from. If they don't then what are they supposed to do?
*nix is not a viable option? That's news to me.
I agree it's not as easy as pre-installed, but it definitely is viable.
You can do that, but the companies and institutions built on Windows will still keep paying whatever it costs for Active Directory, and thus all the bundled software that comes with it.
Individual consumer action does not a monopoly break.
The only way this get better is if the user gets to choose between an OS with ads, lock-in, telemetry etc. and then one with none of that.
As it is now, buying a laptop in a store is a "pick your poison" situation.
Better yet: don't pick any poison at all -- both System76 and Tuxedo Computers (as examples, sometimes you can buy a latop without an OS and save the money, same goes for PCs) offer laptops with Linux installed: no Microslop tax, and hardware that's guaranteed to work with OSS.
Personally I'm a huge Linux supporter and user. I try my best to not to use any non-free software, and while I prefer macOS laptops, I always have an exit strategy if I decide to ditch the platform.
Recently, I decided to start making music again after a decade of hiatus. I got a nice audio interface and some hardware which can do nifty things. The catch?
None of the supporting software for my hardware runs on Linux. I either need to run a VM to configure these things, or use the macOS versions of the software. I chose the latter because it's not meaningful to passthrough all the devices to change some parameters and give device back to Linux. I also don't use Wine. I don't want to install something that big into my daily driver.
While Linux is great for many, many things, there are some things still sorely lacking in the ecosystem. Why can't I adjust monitoring/routing in a class-compliant audio device? Why my effect processors' USB protocol is not open so I can't play with it parameters from Linux?
We still have a long way to go in some areas.
And I think it is fair to acknowledge that Linux doesn't fit the needs of all people. The thing is, the flip side is also true. While I can pick up my (admittedly technical) hobbies under Windows, it is more convenient under Linux. Without the FLOSS ecosystem, I could not afford to do so at all.
That's true. I run almost everything under Linux. All my daily driver and work-related desktop systems are Linux for more than two decades now. Heck, we don't have any Windows machines used for work in the datacenter. However, I wanted to highlight that Linux is not "there" yet, and telling "just use Linux, duh" doesn't solve all the problems a user has.
For photography and graphic arts, Linux can handle many if not most of the work (I use Digikam and Darktable with great success, for example), yet when it comes to audio for example, it falls short due to a thousand papercuts.
And if you are a professional photographer, Darktable falls short by a thousand cuts. It is not even close to Lightroom, let alone Photoshop.
That's the thing, not everyone is a professional photographer. Open source tools are fine for many of us. They are also great to get a taste of a field, to learn the basics, without a massive investment.
You don't have to be everything to everyone. You just have to satisfy a need.
I'm not a professional photographer though. I'm also not a professional musician, either.
Yet, Darktable allows me to process my RAWs to a point which I like. Similarly, my audio equipment allows me to create some music which I like, too.
I didn't push Darktable to professional levels, but I believe it can match bigger tools for what I want to do with it. I don't do photo manipulation, for example. Just process RAWs. I expect the same from my audio equipment for my music endeavors.
That's kind of my experience dabbling into Linux as well. You're effectively turning your laptop into a fancy tablet, which is okay only if you're not doing some professional work in specific niches that are mostly seamless with macOS/Windows. Niche hardware usually is out of the question.
Programming works fine on linux, better even than Windows unless you're developing for Windows. Most gaming (other than some online games with uncooperative anti-cheat) is as easy as on Windows, where games are also likely to need a bit of tinkering. Web browsing is obviously fine, and that's most of what most people do (and so most people would be fine with "effectively a fancy tablet"). 3d modeling is fine. The foss equivalents to most Adobe software suck, but that's not really specific to linux.
Recently someone did the incredible work of getting Photoshop to run perfectly in Wine, but it looks like the original reddit post detailing it got removed for legal reasons (which is nonsense, it doesn't make piracy any easier). Adobe seems to actively work against any efforts to run their software on Linux.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qdgd73/i_mad...
Not to address/counter your comment, but because it might be helpful: if that's a Focusrite interface, the company itself points to an open source project in its support documentation.
https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208530735-Is...
I haven't actually tested it, but it seems like it works for people, and it's solid enough to have the kernel component in the kernel. I found it while researching a possible move with my Vocaster One.
I have Scarlett 2i2G4. I may look into it. On the other hand, I have way more advanced stuff from ESI and Audient, which allows much more customization when compared to Scarlett, and they have no Linux support AFAIK.
Some hope for ESI, maybe: https://kb.esi-audio.com/?goto=KB00337EN
If it's one of those and class compliant, you might be able to access all of it through alsamixer or one of the many frontends (maybe too many, maybe one for you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsamixer
The Audient situation appears to be a proper nightmare realm with non-class compliant stuff, but there is a tool with a list of caveats longer than you might want to deal with: https://github.com/TheOnlyJoey/MixiD
It's more best case scenario as an escape hatch and less problem solved, but it's something.
Well I'll test it when I have some time. ESI has a lot of routing flexibility on board, and I don't know how ALSA will present it to me, but I may report it here.
I didn't expect Audient to work, actually.
I have a tuxedo machine myself for that reason.
The problem is that I can't get one in a store. It's a product that is only available to those in the know.
In the ideal situation a lay-person would be in a store, and there would be two versions of the same machine, one with ads on the lock screen, one without.
2nd hand "Windows" computers are way way cheaper and are pretty easy to put some distro on. You can pretty much cleanse them from any Microsoft taint and use them for lots of purposes.
Normies will never get computers from them without help from fellow nerds, that then need to support them, they want their genius, the easiness to walk into a shopping mall store.
I recently made a decision between a Macbook and a Linux laptop. I went around and around on this, I really wanted the Linux laptop. I even considered Omarchy on one of the Panther Lake machines DHH says he's gotten it working on.
I made a decision I didn't want to make: I bought the Macbook Pro. If I was retired or completely cashflow positive in my endeavors, I'd pick the machine I want.
That being said, there were so many ecosystem, hardware, power management, GPU throughput and compatibility advantages with the Macbook Pro at the moment, and given that I'm firmly in founder/launch mode, I went with the safety option. My biggest risk is Apple making another anti-consumer choice.. I don't see the ads they've started pumping into their product, but I do miss GNOME.
I made a work decision, not a technology decision. That said, Windows never entered the equation.
You probably made the right decision. In my opinion, DHH is underselling how terrible the keyboard on the Dell XPS is. I bought the lunar lake XPS and I hate the keyboard so much, I turned it into an expensive Jellyfin server and bought a $275 thinkpad T14 on ebay to use instead. Maybe the keyboard on the panther lake version is better, but my fingers just get lost with the flat keys. In addition, they are super low-travel and mushy. I gave it a few months and just couldn't handle typing on it anymore.
Thanks. I appreciate the report. The keyboard is important to me.. I do a lot of work on the road and don’t want a lot of peripherals. Apple keyboard and trackpad are great.
My “nice” mechanical keyboard is sitting on my old desktop, which is now a container store. It’s easier to not go back and forth.
Most people want a computer that works with their software. No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution. Especially because nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS solutions, that only a niche Windows program can actually do correctly.
And that doesn't even get into gaming.
> nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS
I'm interested in where that estimate + number are coming from. And I'd like to point out that I don't nearly see as many people pushing back against say MacOS for "not being Windows", despite the fact that the same issue would be there. I wonder why Linux gets special treatment in that regards, when modern distros make usage very accessible.
> And that doesn't even get into gaming.
Gaming on Linux works very well. And if something doesn't, it's usually by choice (e.g. BattleEye customers not enabling it on Linux) or by sheer incompetence / malevolence (e.g. EA Games and their shitty EA App that breaks often even on Windows, and even worse on Linux in a Wine environment).
Linux unfortunately needs to be a Windows that's better than Windows to a lot of people unfortunately. It must support all their hardware and software perfectly and can never have any issues, only then will it be an accepted alternative. Probably because it's free and they want it to work on their existing setup.
Mac users paid money for their choice, so ironically they are more forgiven for the inability to run some Office VBA macros, work with that random MST dual display dongle or whatever. They rationalize their expensive purchase as a good decision and that it's good enough and possible to solve issues encountered like spending 5 times as much on Thunderbolt dock to do what the $30 MST dongle did or learn some entirely new $10 app to do what they did on Windows with something else.
MacOS has the software people need, hence why there's not that same push back.
Just as nobody is pushing back against Linux when it comes to server software, or pushing back against PlayStation when it comes to games.
Then at least let the company that makes your niche software know that you want a Linux version of it, even if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this chicken / egg problem. Nobody wants to use Windows, they want to use some specific application. If most software is available on Linux too, then consumers can actually choose their OS.
Most software is already available on Linux. I've successfully run Linux in corporate jobs where everything runs on the MS/AD/Azure stack. The issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background. Windows is really great at that - until it breaks. Then you're usually screwed. Like, if the problem is close to the kernel, you can't even fix it theoretically. Best you can do is wait for an official MS patch. On Linux things break more often, but you can usually fix them without having to resort to extreme measures. It's a fundamentally different usage philosophy that plays very hard into the strengths of techies. So non-technical users will always shy away from Linux.
> the issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background.
You may have to spend extra work to get things running; but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.
I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very technical distribution and some manual configuration is expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.
> Then at least let the company that makes your niche software know that you want a Linux version of it, even if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this chicken / egg problem.
To solve the chicken/egg problem, the GNU/Linux distributions should generate some very (in particular binary) stable interface for writing applications (including GUI applications) on GNU/Linux - like WinAPI on Windows. With "stable" I mean "stable for at least 20-25 years". This interface must, of course, work on all widespread GNU/Linux distributions.
Even if we don't agree on a userspace ABI, this is still fine-ish, as long as you can statically link everything you need. Unfortunately the nerds maintaining the core libraries REALLY don't want you to do that, and the answer to "how do I build a portable Linux GUI program" goes more or less like:
"Build musl libc statically, set up a toolchain to use it, build libc++ for that toolchain, get libwayland, link that statically (which their build scripts don't support, roll your own), get xcb,libxau,libxwhatever and build those statically as well, and implement TWO platform layers, dynamically checking for wayland support. There's like 5 different ways to set your window icon. Yes, you need to implement all of them. Now for loading the graphics API......."
On Windows it's a call to RegisterClassW followed by CreateWindowW.
It's an old joke, but it's also accurate in this case - isn't what you are asking for just WINE?
> isn't what you are asking for just WINE
An operating system is a style of thinking about your work. WINE is a way to get Windows applications to run (by now run decently) under GNU/Linux. These Windows applications are nevertheless foreign bodies in the whole kind of thinking which GNU/Linux is built around.
The joke is that the most stable Linux API for applications is ... WIN32 via WINE.
It's sad because it's true.
I think that eventually, Win32/WoW64 will be the stable common API for Linux programs - or at least games. I won't be surprised if it outlasts Windows.
I don't want windows or linux, I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there. When I have to think about my OS, then the OS has a flaw. And currently nor Windows or Linux can deliver that anymore. Windows 7 after some customizations and Windows XP had this, but M$ destroyed it. Linux never had this and I don't expect that this will come in the future.
> I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there.
I guess you want a Mac. That's fine.
I value freedom and things not mysteriously breaking and functionality not disappearing, and am quite happy investing a the time and knowledge upfront, so I use Linux.
And then there are people who want to have a system which works out of the box initially and who don't want to learn anything and don't mind it breaking later, and they choose Windows.
To each their own.
Company? Most of the time this stuff is years (sometimes DECADES) old. That's why it doesn't work on Linux in the first place.
> No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution
Hard disagree. Not that it has to be FOSS, but you have a product that is predatory towards you and you refuse to change your ways.
Leaving an abusive relationship is hard, but sometimes you have to do it.
> you have a product that is predatory towards you and you refuse to change your ways.
And honestly it seems like you refuse to learn even the smallest bit about human nature.
Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their computer. Walk into a room of 100 graphic designers who have spend the last 20 years using Photoshop exclusively and put GIMP in front of them and and at least 98 of them are going to say what the hell is wrong with you, they have work to do, take this uncanny valley garbage and get out of here.
I'm typing this on a System76 laptop right now but I understand expecting people to use Linux writ large is ridiculous.
Everybody "learns" how to use a computer. It's just a question of what they learn first.
I would propose a new law of interaction design: Whenever something is promoted as a tool that you wouldn't need to learn, then it's actually designed to use you, and you are the tool.
> Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their computer.
I see this point being missed over and over again in this thread. To people like you and I the computer is often the entire point. To normal people it's a tool. It exists to get the job done so they can move onto something else.
The solution that requires the least effort is objectively the best solution. Most of the time that still means Windows, and it won't change until the required level of effort changes.
If all the crap that people suffer through, and make YouTube channels dedicated to about how much Windows is hell, is not enough to get them to look elsewhere then "fixing" other operating systems won't get them to look.
They aren't looking and they aren't interested in looking. At this point they have no one else to blame.
I mean I kinda agree on what you are saying but then it logically follows that if you don't want to try out alternatives, don't want to push your government to enact better laws, don't want to spend time taking them to small claims court - basically don't want to do anything but suffer - then just suffer.
I don't know how to better explain this, but as I get older I find I just have less energy to address all the things. My worldview gets larger and my energy levels become less and eventually I need to just 'stop' progressing in a certain activity. It could be re-learning the TV's remote control like my grandparents, or it could be re-learning how to drive with an EV touchscreen on modern cars, or it could be re-learning an operating system that just presents a mountain where you just say: "I can't do it this time."
The vast majority of people do not test out alternatives to things they just need to use for work, they don't lobby their government even informally for different laws, have never gone to small claims court (or even been in a court room when it's in session). These are all minority "activist" activities for lack of a better word.
The tin foil hat interpretation of this is that it is all by design, by whatever cabal runs everything, to subjugate the masses and control them directly or indirectly. The generous interpretation is closer to an extreme version of Sturgeon's Law[0] where this is just a natural, even inevitable, byproduct of most things being garbage. Like most things the truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle.
[0] "90% of everything is [crud/crap/shit]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
>No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
It is a solution. Once you do it, your problem is solved, that makes it the solution. If you aren't willing to go with that, you can stay with Windows and just accept the constant abuse.
As for gaming, I've been on Linux for two years now and I haven't had a single game not work.
And as for a better solution, Teach kids. Once I'm an ornery PTA parent I'm going to push for programming and *nix of some sort to be taught to the school, even if I have to volunteer to do it myself.
Well acktshually, gaming is a really good example. Valve did a lot of good with Proton to the point that a lot of games work and work well.
Perhaps ironically, Wine may be the best stable API on Linux. I'd like to see a concerted and well-funded effort to make Wine run certain Windows applications well. We might not be able to replace the Adobe Suite short-term by a FOSS alternative for most of its users, but we might be able to get Wine to run the Adobe Suite, Affinity Suite, and whatnot well enough to make it possible to switch and keep running these applications.
<< No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
It actually is. It may not be the best solution, but it absolutely is one of available solutions. = Not being able to ( or wiling to ) learn ( and adjust ) as needed is part of the reason we are here.
I am not being nitpicky here. Reasonable people don't hope things will change; instead, they change things they can.
Not even that! Most people want a computer that lets them get the tasks they want to do done, in the way that uses the lowest effort.
If they want to edit a photo, and they're used to Photoshop, then Photoshop will be lower effort than a competitor just as Photoshop is lower effort than darkroom editing film. Competitors have to be lower effort or offer significantly better features than incumbents. Product cost is a part of the effort needed to use that product, but far from the entire thing.
> Most people want a computer that works with their software.
I suspect that most people don't run much software at all outside of their web browser and wouldn't notice any difference between using chrome in windows and using chrome in linux. Gaming is not the barrier it used to be either.
Agreed. Default Ubuntu is pretty much feature complete for mainstream users, as long as they don’t have to install it themselves.
> Most people want a computer that works with their software. No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
Why is that argument always applied against Linux, and never against for instance macOS, which also can't run Windows software?
> Why is that argument always applied against Linux, and never against for instance macOS, which also can't run Windows software?
There's a certain type of technical user that gets joy from coming up with arguments, good, bad, or just pulled out of their butt, explaining why people can't use Linux. I'm not going to spend my day trying to understand people's unusual preferences.
Well, considering that you can run almost anything (excluding games and specialized graphics software) with 99.99999% guaranteed result via WinApps, I don't see what the issue is for a hypothetical member of the majority population.
It's not 2016 anymore, you don't have to switch to LibreOffice if you need an office suite of apps.
That obviously would be preferable, but if you're an avid Microsoft ecosystem user, just use WinApps. It's simple enough to the point that a child could use it.
What percentage of MS Office user can, in your estimation, complete the steps as described in this readme?
https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
I know it's a bit ironic given TFA's focus on shoving Copilot and Recall down users' throats, but I really do believe that an OS-level AI agent could solve these usability issues. We need to solve a lot of trust issues, but the capabilities are essentially already there for a non-technical user to tell a Samantha-like OS AI "please get this working", and it will.
I've already been doing this haha, got Claude to install VR mods into a game that most certainly should not have been working with VR mods on linux
Even skipping the first step (which requires a second readme) the next step involves opening a terminal. Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work, what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.
Linux is an important operating system, but anyone under the delusion that it is desktop ready right now needs to actually watch someone use it. I say this not because I hate linux, but because I love it. I want someone to make it usable for a desktop, and people claiming that it is usable right now are not helping that.
> Even skipping the first step (which requires a second readme) the next step involves opening a terminal. Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work, what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.
I strongly disagree with this; I believe that an OS should be whatever the user needs it to be. In my case, I am a power user that loves the command line, and while I agree that I may not represent the majority of users, I do not care for your assertion that my way of doing things is somehow invalid.
I agree on the facts but I think the gatekeeping effect is probably helpful for the current users.
If we had a giant influx of computing illiterate people, the platform would enshittify. They would move towards android-type lock downs and user hostile stuff. More and more binary-only proprietary software, they might fork systemd etc and make sure that the proprietary binaries only run under certain unmodified setups etc. Of course there would be escape routes to various other, nonpopular distros, so the skilled people would be fine again, but there would be a barrier again.
I think this is fundamental. Once the general public starts entering an arena, it won't stay the same. Eternal September etc.
I agree that most users won't be able to follow Winapps' guide, but "The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work" is just false. That is the point of an OS for computer illiterates, not the "entire point of an operating system".
Arguably, the vast majority of users are "computer illiterates", and an OS should cater to the majority. So in a sense, OP has a point.
I may be showing my grey hair here, but that's emphatically not the point of an operating system.
I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage their applications and work processes rather than their computer.
It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from their computers - that as long as they can "save" their work, and "send" it from one app to another, they'd be able to get all the productivity that they are looking for.
I had commented this above, but the OS should be flexible enough to do whatever the user needs it to do. "What it needs to do" is pretty broad, but I think that's the point.
It should be possible to get creative and business work done on a computer while knowing almost nothing about an os but I use Windows at work and the situation with the file save dialogue in office is a farce. I can't imagine how confusing it is for someone who has no conception of what a file is.
Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken from paper based office work. You have container folders and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can contain folders can contain folders. The real world has some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you understand nesting, files and folders are quite intuitive.
Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.
> Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.
I agree with most everything else you said, but would slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links). While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel that we shouldn't be beholden to it.
This is actually an interesting example. To me it sounds like it actually should be less confusing to a person who has no preconceived notion of what a file should be, and only wants to save their work and reopen it later, not worried about what shape the saved object takes.
On that note, I remember how absolutely ecstatic I was when I first set up Sublime Text and discovered that unsaved editor tabs always reliably survive restarts; it essentially flips the script, whereby I've lost multiple saved files by accidentally deleting them, but I've never accidentally lost work in unsaved tabs, and I've never actually had any interest in figuring out where and how these tabs get persisted - it just works.
There’s a big difference between working on a computer and working with a computer.
The people doing the former use computers for ‘real work’. They are using a computer as an end in itself, care about operating systems and have strong opinions about systemd. The people doing the latter couldn’t give two shits about any of that and just want to get their presentation finished on time.
Problem is, both sets of people have to use the same machines. It’s also why software like GIMP will never become widely adopted in professional environments because it’s designed for a completely different userbase.
That's barking up the wrong tree. Github shows instructions for software developers. A normal user would just install Winapps from package manager, like with all the other Linux software.
Your critique should be channelled into a productive direction and point the finger at the maintainers why this is not packaged yet. https://repology.org/projects/?search=winapps https://pkgs.org/search/?q=winapps
Cool. Windows can't do 99% of the things I and anyone not grasping at straws can do with Linux.
It is getting tiring, I don't say Linux is perfect, but KDE has been better than Windows for years, Linux doesn't bit rot like an average Windows install and Linux is in practice surprisingly more stable, but no-no-no, Linux can't be this time again. Quick... ehm "there is a piece of software that only works on Windows". Have you ever thought the reverse holds too, but times 1000?
If you call yourself an IT-professional, you only run spyware.exe in a vm or in a box with all networking gear ripped out and you don't making stupid excuses.
Linux is pretty awful at a lot of things …
As a VERY long-time Linux user, I agree. Multi-monitor setups, where you can unplug the monitor and have your windows gather back onto your laptop screen requires WAY too much configuration. Having your audio switch back to internal laptop speakers requires homebrewing a script. On my 2020 Dell XPS, I still haven't figured out how to enable the subwoofers - so I'm stuck with ThinkPad quality audio. I have 3 ThinkPads (one with straight ArchLinux, 2 with CachyOS) and there's always some little piece I'm annoyed with. The X1C has good battery life, the T480 and P14s are meh. I JUST bought my first HiDPI Lenovo laptop this weekend. Getting that to be a decent tradeoff between readable text and mongo-duplo-massive UI has been "fun". (Yoga 15.3" Aura edition - I really like it) But running apps in Wine is darn near impossible - the text is for ants!
All of these issues go away with Mac and Windows. I'm not giving up on Linux, I'm just a realist.
No need for such childish reaction, dismissing other's viewpoints achieves nothing for your side of arguments, at least nothing good and one of the reasons some skilled folks won't migrate, we have enough toxic communities elsewhere.
Also quite a few inaccuracies - what the heck is 'bit rot' on windows? I had 1 same Windows 10 install running on desktop for 8 years as primary personal PC and installed tons of software and games, both official and... some other types. 0 issues.
On laptop whole lifetime with original install is the default for everybody I know, for me 6-7 years (simply the length of ownership). We don't talk about Windows 95 or ME era here where frequent installs were basically mandatory and a well-practiced chore.
Historically I wouldn't refer to it as "bit rot", but generally "registry bloat" with a combination older, no longer used .DLL's hanging around, rather than being removed on software uninstallation or upgrade.
In the past a good "registry cleaner" would help - but those are no longer reliable with newer versions of Windows - there are many virtual entries that get cleaned-up by overly aggressive utilities.
> I had 1 same Windows 10 install running on desktop for 8 years as primary personal PC
I actually have a desktop still running that got a launch party host Windows 7 Steve Ballmer edition install that's just been upgraded as time has gone on. Very much a Ship of Theseus machine but technically only ever migrated the OS image around, never reinstalled. That's 17 years of a Windows install so far, and its perfectly fine. That one install has made it through multiple motherboards and OS upgrades. It'll end up dying and being replaced once I get too uncomfortable with 10 EoL, this board is still useful to me but it doesn't have a TPM so Windows is dead to this machine.
For better or worse, well mostly worse, most of the software people use these days is either directly running in the browser or is electron based so running perfectly fine on Linux.
Gaming on Linux is a mostly solved issue for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming. If a game isn't using some root kit level anti-cheat or copyright protection, it is going to run just fine. Same with running most other software.
The only part where Linux is sucks is for certain creatives fields. If you need Adobe products you are out of luck. Video editing well you use Da Vinci or free software. There are some good DAWS but no Ableton.
Yes, you have to compromise but Linux is definitely getting there. Not everything runs on Mac either and people cope just fine.
>>for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming
Turns out, a lot of people do exactly that. Hundreds of millions of people play CoD, Fortnite, Battlefield, Apex and many many other games which won't work on Linux at all.
I think the state of gaming on Linux is absolutely incredible - what used to be a very esotheric and "roll of the dice" process 20 years ago now is extremely simple and it mostly just works. But when I play games with friends every week it's almost never a game that would work on Linux.
Good news re: gaming is with SteamOS/Bazzite gaming on Linux is finally near-turnkey. Only thing I had to adjust on my bazzite computer was zram, otherwise I’ve never had to open the terminal (unless I wanted to). Expedition 33 ran perfectly day 1.
I do agree with your larger point though. It’s the same reason everybody doesn’t change the oil in their car on their own or cook their food every night over ordering out. Only it goes even further because by this point most people expect a computer to just do what it’s supposed to do (or they think it’s supposed to do) the first time they try. I can’t imagine asking my parents to start inputting terminal commands. Even just the process of something like running etcher and prepping a usb drive to install linux is a whole thing.
> And that doesn't even get into gaming.
Or Accessibility, which the Linux desktop is notoriously bad with, since, what, 20 years. The constant push to rewrite things typically forgets making Accessibility a priority, for the sake of "progress".
Most games nowadays run perfectly fine on Linux.
Windows games you mean.
Linux is one of the poisons bro
Which kind of poisons? Can you list more?
Linux is just no good option. Linux has it's own issues that make them unusable for people that don't want to put time and effort in their OS itself. Current example: Slidly incompatible unix tools, still not 100% complete, but rewritten in rust.
Windows has only one major advantage over Linux, it comes preinstalled with all required hardware support.
Both installing Windows and installing Linux can be difficult for most people. I have done both professionally and when installing Windows I have encountered frequently more serious problems, which required much more time to solve than the problems encountered when installing Linux.
For those who have someone else to install and configure Linux, it is at least as easy to use as Windows.
My parents, more than 80-years old, have used for many years Linux without any problems and they have no idea what Linux is, they just know the applications that they are using for viewing and editing documents, e-mail, Internet browsing, music or movies listening or watching, TV watching or recording (with TV tuner) and so on.
With your support.
Would have they bought such a configuration on a random computer store?
First of all that's only Ubuntu, but also at this stage uutils is way more compatible with the GNU tools than Apple's tools are.
No general user that is now using Windows would come in contact with the edge cases were the rewrites differ from the standard utilities.
What bugged me for years is that I ended up paying the microsoft or apple tax that way. In the end I figured out a more efficient way around that than any of the rebates/refunds: just buy second hand hardware. Someone else paid for and used the windows license, I just need the box.
If you don’t need a laptop, you can also build a machine from parts. This is probably the best way to run a desktop computer.
Anybody on HN that didn't know that you can build a machine from parts or isn't capable do doing so is probably on the wrong website ;)
I have two left hands (and one of them is backwards) and components spontaneously disintegrate when I touch them. I know I'm not capable of building a computer so I bought mine from Tuxedo computers, who sell computers running GNU/Linux. I might be the GNU/Linux whisperer who manages to not have any major issues, but that doesn't correlate with the type of technical aptitude which would let me turn a heap of components into a working machine. I even managed to break a laptop by trying to replace the CMOS battery.
Making any hardware changes whatsoever to a laptop is dramatically more complicated than building a desktop. It very much is just a matter of 1) buying compatible parts (there are websites for this, or if you shop in person they'll be more than happy to help), then 2) matching plug labeled A to socket labeled A.
Hah! You're like one of my family members. We keep her away from anything electronic because the failure rate in her presence can not be accounted for by accident alone.
Oh, and laptops are nasty. They are put together in ways that can easily confound you when you have plenty of experience. Lots of it revolves around little pieces of plastic that are marginal when new and that just want to break by the time the device needs service. It's a conspiracy!
Anyway, at least you know it can be done. The conditional still holds.
This is another way they rip off consumers. In a perfect world, the license would be resalable for someone else, just like you can sell a used Blu-ray. During piracy cases, they clamor about their "intellectual property". Ok so that means it's not physical, and once one person is done, they can sell it to someone else who needs it.
I mean, this goes way beyond OSes.
Look at the mobile YouTube client. The bottom navigation bar has the "+" create button stuffed right in the middle of it, larger than any other button. What % of users creates YouTube content? Probably <1%. What pp of those do it in the mobile YouTube client? Probably 0.1%. Yet the button is there, with no way to disable it.
In general, why don't apps have a "creator" toggle, off-by-default, that optimized the entire UI for viewing / consuming? Just how apps like Uber have either an entire separate app for 'partners', or toggle.
I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders. And YouTube has no competitor, so they can go buckwild with anything that synthetically increases KPIs.
I think the only app in recent memory that I have seen right the ship is Spotify. The past year they have introduced a lot of toggles for things like the shuffle algorithm, the dumb looping album art videos, audio loudness normalization being split out into normalization and compression ('volume'), etc; About the only thing that's missing is a toggle to disable podcasts, just like YouTube needs a toggle to completely disable shorts.
Any PMs reading this, be our hero. Fight the good fight.
YouTube in general is such a good example.
A while ago, they introduced the Home page with algorithmic recommendations; okay, it sucks that you can't choose whether Home or Subscriptions is the default, but at least you can choose between the algorithmic recommendations and the chronological subscriptions feed.
Then they introduced Shorts. These are algorithmic ally recommended TikToks which you can't disable, they always litter both the Subscriptions page and the Home page. This sucks.
Then, recently, they added algorithmic recommendations to Subscriptions. So if you're on Home you see only algorithmic recommendations, and if you're on Subscriptions, a lot of your screen is still taken up by algorithmically recommended videos from channels you subscribe to.
Every one of these steps is in the direction of making sure you watch what YouTube wants you to watch instead of what you want to watch.
I keep mental tabs on the number of videos you can see from the home page on desktop.
We crossed an all-time record recently.
We get a 2 rows x 3 column grid now. The upper left is an ad, the lower row are clipped in half to coach scrolling, bringing the total to 2 thumbnails.
I feel like a junkie whose dealer tripled their prices and cut the drugs with 80% filler; sobriety by cartoonish consumer exploitation
That's a terrible idea. The greatest thing about the Internet is that there's no segregation between creators and consumers.
TV has it. Only TV program production companies can create shows. That literally undermine ... a lot of things. We don't need that.
There seems to be a pretty wide gulf between "segregate consumers and content creators" and "please let me make it so that I can remove/disable the huge central button I never use that takes up a lot of space and is super easy to accidentally hit"
> I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders.
Exactly.
I am in an engineering design software developer organization bought by an investor from the founders approaching retirement (they worked 3 decades on this software helping construction engineers designing better homes). Ever since the lead up to the sell - changes were tuned to lure in investors, for the liking of investors - our organization is focusing on maximising revenue. Fast. That is THE focus. New marketing strategy, sales strategy, licensing strategy changes, reshape organization to have more informed decision making in sales (i.e. collecting and processing much more data on increasing number of contacts). Company meetings are about EBITDA, sales goals vs. actual, streamlining organization. Luncbreak discussions evolve around how to license existing features differently so it would trigger/force up/cross sales.
What is not on the agenda for maximising revenue: features and engineering. We are a "sales oriented organization", says our new CEO prodly - brought in during the sale. Addressing user needs and becoming more popular for the eventual income boost takes longer than the sales cycle of less than 5 years (the investor wants to sell the company in 5 years time). Engineering is in the way, accounting books need to look much much better much sooner for the eventual profit. Only sales tactics work here.
I see ralted pattern elsewhere, in tools I have the misfortune to use (SaaS and other subscription based products). Shameless self-promotions (cross-sale) distact your focus all the time, 'features' good for the assumed 'cutting-edge' image of the organization, privacy offensive practices (data for running sales campaigns), 'offerings' that help you with the ideas they force on you for some sizeable extra cost.
It will not end well. Takes long time to fail, but without valuable features and engineering there will be no value left for the users to buy eventually. No user wants top notch marketing, licensing, and sales strategy for the benefit of the organization.
This.. give me the - option - to not be an ad infested hellhole of an OS and sell me a product.
On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase in two kinds of posts: 1) That’s it, I’ve had it, windows is dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a distro. 2) I’d love to get off window and move to Linux but I can’t because it doesn’t have an app that works identically to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.
I hate to sound like an apologist but it seems unfair to me to lump MS and Apple into the same bucket here.
Yes, Apple has a 'walled garden' to an extent, but I've never once worried about MacOS serving me an ad from a third party, and their privacy controls are top notch and seem to get better as advertisers attack methods get more sophisticated.
I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to jump through a few hoops to get an unsigned app installed, and each time it's been relatively painless.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).
lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.
A single product meant for all the users will inevitably be a poor fit for most of them. We need more variety of products for the different segments of the market. Alternatively we need more knobs to tune things to user needs. One promise of AI is enabling folks to personalize product experiences, but so far it's all been surface level.
I think the desktop Linux ecosystem is an example of something healthier, but it goes too far in the other direction. There are too many options to choose from that it's hard to find the one for your needs.
I don't think "care" is the right word here at all. We simply don't have options.
This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition, but competition eventually leads to winners that then consolidate their positions and we end up with no real choices.
You're telling me people would pick a worse OS because they don't care even if they had real options? I don't believe that for a second.
Right, and even when there are options that doesn't mean you actually get to choose what you want for all things you care about, e.g. there might be option A with feature a (e.g. no ads) and option B with feature b (e.g. no vendor lock in) but none with both a and b - so you only really get a choice for the things you care most about. Which is effectively why gradual enshittification is effective: Most users will put up with minor anti-features rather than jump to a different platform that will require new programs and/or relearning.
We see this same phenomenon play out in other industries too, like cars.
Stop trying to blame capitalism for your failure to jump out of the pot when they put ads in Windows 8.
We very much do have options. I haven't had Windows on a personal machine since 2011.
> This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition
The fact that governments allow Microsoft to abuse its position to force OEMs to install Windows is the biggest problem. This would never happen in a market where regulation ensures healthy competition.
That version of capitalism sailed 40 years ago in the USA, antitrust enforcement has slowly disappeared which creates a race to the bottom for other countries who would like their companies to compete against USA's companies. If they enforce antitrust then the behemoths created in the USA by absorbing competitors without antitrust enforcement can eat their lunch, even though it's better for consumers.
Unfortunately this also allowed the USA to have companies so large that they basically control the government, changing this now will require massive political will and a political body untethered from corporate interests. I really don't see that happening in the USA, it's been thoroughly captured after so many years driving on that path.
I totally agree. There seems to be absolutely zero focus on Glass Steagall or Citizens United so I can't see how this actually happens without political revolt at this point.
Yes, the neo-liberal economy we've ended up with has drifted quite far from well-regulated Capitalism. I'd still argue that we owe a lot of our rights to hard-fought socialist policy though.
If people truly cared then there would be a high enough expected value to invest into building competitor to be financially worth it.
Sometimes companies will make more money by refusing to give consumers what they want. Collusion is also extremely profitable. A competitor that isn't interested in playing along can be bought out, but once shareholders get involved they're going to insist on screwing over their customers just like everyone else does anyway because they'd be leaving a huge pile of cash on the table otherwise and short term profits are all shareholders care about.
"by refusing to give consumers what they want." in practice consumers don't really want that, that much. The companies do similar things due to the similar ways consumers react to them. That's the point of this rely chain.
There are lots of things consumers want. They'd love a cell phone that didn't spy on them, they want a smart TV that isn't full of ads, they want an ink jet printer that doesn't refuse to print when there's still ink available. These aren't huge asks but because subjecting customers to them make companies money it's difficult, if not impossible to avoid.
What makes you think a competitor that "plays fair" can compete with a competitor that takes advantage of the system and extracts as much value as they can?
That argument doesn't really hold when the barriers of entry are so high. Believing that one of the biggest tech firms in the world is doing something undesirable and having a better idea that many people would in fact pay for is not the same as having the resources to become a unicorn with a huge global customer base that can practically implement that idea.
Plus, specifically for Microsoft, competing doesn't mean an alternative to Windows. It means an alternative to the entire enterprise stack, especially Office & M365.
Google hasn't enticed the big entrenched MS orgs to move over to Workspace, so if Google can't how can a smaller startup ever hope to accomplish that in the face of these behemoths that can just outlast them in a race to the bottom until they are insolvent or get bought by said behemoths?
Microsoft doesn't just sell an OS, or some services, they sell "IT in a box"
This is about markets. It has nothing to do with capitalism. And in fact, it is usually _because_ of healthy competition that this type of enshittification happens everywhere because quality is hard to compare for the buyers and so the sellers are forced to compete on cost.
How the hell can healthy competition breed enshittification? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Now tell me how that competition enshittified eating at restaurants?
For me, nothing stands out. If a restaurant charges nonsense fees, under-staffs to increase profits, reduce portions with the same value, etc. I can simply go to another one. Restaurants that enshittify will almost inevitably close.
But if we look at a closely related industry like the food delivery apps, we see the same exact signs of enshittification we see on the tech world due to monopolies (or oligopolies to be more exact) like: - Increased/hidden fees
- Increased delivery times
- Crappy apps with ads everywhere
- Ineffective review systems
- Pay-to-win search
- Dynamic pricing
They can get away with it because realistically, you don't have any other options. The cost to entry might not be that high but the network effect all but prohibits competition.
> Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Yes, and you correctly point out: On the average restaurant visit, nothing stands out. A good restaurant only needs to provide not-terrible food and not-terrible service to be almost indistinguishable from all others. Quality of a restaurant visit is hard to measure and compare. Price is easy to measure. Thus, the rational consumer will prefer the cheaper option (and even at the same price, a restaurant with lower costs will be more profitable, thus expand more easily).
The same thing happens on Amazon and other market places: When it is difficult to compare quality, price always wins out. Some products are interchangeable with well defined specs, like a 16GB RAM stick is obviously twice as good as 8GB RAM and so it can be twice as expensive and still sell. But when I'm looking for a new light for my bicycle there are no standardized specs to compare. All the product descriptions and pictures are exaggerated. I have no reliable information to tell if the lamp that is twice as expensive is really twice as good (and from personal experience: they never are), so I'm buying the cheapest one cause I expect all of the products to be equally crappy no matter the price.
It's not Amazon's fault. This happens everywhere.
If a regulator is effective at protecting the users, that regulator becomes a target for the industry
It’s an option issue, I use an extremely modified version of windows, and same one for the last 5 years I think with the updates, local accounts, no ads, no telemetry, tweaks etc. I still don’t like tons of things about windows but compared to Linux desktops it’s heaven (for me). Don’t even get me started on macOS desktop experience it’s a fucking miserable (again for my personal taste).
A lot of windows UI design decisions are pretty good. They mess it up now and then like windows 8 (tablet design mess) disaster, especially now with WSL 2.0, it delivers everything I need.
Do I still hate it , yes for the reasons explained in this article and other stupid designed features like search index, windows defender , mix of legacy and new dialogs, for the shitty design of powershell and then the mess of mixed shells, terminal etc.
List goes on, but comparatively I’ll pick windows desktop over anything out there at the moment. It’s a personal choice but I assume majority of windows user feel this way (or cannot afford macOS :))
Things forced on you is not market. You are not talking about market rules at all. This is not it!
I've noticed recently that my Windows 11 start menu isn't a 50% gray empty blob anymore. I always disable "recommended apps" (eg. ad supported app suggestions), so 50% of the space in my start menu was unused, yet it was still there of course. Kind of refreshing to have a somewhat normal looking start menu again with something as revolutionary as a list of apps right when you open it. Let's see how long it takes before they mess it up again.
Speaking only for myself, this sort of behavior is a great way to break the Trust Thermocline [1]. The point where I am so frustrated, so fed up, so expectant that said company will abuse me again, that I refuse to do business with them at all, under any circumstances, no matter if it is inconvenient to avoid them or not.
1. https://x.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904
Exactly. This behavior is blindly driving to "line go up" without realizing they just dug their own grave. 2025 was a series of existential missteps for Microsoft. This is a historic moment. These suits would rather die than try to build trust.
The answer to all of this has traditionally been robust competition.
A framework of just and fair laws and regulations should support this, backed up by open enforcement.
but, yeah.
The underlying philosophy for these companies seem to be "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Some of us are done forgiving, but I am not sure there are enough of us to reverse this cultural trend.
A view from my small corner on the inside: taste isn't merely not incentivized, it's actively disincentivized. It's not selected for during the interview process, if you demonstrate a little of it nobody cares, if you demonstrate too much of it you clash with everyone else's priorities which quickly becomes career limiting. So people willing to fight for taste never advance.
This isn't some nefarious plot to screw over users. Taste is not prioritized because nobody has it and thus can't recognize it. Can't value something you don't even recognize. This is orthogonal to talent btw. Lots of people there who are insanely good at what they do, who produce the most hideous API specs you've ever seen, as one example.
A much more mundane (and almost certainly true) explanation is that people who put all that crap in legitimately thought it's a good idea. Taste is its own thing and it's just not in Microsoft's DNA.
You'll note that those are both B2B fumbles. The savvy end user usually doesn't have the needed weight.
That's how the world works for everything: software, politics, social stuff (good or bad), war, etc. People are bad at judging gradual/slow changes but when you push a bit too far, you have already gained so much that you can usually just say sorry and move on
Like that windows recall feature which they keep pushing
Because Microsoft makes far more money on enterprise and ai products than they do selling windows licenses to consumers.
The rollback only ever applies to the thing people noticed. Everything else quietly becomes the new normal.
>It’s quite common for companies
It's quite common for megacorps, FAANG and friends, NASDAQ bigwigs.
It's rare for small companies, and extremely rare for independent developers.
Too late now. Multiple people having anything to say when choosing hardware and software, including me, will no longer advise or approve buying windows machine or using windows in general.
> It’s quite common for companies
This is not general. This is true only on markets which are full regarding available customers, and there is no foreseeable growth.
What we can see in IT in the past 10-15 years (especially after around 2015) is the slow progress towards this state from a rich and competitive (and personally I think a way more fun) one.
I worked for dying companies (e.g. Ericsson), for slowly moving ones (e.g. Santander), and for several now dead startups, and what happened with Google, Microsoft, etc is that they slowly moving from the "startup" market - there is still available non conquered market segments - to the dying, slowly moving one - where there are a few large players, and it's not possible to grow in any meaningful way with your own skills. The only difference now compared to the decades until the 90s is that antitrust checks and balances are dead, and they can artificially inflate their own power, which haven't happened in this scale for at least 100 years. And it caused world shattering problems back then, and it will now too.
I would leave this field happily, even when I'm exceptionally good in it, because it's more and more disgusting. Only if there would be any good alternatives, which wouldn't require me to loose at least a decade of my life. But unfortunately, the balance is way more fucked up to easily change my lifestyle at this point. And it will be just worse than this.
I think private interests should not run what is effectively public infrastructure, like Windows. Or, put another way, infrastructure of national importance should be publicly controlled and governed with transparency and public interests in mind. Either that, or true capitalist competition has to be reenabled aggressively: forbid walled gardens, split up the Googles, etc. This centralization of public utility and power in the hands of private individuals, coupled with an uncompetitive market, is nonsensical. Competition or nationalization.
Windows is not public infrastructure. If the government's reliance on it has reached the level of "national importance", then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not Windows' ownership.
Public infrastructure should be built on open-source, period.
Why is Windows not public infrastructure? Because it's privately owned, or because it's not relevant to enough of the public? I argue that it is public in function. My thinking matches yours as regards OSS.
The government haven't yet mandated you use windows. Yet. It will be soon, like with androids and iphones, for user identification so the government knows who sends every network packet.
I think managers were promoted for infecting their features with Copilot, and developers for infecting them with React, and here we are.
OneDrive managers on the other hand are one step away from inventing some way of adding a gacha mechanic.
Infecting with React can be easily explained by pathetic state of desktop application development environment.
See https://domenic.me/windows-native-dev/
This is an interesting point when the question is "how do I build a Windows app?" and a decision needs to be made. React is definitely one of the options that some consider when this question arises.
I think you miss the more common reasoning though. This starts with "can we build a Windows app?" The answer to that was "no" for many more people until relatively recently. The .NET Framework wasn't as available by default until the second half of the 2000s which caused some Windows app devs to hold off beyond the performance reasons and WinForms vs WPF. Electron and React go hand-in-hand here as they made a (crappy) Windows app easy.
What I feel popularized this was the webview approach on mobile. In 2010, there were a ton of frameworks popping up for hybrid mobile development. This was carried forward to desktop although some of us had been embedding IE webviews much earlier. This let people say "yes" and it went from one thing to the next with diversions into React Native.
It is worth pointing out that it is the Recommended section in the menu that uses React Native. See also https://devblogs.microsoft.com/react-native/rnw-settings-win...
I ditched Windows long ago so I'm mentioning this only in the interest of accuracy.
Blaming React is absurd. Its like blaming the screwdriver instead of the person using it.
Blaming React is correct. It is like asking for a picture on a wall and instead getting noisy, power hungry plasma TV on a wall.
I recently began developing an app for Xbox Series X/S. The only framework that will work is UWP. When you look at the UWP docs, this is at the top of the page highlighted "If you are starting to develop Windows apps, we recommend you consider using the Windows App SDK, and WinUI rather than UWP. Although still supported, UWP is not under active development. Please see Start developing Windows apps for more information."
So no, React is a (poor) solution, not the problem. The problem is Windows can't nail down a solid SDK for it's platforms.
Or instead of React you can use native WinUI. So using React is just lazy bloatware introduction
This metaphor is so stupidly bad it's hard to believe you guys even know what React is.
I'm not a dev and actually don't know what React is. I don't care for this metaphor.
As a user, however, I find that the Start menu has become more sluggish than it used to be, and that's pretty annoying. What about that?
Thank you, your comment sure helps to improve our understanding of React a lot.
My bad. I didn't realize it was my job to educate people who talk about things they don't know anything about.
lol what a weird response.
Thanks for adding nothing at all to the conversation.
I too would absolutely blame a plumber for trying to fix my leaking pipes with a screwdriver instead of e.g. a solder patch. Not everything is a screw, not even in the developing world.
lol Blame the plumber then.
"Infecting with screwdrivers" now see how dumb that sounds?
We can blame both. If my repair bill was higher because the mechanic chose to use a ridiculous electric screwdriver that used tons of power to achieve what a normal screwdriver can and stripped the screws in the process then I'd also be upset with both the mechanic and the ridiculously inefficient tool.
> a ridiculous electric screwdriver
So React, the most popular front-end library and used my hundreds of thousands of successful apps, is the ridiculous electric screwdriver? See how weird that sounds and makes it obvious you guys can't give an honest assessment?
React is a javascript library. Javascript needs its own runtime. Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and save having to run an entire javascript runtime for no reason?
Only someone who has not tried to write stuff in "native windows" would ask this question. If you want a real answer, go try and develop a Windows native application real quick. I'll wait...
I would hope that the windows developers who are working on the windows shell would know how to write a windows native application in C. If it's that bad, they should improve the API, not just write it all in react instead
Windows 7 was not written in react, it looked great and worked great. Get those guys to write the UI for Windows 11.
This is such a ridiculous argument. Applications were developed long before JavaScript was a thing.
.NET Framework needs its own runtime. Java needs its own runtime.
What's the issue?
I have no issue with user-facing applications doing whatever they want, electron apps bundle an entire chromium to do their thing, but there's a win32 and win64 api in C for a reason, to make OS level stuff fast
I wouldn't want my start menu to load the entire Java runtime before opening, that's the issue at hand.
> Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and save having to run an entire JavaScript runtime for no reason?
Idk, and I'm not saying it's not a good question, but it's irrelevant to the comparison in OP's comment.
Using an entire javascript runtime and framework to make your OS start menu is using a ridiculous overpowered electric screwdriver that strips heads. Using native windows controls is using a proper manual screwdriver that just works
it's also just a numbers thing. react and more broadly JS developers are a dime-a-dozen as far as availability goes compared to winapi folks.
which on one hand, good -- fuck microsoft and the monolith; on the other hand we get react start menus when we have to use microsoft.
Its popularity or success in other apps has nothing to with the windows situation.
Other apps are successful despite being slow and bloated, since performance isn’t a primary concern of users. In contrast it’s critical for OS internals like the start menu, so a javascript runtime and framework is just the wrong tool for the job.
"Shit tastes great! Millions of flies can't be wrong!" ;)
React only makes sense as a layer on top of the browser DOM, because the DOM itself cannot be fixed without rewriting it from scratch, so making it usable for non-trivial UI needs to happen in the 'framework layer'.
But without the DOM as the thing that needs fixing and the restrictions of the single-threaded browser-event-loop, the React programming model simply doesn't make a lot of sense. Using the "React-paradigm" outside the browser (e.g. SwiftUI, React Native) is pure cargo-culting, it only makes sense for onboarding web-devs who are already familar with React - but makes it harder to create UIs for anybody else.
The actual problem in the context of Win11 is of course that Microsoft doesn't have any sort of longterm strategy for Windows system APIs (not just UI frameworks). The only long-term-stable API is Win32.
He isn't blaming React (or Copilot), but those who used them in context they had no place in.
"developers with infecting then with React" is 100% blaming React
No it’s directly putting the blame on developers
"I'm on HN and whenever I see React mentioned I'm constitutionally incapable of not saying something dumb"
Seen in the context of the thread, with the both of you never addressing the actual problem at hand but instead reflexively and vigorously defending React against an alleged attack, I'm sorry to say this reads like an admission.
Nobody's blaming React. The blame lies on the bad developers that chose it to write a freaking start menu.
React is the symptom here, not the cause.
What does "infecting them with React" mean?
Introducing bloat.
Umm sir, it's Windows. Bloat is part of its core architecture.
Fair point...
So you’re saying that the people (HR) team is responsible and that their retention and growth policies are to blame.
>"It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate."
developer delusion. devs who barely use their own apps. who dont understand the day-to-day user experience.
The other thing is availability of alternatives.
Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.
> good luck getting the average person through the setup process.
an enterprising hardware manufacturer can take on the mantle, and be the trail blazer with a no-setup machine that works.
Personally, i would imagine something like framework laptop, and steam machine, are the best candidates.
This is what the Steamdeck is. But it took an absolutely massive amount of work over a decade from valve just to get gaming working. No laptop manufacturer could afford to do the same for fixing wine for desktop software since they aren’t getting a cut of the software sales like valve does.
That's mostly because they didn't care before. It also took a massive amount of work to get gaming to work on windows.
How long would it take for some MBA to come there and say hey if we install this full of crap we could make multiple euros per unit... And then fill it with crap, spying and other things?
Purely hypothetical, hasn't happened yet. The reason is that Linux system vendors are lead and staffed by people who are idealistic like the average Linux system customer. They know their clientele, they know it would be bad for business.
Good luck getting the average person through the setup process
AI is part of the problem with what MS has shoved in to things but it may be part of what can help with the underlying issue of this behavior by corporations.
The average user increasingly will not need to be walked through in certain ways, they’ll only have to be aware something, some way, is possible. Because we are most of usthe average, meaning outsider to knowledge and understanding of things their functioning on a computer. I can strip out tired windows behavior to some extent and certainly stand up a Linux desktop. But I didn’t know how to easily manage retrieval of data from an old disc image that refused to mount. But I knew it was there and not impossible so I asked Claude. A one shot prompt that a few minutes later had Claude reading raw bytes in someway and finding the location of a few files I needed.
So there is potential for AI to fill some gaps in this way and make some things easier and more in reach of average users. It’s potential only though, so continuing to work and ensure open models remain a thing, it’s important. Just like the Internet enabled a lot of things previously out of reach of people. And yeah, that was not an un mixed blessing with the rest, so all the more reason to move forward thoughtfully.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
Yes, when there isn’t real competition. And that’s in part due to a long history of anti competitive practices but also simply because Microsoft is too big and should be broken up.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
It's called "enshittification": https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate
I get the impression that many companies are working through this with AI-assisted coding. How bad can the product get before the revenue loss is greater than money saved by firing programmers and deploying AI slop? For products like Windows and Office, the subscription model and enterprise account revenue provides a huge cushion for decreasing quality before they even have to apologize and roll back.
One point that wasn't mentioned is that we've been through this cycle many times before with Microsoft, and we will again.
It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft went "all in" on Windows for developers and power users. WSL was drastically improved, developer tools were revamped and open sourced. The press adored the "new" Microsoft. Many developers moved over to Windows because they "got the best of both worlds".
And then, they just went back to the same old shit. The thing is, the shit phase of this cycle lasts longer than the non-shit phases.
This next phase is just words, so far. But, mind you, even if Microsoft does produce releases to back up those words, they'll be back to their same old shit within a year or two, once again.
And the whole process will repeat.
PS: And regardless of this supposed change of direction, if you listen to recent statements from Satya and other senior leadership, they are still spewing the same platitudes about agentic computing and software. So what's really going to change long-term?
I remember being excited about Edge, I even started using it because it was fast and had a couple of built-in features I liked. It was a big improvement over the old IE, it felt like Microsoft was going the right direction, but then they kept using dark patterns to change my default search engine to Bing.
Now you have "rounded edges" in Edge that add a content area limiting margins to all sides. Also, they took an open source browser and do not provide the source for Edge. So much for love of open source.
Every third version, as the saying goes.
Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.
But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.
Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.
We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory.
Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.
Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.
> Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows
I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.
SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.
I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.
> giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
Prior to SharePoint 2013, Microsoft used sparse columns. It made for massive tables and was poor design.
Moving to XML blobs for user-defined schemas was the correct choice. The table schema became significantly smaller and user-defined schemas (for Lists/Libraries) could become much more complex.
> The traditional Office suite is still good
I don't think so. The web version is mostly incompatible with the Windows or Mac desktop versions.
Have you compared the UI of Word/Powerpoint/Excel with alternatives like Apple Pages/Keynote/Numbers or Google Docs/Sheets? For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons, abysmal font rendering and insane defaults.
> For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons
In the case of Office I actually consider it a strength. Office has to take into account a large number of use cases, most people will use only a fraction of what is available, but not everyone use the same fraction. So that "unrelated button" may be someone else's essential feature. The "insane defaults" are what people are used to. I don't know about Apple, but I tend to get to the limits of Google Docs/Sheets rather quickly. It may cover 99% of my needs, but Office gives me the missing 1%.
That's for the traditional Office Microsoft are sabotaging, the web versions are only a shadow of it, and by most points worse than the Google suite, and that's the problem.
As for font rendering, I am sure that Apple is ahead, it has always been their strength. Microsoft may be the king of the office, but when it comes to art and creative work, Apple has always been on top.
The font rendering is a dealbreaker for me. I have to use Word periodically for exchanging files with customers where we have zero say in the mechanism. That is, when they say "here's our version of the contract for review before we give you $$$", and it's in Word that doesn't open cleanly in something better like Pages or Google Docs (yeah, I said it and I meant it), then Word it is.
I can't stand using it a moment longer than I have to, and never, ever use it for anything other than this kind of legacy doc compatibility situation. The font rendering is so, so bad that I just can't look at it. If MS ever cared to fix it then I bet that could move their Mac adoption by at least a few percent, which would work out to a nice chunk of change at their scale. But alas, no. We get stuck with something that looks like they took a photo of an LCD calculator screen and downscaled it.
Windows used to exist in a competitive environment where they had to fight to remain relevant. For a long time now they have become complacent, no matter how many ads, product placements, and user abusive features they push, people will tolerate it.
The situation has only just changed now that Apple and Valve are getting close to threatening the Windows monopoly.
Isn’t this backwards? Microsoft had way less competition on the desktop in the 90s than they do now.
I do not think so. The Windows - OS/2 war was a big fight that Microsoft won on merits. Windows 95 was revolutionary at the time, folks queued at the malls on the release day to get it, bugs and all.
They fought the compiler wars with real engineering, giving Borland a run for the money. Different people have different opinions about Visual Studio. As a Linux user since 0.9 I did not like its architecture and focus on GUI at the expense of everything else, but I still saw it as a consistent framework done by excellent engineers. And so on.
On the desktop, I don't believe Microsoft has had significant competition for quite some time, likely back to Windows 95. In the server space, NT fought really hard against the UNIX giants of the time.
Windows’ share of the desktop market has dropped from about 95% in the late 90s to around 70% now.
Frankly I don't know why we still have laptops. Honestly I think my mobile with a usbc base for screen and usb would perfectly work in a hardware pov. I don't know if Android would work, and besides of that a small fixed pc for whatever needs power.
because phones are not general computing devices, and really shouldn't be. They are too important to modern society to be unlocked for their full potential.
That said, I doubt the average person on a laptop even needs a general computing device, so your point does make sense. Though, is carrying around a screen and a keyboard and cable any better than carrying a laptop?
I could see an argument of it being cheaper, but that would take years, possibly decades, of multiple competitors in the space for the market to make that true.
Now, if we could have a decent folding keyboard and monitor that fit into the same case as your phone, that would be a game changer, but I don't think anyone is risking the investment to develop that.
People want a full-size keyboard. Adding a couple of millimetres underneath that keyboard allows you to put a whole computer in there.
We have laptops because it makes sense. Look at Apple's Macbook Neo. The tiny logic board on that computer is the least of Apple's worries. The most expensive components are the display and case. Why not charge 100 bucks more and not have to worry about this thing being a phone accessory?
Yeah, that's basically my point.
The only way it would make sense to use your phone is if the keyboard and monitor can fold up so small that they can attach to the phone and still fit in your pocket. Otherwise, just using a laptop is going to be better every time.
Yeah, it used to feel like "we'll crush competitors, but at least we ship solid software"
Its as steve jobs said, once you control market share theres no incentive to build a good product and you lose the ability to do it.
It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products).
Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.
Microsoft has indeed lost their way with Microsoft, but not in the sense that they became evil ghouls. They've always been evil ghouls. No, what's happened is that Windows became a minor part of Microsoft's profits. The whole company is not focused on Windows the way Apple is with the iPhone.
The higher ups no longer care about Windows as a product itself. They only care about Windows as a storefront to their other efforts (OneDrive, Office, Copilot, etc.)
I mean, at least their software used to be pretty good. The Windows NT kernel is arguably a better design than Linux. I complain about NTFS now, but thirty years ago it was better than most other filesystems. And Windows NT at least didn't jam a billion ads down your throat.
Granted, MS has always been a pretty evil anti-competitive company, so I'm not trying to sanitize them much here.
I'd read "Microsoft lost their way" as a description of how the speaker's worldview has changed, as they've gained experience and perspective.
Microsoft is often good to their customers. Generally in situations where badness has a poor RoI, or they're trying to lure you deeper into their clutches.
I find Teams is often simply picked because of cost reasons.
A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?
Don't forget network effects. If other companies you are working with use Teams then there is less friction if you also use Teams yourself.
That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend that decision.
6k would be a no-brainer.
In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's about 14/user/month.
At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly cost for something that is comparable to something you can get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and intuitive it is.
That's a very upside down way to think about it.
The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive with it, than the free version?"
The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as well.
Not 'But it costs $X million!'.
Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day?
Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their monitors.
This is exactly right. You're going to pay a dev on the order of $10,000 per month, then make it harder to do their job to save $14? That's idiocy.
The person responsible for picking our work laptops asked me for advice selecting our new Macs since our old model was being replaced:
"Do we really need to spend an extra $1000 for 64GB of RAM instead of 24GB?"
"That'd save us $300 per year, or about a dollar a day, over the deprecation schedule, and it'd make our devs slower. We spend more than this to have lunch catered."
"You know... good point. 64GB it is, then."
And that's how we opted for beefy machines on this hardware cycle. The guy I talked to is extremely smart and competent, but just hadn't looked at it from that angle. Once he saw it, he instantly bought in. There are dumb ways to save money with massive negative ROI, and cheaping out on basic equipment and resources is one of them.
I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.
> I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.
I, living in Germany, rather wonder myself quite often why US-American tech startups don't act much more frugally: this would give them so much more leeway/runway to make their startups succeed.
Half of the time it's startups subsidizing each other in a circle to have users. Like if you're a VC, you "force" your companies to use tools made by your other companies. So everyone will use the chat app made by one company the VC owns, the CRM software, all the different SaaSes etc. So it's just money moving in a circle, but then all the apps get to claim good sales and user numbers.
A big part of it is that if you're in a very competitive realm, where most of the startups you hear about are working, then every day counts. If you can spend $1M to develop a product in a year or $2M to develop it in 6 months, that extra million gives you a 6 month head start in sales, revenue growth, and publicitity. Depending on the numbers involved, that frugality could cost huge amounts of money overall.
Note that you don't hear so much about the many, many startups doing slow growth things in less glamorous fields. I know a few companies making agricultural products for small farmers. Yes, frugality makes perfect sense for them. They're not going to have a hockey stick growth curve where they go from $0 to $10M to $1B over the course of 2 years. Their revenue graph will look more like a traditional manufacturer. They're doing things the way you describe, but they're not all over tech and non-tech news sites.
Quicker and bigger is better than slower and smaller. Especially in a competitive sector.
Better to go bust quick, than to eke out a tiny profit by being super frugal. The latter is a waste of everybody's time.
The reasoning makes more sense when you factor in that your startup’s VC is also Slack’s VC.
You’re actually giving that same venture capitalist $4m of their own money back, in a way that makes their investment more valuable.
> 6k would be a no-brainer.
"It’s one banana, Michael, how much could it cost? 10 dollars?"
That would be 420k/yr. To get to 4 million you need 25000 users. That's quite a big company.
So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There must be massive discounts above certain threshold.
Your corp has 95 thousand employees but bats an eye at 16 million dollars?
Also yes, volume licensees generally get massive discounts.
You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our jobs'
yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.
How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise.
And if you put it to a vote, "would you rather upgrade from Teams to Slack for $9 per month, or get $9 of taxable income more per month?", I think there's a very good chance you'd be switching that week.
(I don't love Slack by any means. Still, I'd pay $9/mo out of my own pocket not to use Teams.)
We used to have anti trust regulators. We don't now.
We've got a lot of billionaires with a higher balance on their bank accounts though, so you can't say it was all for nothing
It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a winner takes all Ferengi style system.
yeah I don't understand how this isn't blatant market abuse through their monopoly position
Regulators should be all over it. EU has tried, but unsuccesfully, since it was lawyers who came up with the mitigation.
Regulators are either sleeping on billions of lobby money or asleep at the wheel
Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365 subscription is net positive for the bean counters.
Chat software is absurdly expensive. I’m not saying teams is good, but being nickel and dimed is a real risk for businesses too.
18€ a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat application seems absolutely insane.
>Chat software is absurdly expensive.
Define absurdly expensive here. I can probably guarantee that for small to medium sized business paying Slack or Microsoft for chat software is miles cheaper than self hosting it yourself.
My Google-Fu says Slack costs $18.00 /user/mo for their Business+ subscription plan. That's still relative peanuts compared to the yearly salary, let's say 60k/year, of developer you hire to self-host and maintain an on-prem Matrix/Jitsi instance with all the equivalent bells and whistles of Slack/Teams, but guess what, even then your clients/partner will send you MS Teams invites for calls, so you still have to pay for it anyway.
Then isn't it easier if you just fork out the cash for Teams so you can focus on your product instead?
Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks.
We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.
Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.
What % of Microsoft's revenue comes from government contracts? I'd be very surprised if it's more than 2-3%
Even if gov adoption dropped, I suspect the incentives wouldn't change much unless there were genuinely viable, low-friction alternatives.
Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent.
XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.
No they haven't oscillated.
Generally Windows NT line to Windows 2000-7 was pretty decent. Even Vista once Service Pack 1 came out was pretty decent. Vista Service Pack 2 is basically Windows 7. Win 8 and everything after has been garbage.
> XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
The cycle is more complicated:
* 2000: exceptional
* XP: bad (the original XP was indeed bad)
* XP SP2 (from a technological perspective basically a new OS): decent
* Vista: bad
* 7: good
* 8: awful (it was so bad that soon 8.1 was introduced)
* 8.1: bad
* 10: controversial (some say it's "decent"; some say it's "bad" because of the magnitude of telemetry (spying) that Windows 10 introduced)
* 11: awful
So, in my opinion it's rather a general downward trend with some overlaid cycle.
Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been wonky, but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.
They had a "last release in the series was best pattern" with Win 3.11 / NT, Win 98 SE / 2K and XP SP2 (which merged the consumer and business tracks).
After that, it's been strictly downhill. 7's additions vs XP are purely hostile to the end user, including escrowed disk encryption and DRM. 8 was the beginning of the pivot to mandatory cloud. 10 added mandatory telemetry and ads. 11 added nonsensical AI crapware, and turned the ads to 11.
> Windows 8 was better than 10. The UI might have been wonky, but 10's telemetry was a far bigger problem.
Don't worship Windows 8/8.1.
It also introduced WinRT, an API that gave the programmers a lot less freedom; the roadmap was clear: applications should from now on be developed for the WinRT API, and only be distributed via an app store (Windows Store). The old WinAPI shall be legacy, and will only be provided as long as Microsoft is willing to.
Windows 8's ARM version (Windows RT) was incredibly locked-down; here applications could only be installed via an app store (Windows Store). It was clear that Microsoft had similar plans for the x86 version.
Actually, because of programmers' and users outcry regarding this, Microsoft pedaled back in this regard with Windows 10 (but started introducing a lot more telemetry).
Also, Windows 8 was the Windows version that started the tight integration of the local user account and the Microsoft account. Windows 8 and 8.1 were the first versions of Windows for which the "How can I avoid setting up a Microsoft account when installing Windows?" tutorials started.
> Windows 8 was better than 10.
No, Win8 was all about the Metro/RT nonsense, the attempt to convert Windows into a touch-centric locked-down App Store platform.
While a fair bit of that lived on in 10, it was far less obnoxious. Although they still managed to break things like Sticky Notes in the process of converting them to 'store apps'
The general downward trend is across the whole of tech, if not the whole of society, rather than just Microsoft products though.
Even earlier than that:
Win98: bad
Win98 SE: good
Completely agree with your timeline and rating, 2000 was the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with, before it was such a bad shitshow that MS-DOS 6.22 seemed like coming from another planet.
Hated 10, was forced to it basically only due to gaming, a common assholish trick MS uses whenever it can. But when looking from 11 perspective, 10 was fine compared to that heap of disorganized badly designed crap.
Yet again time to be ashamed to work for MS, this time its sticking around like tar spit on a white shirt.
> 2000 was the first windows one could use the word 'stable' with
Windows NT4 was also very stable (once you installed the Service Packs), but had a lot less convenience and modern features than Windows 2000.
> Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams?
People seem to forget Teams is the unloved child of a forced marriage between acquisitions, it was never going to turn out successful.
Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom?
The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.
I haven't had that many issues on Windows "native" client. So I really don't get what the critical issue is... To me it has long looked like good enough.
Teams if you only use it for meetings is great, truly. It's easy and simple. Messages in the attached chat rooms of recurring meetings is really convenient. DMs work seamlessly and sort in between those meeting chats.
The problem is that the "teams" in teams are a cobbled mess that works like a combination of forums posts and chat rooms. If you have coworkers who really like that functionality, you're forced to interact with the garbage underbelly of the app. My opinion of Teams shifted drastically when we got a new PM (former MS employee) who started putting things there, making them hard to keep track of.
Well I genuinely like Teams. Being forced to work on a mix of Zoom & teams in my new work, I have found an appreciation of using M365 connected tools - Outlook,claendar, teams, sharepoint, copilot etc just work very well together for me.
Teams is not that bad if you are using Office and OneDrive anyway, as it integrates well with those.
Most of my team members are using different named chats for discussion instead of channels, which are used for more important notices. Somehow it works, and our channels on slack were also basically chats anyway.
My only gripe is that Linux does not have a “native” client anymore and the web client is full of bugs on Firefox. But it’s Microsoft, what can you expect. It’s not that bad except for memory consumption on other platforms.
I use Firefox on Mac when I'm stuck in a Teams meeting. The native client attendees invariably have more problems than I do with connections, authentication, forced updates mid-meeting, etc.
I'm guessing the native client has been going downhill, based on frequency of issues people report. I hope they kind of forgot about the web client, and won't enshittify it as quickly.
I don't like either very much. Both Teams and Zoom try to stay resident after you're done. I use both from the browser now because they are both abusive.
No but it’s hard to get excited about two different flavours of shit sandwich. Teams is terrible piece of software no doubt but slack is worse, marginally
Yes, and you are wrong.
Objectively.
I believe they are abusing their customers but I think it's in poor taste to compare this to domestic violence.
I strongly disagree, and not because of the "Microsoft is associated with bad things and that's a form of violence" points other people mentioned.
The end result of treating domestic and sexual abuse like Serious Important Subjects that people should only talk about in a Serious Respectful Tone isn't that people become more mindful of abuse dynamics, it's that they avoid bringing up the subject at all.
In practice, yes, abusive practices of corporations echo abusive practices of violent partners, and the parallel is worth highlighting. Bringing up the fact that both of them will use grand gestures to stop you from questioning their pattern of behavior isn't disrespectful, it's useful information.
If anything, abuse victims should hear that message more often.
The underlying point about power imbalance and gradual normalization of bad behavior is fair, but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
> but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
Twitter literally runs CSAM-as-a-service.
While Microsoft is not quite that evil, building the North Korean computer surveillance system with "Recall" comes pretty close. Other examples include things like Facebook's regular doxxing of it's users with their real name policy.
It's a crass comparison, but not unreasonable on both sides. Abuse goes beyond just physical violence, and the practices of these tech companies really do match those other kinds of abuse. The other half is that software has eaten the world, and these changes really do affect people's lives.
> but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
It's imperfect. We have way more choices in domestic partners than we do with operating systems but I think there are a lot of similarities though too. User-hostile software like Windows is intentionally designed to develop dependence and learned helplessness in users. Windows will gaslight you. Microsoft will victim blame. Many shared tactics. It's a fair comparison to make.
One more similarity is how hard it seems to be to break up with an abusive partner: when I saw the "Windows anounces Recall - Linux increases its Steam market share by 25%" meme, I checked under https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/, and yes, in May 2024 it went up - from 1.9% to 2.32%. But in February 2025, it was back down to 1.45%. It has rebounded since, to 3.38% in January this year, but dropped to 2.23% in February. Not sure where these big fluctuations come from - maybe Linux gamers don't really play that often, so they only log on to Steam sporadically?!
saying victims of domestic violence should chose better is also victim blaming ma dude.
> saying victims of domestic violence should chose better is also victim blaming
You're the only one saying that, not me.
I disagree. Microsoft's actions have real world consequences, increasingly including violence. They're building a surveillance machine that is already being used like organizations such as ICE, and that's not even the worst of it. Look at how they are trying to tip the balance of power from employees to employers with telemetry in Windows 11, Office 365, LinkedIn and GitHub.
Like domestic abusers, things only expand and escalate from here.
The title is supposed to be provocative and hyperbolic. Much of what is provocative and hyperbolic could be considered to be in poor taste, that is the entire point.
The guy is an ex-Darknet Vendor and regularly interacts still with people that build ransomware, hack the US government, sell online drugs and he is quite pleasant compared to these people.
> The guy is an ex-Darknet Vendor and regularly interacts still with people that build ransomware, hack the US government, sell online drugs and he is quite pleasant compared to these people.
It’s _almost_ as if we don’t use “people that build ransomware, hack the US government, sell online drugs” as a baseline for “pleasant”.
The point I was making that the norms for many of us isn't this behaviour of everyone is walking on eggshells. I find it infuriating that people will get bent out shape if they hear the truth. I prefer it when people talk plainly and speak how they feel. He is unfront and honest, which I appreciate much more than a snake in the grass (which is how many people behave in spaces where language and behaviour is tightly controlled).
I find it honestly ridiculous that people are complaining about provocative & hyperbolic title, to the point where I believe they are concern trolling.
I agree and appreciate you calling this out.
It’s easy to not understand the impact or meaning of referring to violence in a flip way when one has never had to have experienced it.
I also appreciate the callout but don’t believe it’s in bad taste. There are enough analogs, and it makes you question the type of people who run the companies and make the decisions. In MSFTs case, Bill Gates was an associate with a known pedophile and likely an abuser himself.
I completely understand it being triggering but shying away from it because of that protects perpetrators. A lot of executive circles are filled with abusive freaks and their decision making reflects that.
A article mapping out those connections would be a good thing to do. That’s not what this article is, though. This is about Microsoft having poor quality software and a business model that is adversarial to their customers.
I'm willing to bet very good money that windows forcing an update somewhere has led to things that has killed someone.
Damn, really, 2 downvotes? Do you guys think what I said is wrong (or irrelevant or something)?
I'll be happy to correct myself if I said anything wrong, but downvotes without comments really don't tell me much.
The guy was a Darknet Vendor and has been to Jail/Prison in the US.
So when he looks at Windows 11 and calls it something bad, you should probably pay attention.
He is someone that cares about operation and information security. Modern Consumer operating systems basically throw all of that out of the window. On top of that he hate Microsoft.
Not too surprising in a society where we use the language of homicide and violence for trivial things like describing a good comedian.
Thank you for saying this. Some journos don’t mind crossing the line for a click bait headline.
I felt the exact same way. Put a bad taste in my mouth and I just stopped reading.
Yeah, fully agree. The idea domestic abusers care about flowers is ludicrous. They’re violent and mostly remorseless about it. Anyone who dealt with it personally would chuck the flowers in the bin.
You'd be surprised how much that happens. They'll sweet talk their way back and that's how these relationships often survive.
While I have many grievances with Windows 11, I am particularly upset about the taskbar. Back in Windows 10, I used a double-height taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. I forget the name of the specific setting, but all windows would appear as their own item, and, the taskbar would ensure that all items retained the same width.
The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get past not being able to at least make a double height taskbar. But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10 also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would resize all existing items to the same dimension.
This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running Windows 10.
Yes, it seems like UI designers only solve the basic use case: beginner user with 3 apps open on a 14" laptop, each full screen, or tiled side-by-side.
I imagine them presenting their design on a static PowerPoint slide, and upper-management says "beautiful", and they move on to CoPilot features, never looking back.
The Teams... team... took several years to let us pop out chats to their own windows. The minimum size of the window was almost half my screen for a long time, which was annoying since it had a mobile app and my phone is way smaller.
Someone would send you a document and it took over the entire Teams window. You had to exit it in order to chat with the person about the document. The concept of having more than one 'thing' on screen at the time was completely missing. My only explanation was that the developers had never used a computer before.
I am particularly needy when it comes to the taskbar. I installed a few mods:
* Windhawk - can tweak taskbar with extensions similiar to gnome tweaks imo (free)
* DisplayFusion - qol for multi monitor setups (paid)
I would give it a try if these two applications help you, honestly there's just so many settings to explore -- but afaik static width was something I needed and got done through Windhawk.
You should not have to hack Explorer to make it usable.
For me the worst is Microsoft Start news. I've already turned it off multiple times and it always come back.
To add insult to injury, it always displays terrible gossip, sports or far right news.
If any developer that works in MS news service is reading this message, please know that I hate you.
It's so mind-boggling that they have control over the default browser home page and the news feed on everyone's taskbar and they choose to show gossip and one weird trick that doctors hate. Don't they feel embarrassed that they pollute their brand like this? Is the revenue from the clicks really worth it, or do they just not care?
While crazy to us, I bet we're in the minority. Average computer user might actually like it or at worse (to MSFT) not even notice it. Their web experience is bombarded with "1 weird trick" ads everywhere.
I don't think it's about revenue from clicks; they probably believe that it is what customers want, because those customers click on it. That surely means that they want it.
No worries, this is just how manipulative relationships work: they always aim for unidirectional communication.
You're obliged to consume the most important news from the most important entity on the planet Earth (Microsoft/Facebook/X/...), eat piles of informational crap that get dumped onto you, waste you emotional energy on processing the whole thing, participate in drama and show your admiration. Why? Because you're very convenient when in this state, you're mendable and coercible for whatever action the entity wants you to do without saying it directly.
But when it's time to listen to you and your concerns - surprise-surprise, nobody's home. It's one way only, see you next time, maybe.
P.S. Forcefully installing an attention-pollutve app like News in the Start Menu is nothing less than a way to control you. And for an insatiable ego, the sense of control is everything. This is why it keeps coming back, again and again, as if it's a lucky reoccurring coincidence. A Windows Update repairs the system? Yes, plus it repairs the system of control. Security patches are very convenient vehicle for that - once you eat it, you'll be served special dishes you never asked for.
Use this https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 or something similar, unfortunately without this level of tweaking it will be a shit show, not deeply modified windows feels like browsing the internet without an ad blocker.
I turned it off exactly once through the settings and it's never appeared again over years of updates. How did you "turn it off"?
I presume that it's a difference between Windows OS editions. I turned it off too, but it wasn't as easy as one click, I had to use Group Policies to decrapify the adjacent aspects of the system. Group policies are not available in Windows Home edition, for example.
I just went into the settings for the widgets, turned off the "Start" or "News" experience or whatever it is and it's never come back. Just using the toggle it offers in settings. While I was at it I went into the taskbar settings and just turned off the widgets altogether, never came back. I wonder if sometimes we just assume the worst and resort first to "hack" ways to disable some of these things and when a new update comes along from your company or whoever, it gets re-enabled. Instead of just using the built-in functionality for turning things off.
No no you don't understand. "Here's a picture of some gross toenails" is the sincere best most valuable advertisement that the fourth most valuable company in the united states is capable of delivering. If anything better existed, they would be using it.
do you really expect us to believe ms is pushing 'far right news'?
perhaps youre just so far left that anything slightly in the center feels 'far right'?
when bing / edge recommends me stories it's never ever 'far right'. it's almost always something pro-left or that makes the (R) look negative.
As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows platform today.
- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;
- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.
- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.
- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements. But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
Its the curse of the power user.
Don't forget general familiarity. I don't know about today, but Apple was once very big on giving large discounts to education specifically for the purpose of getting students familiar with their machines.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html#kids
My point is it's harder to switch from the system you know.
Excel is the biggest blocker for my dad, and why I keep losing the argument to get my parents to move to Linux or Mac.
Pretty much all their other stuff is stuff that either works fine on Linux or is just in the browser anyway, but the only thing that I don't really have a rebuttal to is when my dad points out that he uses the full-fat excel and a lot of the more modern features.
I would so rather they move to Linux, and just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it. Annoying since I'm still expected to play tech support for them and Microsoft's recovery tools do not work, and as far as I can tell have literally never worked for anyone in human history, and I'm not entirely convinced that the people at Microsoft have ever tested them.
> just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it
Just curious, is it about different tools / workflow / the new thing to learn (and those are valid reasons!) or are there some technical issues with for example Winboat?
They've never used Winboat (or anything Linuxey really), so it's definitely not a fault with Winboat itself.
Honestly I think they really just don't want to change and they're trying to look for ways out because they know that "I don't want to!" isn't going to fly with me if I'm expected to be tech support.
What do they do with Excel for Windows that they can't do with Excel for Mac?
This is exactly what I do with my personal computing. I would prefer to be on linux, but a lot of people still sends me data in excel spreadsheets for processing, and lets be honest: apple hardware is fucking awesome.
The feeling of being able to work away from my desk and dont care about battery, is so goooooooood.
And I have to admit. Even if I dont like macos, my macbook with m1 and 16gb ram is probably the fastest laptop I ever own.
Excel for Mac has gotten a lot better - but I'm not surprised if it is still its own thing - with edge cases in format, macros, visual basic, linking to databases and data sources etc. I imagine excel under wine is better than the port to Mac in some respects.
If you can even get Excel working under Wine. Older ones work fine, but AFAIK there's no way to get the modern Excel working on Wine.
I'm honestly not sure. I'm sure my dad Googled something to use it as an excuse to not change.
As I said in a sibling comment, I think they really just don't want to change and they are looking for excuses; I suspect even if I could prove that there's absolute feature parity between the two versions they'd just find another reason.
You can run Photoshop and small Excel (fine for 90%) on Mac without an issue.
The real problem is more specific industry software - Revit, Solidworks and probably a thousand smaller ones.
yeah, solidworks. forgot about it. A lot of people depend on that.
It very depends on which part of the software is needed. SOLIDWORKS is usable on a windows VM via Parallels thanks to their GPU acceleration (it's totally unusable via Virtual Box/VMware on a Mac). Would love to hear the other thousand smaller ones. Davinci for professional video editing is a multi-platform. No idea about Mastercam.
>Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
I was thinking about this compatibility problem the other day. Usually someone moving between office suites (MSFT Office, Google Drive, LibreOffice) complains stuff broke, then they give up / drop it / work around it. I was imagining an ideal path would be to document these cases of incompatibility as bugs/issues in LibreOffice. Describe the difference and how it should work, then LibreOffice fixes their software to better match. I don't know if this already happens. Personally I avoid all office software like the plague and try to work with plain text files and vim. I just hear about these issues enough that I'm mildly invested in the situation by now.
I tried to tell a friend about WYGIWYM stuff like LaTeX, groff, and Typst the other day. He seemed more interested in "figuring out" why stuff broke when changing between office software. I tried to tell him that MSFT doesn't follow their own spec and everyone else has to reverse engineer it, resulting in implementation differences. Plus MSFT's own implementation being proprietary so it can't be easily copied. I'm not sure the weight of the situation got across to him.
Pulling the emergency break promising to improve a situation will in general not build any trust unless the mea culpa also includes:
1. An analysis of what allowed the situation to get out of control to begin with
2. Systematic changes to prevent it from happening again
Otherwise you will just be in the same situation again in 3 years. And neither is included in Microsoft's messaging here.
I don't really see that happening here.
Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be gaining any by this move.
That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their public image is as bad as it can get.
> they won't be gaining any by this move.
Then why even do it?
Microslop is saying “I’m sorry that you’re offended” and will continue to abuse their users. All of this is a PR campaign to fix their image so that they can raise more money.
Just a guess, with Macbook Neo releasing, M$ likely got scared of mass exodus to MacOS (the average PC user can now consider a Macbook and it likely wipes the floor with all Windows laptops out there) and decided to throw in a damage control piece.
Hilariously, the MacBook neo has the same taskbar issues since it was what Microsoft copied. No one is getting replaced so I’ll guess they’ll just add some customizations to make it more Mac-like to win users back.
Unfortunately Apple is learning to be as annoying too. I don't want to upgrade to Tahoe which is inscrutable to me. Maybe remind me next year. But they pop up every week reminding me to "upgrade" even though most the problems are unfixed. They have pushed iCloud in the settings application as if it is an adboard.
Hopefully they stop but I recognize these steps from Windows slippery slope.
This sucks. Sometimes they even disguise the update to Tahoe notification as "Pending updates to install later tonight".
I haven't upgraded, and the notifications are fairly rare and unintrusive.
I get it at least once a day. Sometimes as "Update to Tahoe" and sometimes as "Install pending updates tonight".
Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.
The reason, i opine, that so few people switch from Windows to any Unix flavor is that Windows users are waiting for the two productivity suites which make Windows at least marginally usable (cygwin and msys) to be ported to any of the Unix flavors.
;)
It’s just office.
Make office work and people will happily leave in droves.
Apparently you can https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwDbERjm0yA
That one's using PlayOnLinux.
Not tried it myself but that's been one of the blocks to me using linux as a day to day thing. Although I'm on mac and don't find it too bad.
That is Office 2013, or a 13 year old software.
Play on Lennox is just non-free wine. And no offense to the wine people, but it seems like perhaps they have hit a wall on what would be Windows 10 translation.
I bought my first x86 PC in 1994 to install Linux on. I wanted a Sun workstation but couldn't afford it.
I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like they have Stockholm Syndrome.
My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac.
The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. It's got the price of entry down to where it's now the obvious recommendation for less-technical friends/family wanting an affordable-but-nice laptop for light home/office/student use.
I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real Mac running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.
> I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real Mac running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.
Maybe, but I somewhat doubt it, for a few reasons:
- Kids like iPads for gaming/video watching, and the overhead of computer interfaces for them might discourage laptopping (understandable for littler kids; regrettable loss of tech familiarity for older ones, but true regardless).
- Parents/rough users like iPads 'cuz there aren't moving parts or gaps to get hammered and damaged, though the screen is a risk.
- Cellular iPads/huge phone-alikes are pretty popular, and the vast majority of users are unfamiliar with the idea of hooking a computer-shaped device up to cellular internet.
- iPads are easier to MDM-manage/lock down. You can do that on MacOS too, of course, but a lot of folks find it easier to regulate kid/employee/etc. use of an iPad because the management system is familiar and simpler.
- iPads feel like a big phone. That's a pretty intuitive switch for a lot of folks who either don't have keyboarded computers at all, or associate them with non-fun (work/school) computing. Silly distinction to draw, to be sure, but very significant in the minds of many users. The single-brick/touch aspect of iPads is desirable enough that a fold-out laptop isn't going to overlap with a lot of those users.
> The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. I
It already is.
> MacBook Neo Just Broke an Apple Sales Record, Shipping Delays Continue
> The laptop is a record-breaking release for sales to first-time Mac owners, according to Tim Cook.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/macbook-neo-just-broke-an-apple-s...
I don't think Ipads are selling well. I have an old style basic one (from 2019 I think?), and the only thing I use it for is to read articles and occasionally look at emails, for which it's perfectly adequate.
Tablets can do very little that you can't do on a phone.
Phones got larger and more capable, tablets now seem somewhat redundant. But a laptop with a keyboard and 'real OS' can still do many things that aren't practical on a tablet or phone.
> for normal people is to buy a Mac
Thus, the MacBook Neo. For the average user who only occasionally needs a general-purpose computer, it's powerful enough. As the geek in my friends-and-family circle, it's what I will be recommending to most of them if they ask.
Most of them only use phones or tablets anyway.
If they have a budget of ~ $1000, then I'd recommend an AMD Linux laptop. For folks here, I'd recommend similar, but pave it + put Devuan or similar on it.
For low end laptops, if you can tolerate Apple's terrible window manager, rapidly declining stability, and creeping ads (they leaked expansion plans that are coming soon), then the Neo probably wins.
Typed on a macbook pro.
> but pave it + put Devuan or similar on it.
The distribution which left the root account without a password if you selected "Use sudo as default and disable root account"?
Mac’s are way more expensive than most people need. If anyone asked me today, I’d say buy a cheap laptop and I’ll install Linux on it for you. Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs come up. Problem solved, hundreds of dollars saved over the Mac.
Most PC laptops at Neo's price point (or cheaper) are essentially manufactured e-waste.
Other brands' USD 599 laptops are atrocious. Neo is guaranteed to be a reliable, pleasure, and long-term investment.
>Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs come up.
This is a dealbreaker compared to never (or even rarely) having any “bugs”.
Is there a full equivalent of Total Commander there? I don't mean just something with 2 panes, I mean full equivalent. Those I have seen were clunky, slow and lacked features thus completely breaking the flow. When I see folks doing something more complex in File explorer or similar stuff I rather walk away, make a tea/coffee, have a chat or two, come back to watch them hopefully progress a bit, when it would take few quick operations in TC. Its like doing java development in Notepad vs Idea, both work but man I always thought engineers craved efficiency...
That program is so powerful when used in skilled hands, it saves me tons of time every day, easily 30-60 mins compared to other colleagues doing similar tasks. Editing files directly in archives (or archives in archives), quick file comparison, tabbed panes, dir sync, ftp client, etc.... and tons of customizations of behavior and visuals, plugins ecosystem, and its freakin' fast and stable.
Another one could be Notepad++, ie mass edit of lines as cells in spreadsheet is a powerful feature.
When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.
Their office subscriptions are also going up in price at. Crazy rates. Giving Stiff competition to food price inflation
All because it has some AI stuff on it that I don’t want.
Funny thing: I wanted to try out Copilot to help with creating a starting point for a diagram in Visio.
Copilot isn't in Visio (at least in the subscription my work pays for).
I used Copilot's chat interface instead, and it is unable to generate a diagram in the Visio .vsdx format; it tried, failed, tried to fix it, failed.
Sigh.
I opened a blank document and pasted a fairly large markdown text. Converting it to word (or html) formatting is easy, there are online tools and/or any other LLM can do it. This one time I opened the Copilot willingly and was excited about getting it done with a few keystrokes: "convert to word formatting".
It generates a formatted response but cant edit the document. How stupid you have to be to integrate copilot and not allow it to update text in a text editor??!
Copilot's glaring limitations when interacting with Office are insane considering that's its main value prop
Yes the price hike is almost 2x
If anyone knows how to revert to non-AI version of the subscription let me know
It's called 365 Classic and it's hidden in the Subscriptions section of your Microsoft account.
Don't care about windows. Haven't used a windows computer in over 20 years. Happy Ubuntu user here. What bothers me is the upcoming Android restrictions. I distribute an app that none of the app stores want to touch with a 10 foot pole. That's fine -their store, their choice. But now, to distribute the app from my website I have to jump through hoops and pay their stupid fees through a credit card (at a time when I'm trying to stay anonymous because of the nature of the app). I don't know what to do.
I like Ubuntu. My only regret is having an nvidia GPU and not getting an AMD one before computing components became unaffordable. Nvidia on wayland is 100% busted and juggling DEs for gaming vs productivity work is inelegant.
No idea why anyone would buy a Windows machine over a mac unless in this day and age unless they can't afford one, Microsoft's OS dev philosophy has been trash for years.
For that matter, Linux has been better than Windows for decades.
Yes, Linux has some jankiness, I don't dispute that, but when people say that they're often smuggling in an assumption that Windows doesn't have jankiness, which is decidedly not true. People are more used to Windows and its shittiness and they forget how much bullshit they actually put up with for it.
Windows Update, for example, is awful software and if anyone who works on it is reading this, you should consider getting out of the software game because you are not good at your job and considering how consistently bad Windows Update has been for its entire existence I don't think you'd be good at other software jobs either.
Windows Update bricked my mom's laptop doing an automatic update to Windows 11, I believe because they broke some boot keys, and since Microsoft's restore and repair tools don't actually work, my parents called me in a panic because there were of course tons of irreplaceable files that they couldn't access. I had to walk them through flashing a Linux USB, walk my dad through booting off that USB, walk my dad through setting up tmate, and then I had to mount the NTFS drive and rsync the files to my personal server. Just to reiterate: I had to use Linux to save Windows because Windows' tools do not work.
If Microsoft used a filesystem that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, I could have set them up with recurring filesystem snapshots and this could have been fixed at the filesystem level. You know, like what has been readily available on Linux since like 2010 with btrfs and other Copy on Write filesystems.
To be clear, before I get a lecture, I'm aware that updates are a hard problem when you have a diverse set of hardware, but I should point out that it's not like my mom installed the OS on some arcane custom built rig, this was an OEM install on her laptop, so they don't have that excuse. Additionally, I update every Linux computer in my house literally every day, and I have never had it so thoroughly brick the boot process as I had with my mom's computer.
My elaborate point here is that Windows has lots of jank, more than Linux, but people just act like that's part of the deal, but don't extend anywhere near that same level of courtesy to Linux.
The solution for "Windows" is to use the current US derangement to convince the EU, China and even the Russians that, as a matter of national security, it's in their best interest to come to the negotiation table and create an international organization that "adopts" WineHQ[^1] and any other projects that focus on a Win32 compatibility layer. It can be financed with increased sales taxes for any PC software distributor that doesn't natively support Linux.
[^1]: https://www.winehq.org/
Even if they fix it, and that's a big if - It doesn't really mean anything when they have a ton of MBAs and product managers working internally to make it creep back in. It's going to take a decade to grow trust again and I don't think they're up to the task.
I think we need to be a bit more careful and considerate around the use of language around physical abuse, or abuse in general, and using software.
Saying that here as someone that isn't fond of the Windows experience these days, but the two are not relatable.
Beating is a normal English idiom. While I do sympathize with anyone suffering from abuse, I highly doubt anyone is actually suffering from use of the word.
I agree with stndef. "Flowers after beating" is a very direct evocation of physical abuse in an intimate relationship. Whether or not you think it's appropriate.
If you don't claim it's inapropriate then what's left to agree about?
There are all kinds of language registers for communication. From formal business speak to 'locker room banter'. What is appropriate or otherwise depends entirely on the participants of the conversation. So, it depends on what kind of conversation we're trying to have.
I think this post's usage is meant deliberately to be a bit edgy, to illustrate how badly Microsoft has behaved.
An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
Personally, data point of 1, I think it's a bit distasteful, and would prefer to participate in a community that doesn't routinely use that kind of langauge.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
I think you guys complaining about provocative title and not not the substance of what is said, is what people are taking issue with.
If I didn't know better, I would honestly think it is concern trolling.
> I think it's a bit distasteful, and would prefer to participate in a community that doesn't routinely use that kind of langauge.
The entire point is that it is provocative and hyperbolic to make a statement. Often to make a statement you have to act outside what is considered polite norms and ruffle the feathers.
If Sam had given this a nice polite title (as per your preference), not as many people would have taken notice of it.
I hope you can take on trust that this is a genuine, exploration of the original point about language. And FTR I have a very low opinion of MS and have had since the late 90s.
There are usually all kinds of twists and turns in a HN discussion. And it's not like we're discussing the background colour or something far off-topic, the title is a pretty noticeable part of the article. I don't think it should be verboten to discuss these things.
I agree that transgressive speech is an important tool, and tone policing is generally bad news.
To each their own.
> I hope you can take on trust that this is a genuine, exploration of the original point about language.
I find it hard believe that any discussion like this is genuine and I am deeply suspicious of people that complain about hyperbolic and provocative language.
Moreover, I think complaining about it like people have is here is verging on being ridiculous tbh.
Again if I didn't know better (i.e. I don't think this is happen) I would actually think it deliberate to run interference.
I don't think it's fair to expect people to autocensor based on ill-defined, circular notions of taste and appropriateness, at least not in edge cases where these notions clearly vary from person to person. If the reasoning is something like "an abuse victim might read this and feel bad" or "a stupid person might confuse social license for edginess with license for being a bad person", then that's a discussion we can have.
> An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
I don't understand how HN's news guidelines apply to a blogger writing an article on their own blog. The controversial language was found in the article. It wasn't found in the thread you're replying to.
I their point was: the comment they were replying to ("Beating is a normal English idiom") was being disingenuous.
Saying something like "the benchmarks took a beating in the new version" would be inoffensive but "flowers after the beating" is much more specifically about abuse in a relationship.
I don't think "Whether or not you think it's appropriate" was meant to say, don't worry it's fine. I think it just meant, let's not justify by pretending that it's about something different than it obviously is.
Thanks, I get it now. I'm not sure if the comment was necessarily disingenuous but it's clearly not used as an idiom.
I'm willing to be wrong, but it's specifically mentioned as an analogy for abuse in the article itself.
Not trying to turn everything "woke", but phrasing of scenarios around this just takes away from the severity of what actual abuse is.
How does it take away from the severity of actual abuse? By not mentioning it when it's not relevant to the analogy?
It’s actually more triggering / offensive that you brought up abuse when no one was talking about abuse. This site is for adults who understand the concept of analogies. You just wanted to bring up the topic of abuse for whatever reason. Why?
The article comes back to the abuse analogy multiple times. If you want to defend that as fine, go for it, but in no way is it a new topic that the poster here brought up.
Oh please, TFA has a title of "Flowers after the beating" - its a direct reference to domestic abuse which attempts to equate Microsofts behaviour and that of a domestic abuser.
Username checks out, but you might want to check with your mother about how she feels about this comparison.
TFA brings up abuse not stndef.
An analogy is "a thing which is comparable to something else in significant respects" and stndef is right to point out that microsoft behavior, while abusive, is not comparable to domestic abuse "in significant respects". Not even close.
The TFA title is sensational for effect and in very poor taste.
> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions
sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?
as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.
mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.
>sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11
It's a setting called "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen", and it's checked by default.
Not only is it enabled hy default ... it magically gets enabled by default after some days, desktop spotlight feature that pushes some lock screen wallpapers and trivia overriding my personal wallpaper, Edge trying to do the same thing to homepage, edge trying to steal browser favourites and extensions from other installed browsers once every few weeks, edge stealing default app linkage for PDF viewing, copilot in various flavours appearing on taskbar, start menu, edge, ...it's mayhem out there.
Death by a thousand cuts. So many micro abuses by the OS that keeps reminding you who has the power.
I do get lockscreen wallpapers, but in general I find them quite pretty and interesting. I've never tried changing to a fixed lockscreen wallpaper, though I I do have a fixed, custom desktop one. I can't think that people are obsessing about the lockscreen???
I don't see any of the other things you do. I use Edge as my default browser, with uBlock installed and it all seems to work. There is a Copilot icon, but I think I could remove it if it irritated me, which it doesn't. My Asus Zenbook has a Copilot key which irritates me much less than other aspects of the keyboard layout which have nothing to do with Microsoft.
All in all, I like Windows 11. I don't see how it has made things worse than any of the other NT versions.
Ah, it's available only if you pick a specific wallpaper image, that's why not everyone sees it.
> pick a specific wallpaper image
you interest me strangely - which one?
Oh I didn't mean a specific file. Lock screen wallpaper has three options, custom image, custom slideshow, and Spotlight. The former two have the "Get tips (...)" checkable, the latter doesn't.
For some people the threshold for "ad" is an uninterruptible segment that they are forced to watch, or a typical banner ad placed on screen. For others it's the visual presence of any set of pixels that can be connected to a business entity or revenue stream.
Oh I’ve definitely seen all those things… in the short minutes after a fresh install, before I wipe them out.
Same for me - I find Windows 11 pretty good and I've never seen an ad in the Start menu. It might be specific to some editions or regions?
I have the same experience. I'm on a Windows Surfuace 7 Arm laptop right now. There's no Copilot icon next to the start menu. I press the start icon and I don't see a single ad anywhere. There are no ads on my screen. I use Edge and I don't see anything odd while I shop. Granted, I run "Pro." Maybe the home edition has more of this?
I pay for a 365/OneDrive subscription and it works well. I get the apps on desktop/laptop/phone and 1 TB storage for a decent yearly rate. I log into the PC and laptop on the same account and useful things sync.
I've done mild tweaking to turn a few things off, like the icons in the "search" bar, but nothing's been "hacked". On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?
Macs don't need Apple accounts at all. I just set up three Macs with no Apple accounts, not needed for intended use. They all work fine. Apple accounts are only needed if access to Apple services is desired.
> On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?
Really? Isn't this only for App Store and other Apple services? You can still do your everyday basic things, including downloading and installing software from internet.
Replaced all our windows machines with mac silicon and linux 6 months ago. No one is going back no matter what they do now.
Recently I got tired of having random changes occur to a Windows installation I use for one purpose: running X-plane. I took the drastic measure of disabling both inbound and outbound network access in Windows firewall by default and turning off most of the pre-installed rules. Then, I allowed outbound access from the things that really need it. Spurious network traffic dropped to zero and surprises are gone. If I cared more, I'd explore profiles for enabling only useful network activity in more situations, but this has been really good for my use case.
X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.
I think nowadays the only safe and sane way is running Windows isolated as a VM (e.g. QEMU on proxmox). I did this with my gaming server. The VM sits on ZFS which I can snapshot before any Microsoft stuff happens, to revert any action. I can cut off the network card virtually and shutdown the guest whenever I get tired of it. I could even disguise the CPU/QEMU config, so that the anti-cheat from Star Citizen didn't recognize it was running in a virtualized environment. Pair this with Moonlight+Sunshine and you can game without issues on any remote client. Why I prefer Windows for gaming? It is just (still) the default and provides the least barrier and setup effort for most games.
I used to dual boot Windows to play a single game too, and every few months something drastic would change with no input on my part.
Shameless plug: My products (FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit) can filter all types of potentially unwanted traffic from your Windows PC to Microsoft cloud: namely, Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and many more — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools (e.g. various GitHub scripts) can’t achieve. https://www.prime-expert.com/
I admire your effort to increase user privacy but it's very difficult to argue that allowing a piece of proprietary closed-source software to make fundamental changes to your operating system is a good idea.
For starters, it doesn't explain what exactly it does. This is all I could see on the info page:
> Privacy Enablement Center: Politely ask already installed Windows 10/11 to phone home less, or add Privacy Enhancing DNS Proxy to already installed Windows, in order to block Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and other types of potentially unwanted Windows network activity — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools can’t achieve.
That sounds an awful lot like using the hosts file or a firewall such as Portmaster[1] to block known tracking domains, no?
[1] https://safing.io/
Pure hosts file solution won't cut it for several reasons:
1) certain domains (the most offensive privacy infringers) are whitelisted by Microsoft's DNSAPI.DLL to always bypass hosts file lookup (DNSAPI.DLL is a place where hosts file parser lives on Windows, so this parser just ignores hosts file records which don't align well with data vaccuming purpose of modern Windows versions)
2) hosts file can't blacklist domain hierarchies (domain + all subdomains), it can blacklist only apex domains
3) some domains to block are not quite domains, rather domain names regexps (set of domain names to block is not finite)
So, I would say it's rather list of regexps to block than list of domains to block (in our product it's compiled to highly efficient finite state machine in C, plus a user-friendly list of categories to choose blocking preferences from); but in principle you are right: all of it currently boils down to DNS packet interception.
This follows the standard windows pattern of every release alternating between bad/good.
98 good
ME bad
XP good
Vista bad
7 good
8 bad
10 good
11 bad
When 12 comes windows will be tolerable again.
Windows 10 was not as good as Windows 7 for its time (and even now). After 8/8.1 things started to go downhill. Windows 7 was a really good polished OS with beautiful and consistent UI. Windows 10 UI looks like a Frankenstein, and MS fired a lot of QA folks, now the testing is primarily done on the insiders and regular users. Also these privacy / telemetry / ad problems started from Windows 10.
Really highlights the plummet in quality and massive shift in user tolerance that w10 is considered "good" now
The conspiracy version of this is each bad windows release is purposefully extra bad so the next "good" version is perceived as artifically well.
It's a shame too, I feel like the underlying OS has some really good engineering in it, but the layers of cruft and anti-features on top make for a poor overall product.
Yes, I have also read / heard that Windows is actually very well engineered at the low level (despite the claims), and even surpasses Linux in some aspects. For example, Windows handles low RAM situations much better than Linux. During swapping Linux can become so unresponsive that even the OOM killer can fail and the only solution is hard reboot :(. But all I see people claim about Linux's superior memory management, which I think is believed largely because of the memory overcommitment. It can reduce the average RAM consumption because Linux, by default, maps the allocated pages to a read-only zero filled shared page, and allocates actual memory only when page faults occur during page writes. But this can make the worst case scenario much worse when no physical RAM or swap space is available.
Inshallah. This is the first ‘bad’ version I’ve caved on updating to, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next ‘good’ one looks like.
The pattern is pretty familiar at this point:
1. Ship something user-hostile 2. Wait for backlash 3. Roll it back partially 4. Get credit for "listening"
Also called the door-in-the-face method.
Love the quiz at the end
It's remarkable that computer users are paying $139 to give data to Microsoft through an ad-supported "operating system"
Back in the day (generally) only OEMs paid
What is the $139 for
Sometimes I wonder what Operating Systems do nowadays that they didn't do 15 years ago that requires so many resources.
Maybe it would be a good idea for Microsoft to split Windows into a version for business that supports all the cruft that has accumulated and is needed, and another version where they start from scratch. Something that is lightweight and respects the user. A man can dream.
I see people saying the opposite and saying MS should sell windows Enterprise or LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel) version to consumers. These have less of the bloatware and forced features that most people are complaining about.
I have 10 Linux machines and 1 Mac at home. I never use windows for anything personal. At work we have windows laptops that I really only use for email /web and to connect to a remote Linux desktop where I do all my work. The windows enterprise version we have seems to have far less of the crap that people complain about.
This already exists, but you have the markets backwards. Microsoft wants to force the cruft onto everyday users; it subsidizes the cost of the operating system license. Home users can be conned into paying for OneDrive or Copilot subscriptions much more easily than enterprises can. On the other side, Windows Server is their lightweight version, and it's made for the only customer that Microsoft respects: ones that paid in full upfront.
You don't want that dream.
It's a whole new set of unknown bugs, security issues, lack of essential features, and app compat issues.
And the internals of NT are quite good and still largely modern. There's not a lot worth replacing (my only thought would be to rip out the file system filter driver model though I don't know what would replace it).
There's "MinWin", I wish this could be used as the foundation for a consumer Windows OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin
Back in the day windows NT was serving this purpose and a lot of pro users would use it over windows 98. (At least in 3rd countries where all licenses are pirated).
It actually used to work well, and I think there are still some windows editions like this they are more strictly separated and not that good for daily en user usage.
I like your dream. I think financial incentives make it unlikely, though. The writing's been on the wall for user-friendly general computing OSes for awhile, I think. So Microsoft's incentive is to treat Windows like a loss leader (even if it's not) and use it as a funnel for services/subscription revenue from their other products.
I hate that/wish it weren't so, but I think the last ~15y of M$ decisionmaking makes a lot of sense in that context.
Another aspect to this is that I really doubt consumers would go to linux if there was any pay-wall or 'donate for more features' type aspect to it. Something that really isn't emphasized much is how lots of OSS/linux work is done by the various big corporations often for goals that are not aimed at the small scale users, and it's a happy byproduct that many aspects of their system may run better just by swapping OS, all free to them. Similarly Valve's efforts seem tightly focused on what matters to their products/services and being available to everyone is a byproduct.
The windows cost gets hidden/de-emphasized when buying a PC, or other users just ignore it which is seems to be below MS's pain tolerance for lost revenue on those users. If there was a price of admittance to linux for any other company to devote resources to work on it where it couldn't be treated as a loss-leader for something else, it'd be an even tougher struggle to migrate users over. (and it's likely right now most people moving to linux are somewhat enthusiasts)
Introducing Windows NNT (New New Technology).
Are we pushing sambent.com now?
Yeah there is something suspicious about this site.
Sorry Pavan, I'm happier with Fedora Atomic and Bazzite now.
I have to be honest. The idea that Microsoft is even admitting that their products are less than perfect is a step in the right direction.
A step on a thousand-mile journey, perhaps, but it's a step.
One major thing is the mandatory MS account. And it's (or more precisely its laxing / removal) not listed in the improvement list. Optional online account is fine and I might even use it. But mandatory online account is a big NO. This is disrespectful and an invasion of my privacy and control over my computer. I bought a PC / laptop and I want to use it the way I want, without any permission from some fucking server.
Don't worry, they'll just destroy any goodwill they tried to claw back with these 'fixes' in following releases.
They absolutely can't help themselves but make their product more and more user hostile.
Has it always been a case of incentives with Microsoft?
Builders - let's build awesome stuff with great experience.
Execs - need to meet next earnings reports goals. Let's sneak a few features to help M$FT stock price at expense to our users.
Product suffers... Execs then allow builders to make the products better. Then execs step in again because they need some quick wins. Visual Studio and .NET really seemed to exemplify this a few years ago as Code was eating into Visual Studio's user base.
I for one hope ending quarterly earnings reduces patterns like this in companies.
So will I be able to upgrade my old computer without a Trusted Platform Module 2?
I wish there was a better alternative for average users. It's easy to say, especially on HN, that using Linux or Windows LTSC is a way to avoid these issues (and I do.)
Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?
> Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?
Buyers of PCs, laptops and other devices with Windows pre-installed. I guess that the cost of the Windows licence is included in the price of each device.
That's true, I meant that as a reference to the article where they mentioned people paying $139 at retail for Windows. Which seems bonkers. Why would you do that.
Oh definitely not. You can buy it at key resellers for like $30.
Domestic violence analogies for computing....really gross. I wouldn't hire or work with 'Sam Bent'.
There's nothing "gross" about it. You are making a mountain out of a molehill, and honestly the kind of behavior you're displaying here would be absolutely miserable to deal with at any job. Nobody likes someone who complains about trivial non-issues like this.
Completely agree, we can be edgy without being insensitive.
Or, even better: let's not be edgy, because we are not tweens circa 2002.
Thanks for the curated and well described list!
If MS brings back normal local accounts, I'll switch back. This is insane, imagine I have bought a kitchen stove or a washing machine which requires to setup an account on some website.
I would just like to add forcing users to use bing online to search their local files to one of their cards. I think that’s the main one they missed, but it’s a good article.
Microsoft should be scared about the Macbook Neo. They're going to lose a good chunk of the market because of it.
Apple isn't capable of manufacturing the amount of volume necessary to displace x86/Windows.
Apple shipped 25.6 million Macs in 2025. Lenovo shipped 19.3 million PCs in the 4th quarter alone.
No they're not. They're going to continue making enormous amounts of money from corporate IT lock-in, Azure, and AI.
Windows' biggest competitor is iOS, and many people have stopped using Windows entirely and just rely on their phones. Microsoft has had record profits since that started happening.
Funny you mention iOS - my MegaCorp-issued iPhone has Microsoft entune for device management and Active Directory membership, Microsoft Authenticator for single sign-on, and really high quality versions of Microsoft office apps - Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel. Microsoft is all-in when comes to iOS.
Over Peak I had to update a shared Excel file on SharePoint each night - because as we all know, Excel is the finest multi-user database in existence. I had no problems doing that from my iPhone.
But what PC user is going to be like “oh now that the NEO is out, I’m finally willing to switch to a completely different operating system”
What about new users that don't have a laptop yet?
Or users that have a very crappy Windows laptop and would like to improve to something good hardware wise?
Or what about Windows users that have other Apple devices and don't have strong hardware requirements?
Let's not forget about RAM and SSD prices increasing PC prices through the roof.
I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).
I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.
I had enough of Windows 11's ads that I bought a Mac mini for personal use and requested a Macbook to replace my Windows laptop.
I will have to use Teams and Outlook at work because I don't have a choice. But that's it Microsoft.
Windows 11 should run on ANY PC.
I am customer and I absolutely hate it that they have restricted the machine that Windows can run on.
If they don't fix this sort of anti customer garbage then all their words are pure horseshit.
This is one of the areas that annoy me due to how limp microsoft is with the requirements...
Either give a solid set of requirements that let a dev assume things about a windows 11 system (good hardware security, in particular), or fuck off entirely.
have you thought about switching to another OS?
Unfortunately Linux doesn't run well on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (which is perfectly functional other than the lack of Windows security updates). I'm very unlikely to buy or recommend a Microsoft computer again, even though I liked the hardware.
Looks like your device is supported & has been for a while ?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/nwr4kd/best_d...
I check out the status every so often. Not much is upstreamed yet, so it requires a patched kernel and some mucking about, likely on an ongoing basis. I'll probably try it at some point but not until I have moved my uses for that machine onto something else.
For what it's worth, I have a surface laying around somewhere. It doesn't run Windows any more. I have plenty of older Linux machines that are still supported.
Moving forward, I'm sticking with hardware where everything works without setting the Linux 'taint' bit (i.e., zero proprietary code in the kernel). Most laptops made in the last few years with an AMD CPU + GPU meet that requirement.
I'd require that even if I was running windows, given how badly I've been burned on short hardware support lifespans in the past. For instance, I also have an Intel OEM reference motherboard that never had Linux video drivers. It no longer boots windows.
Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better product. People who know they need Windows will always have the option to install it themselves.
I actually belive that is what triggered this.
There was a rumour 1-2 months ago about Lenovo and Asus meeting Microsoft execs and warning them that if win11 issues continued to cost them support hours and devicw returns they would be forced to find an alternative.
Now there's an idea I can get behind.
I've installed Win 11 in VMs and linux on bare metal quite a few times this years.
If you count "time to unobstructed desktop + working hardware drivers", Debian beats windows by a large margin. (10 minutes vs. 1-2 hours). Also, with windows, you need to type weird crap like this into a terminal:
Debian mostly lets you avoid such stuff.Finally they realizing the power of linux is cannot be taken for granted
Don't you ever complain about that regulation which will require [x] on window corner to cancel-close.
In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.
Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.
For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.
^--- this
It is completely impossible to comply with European privacy law if you are using up-to-date Windows for your business.
The US CLOUD Act compels companies to provide access to data on machines they have the technical ability to access.
Starting in Windows 8, Microsoft granted itself the ability to pull locally-stored documents out of (non-onedrive) folders on all machines for "debugging" purposes.
Since then, EU courts overturned the Privacy Shield deal with the US because our laws are in direct contradiction with their privacy protections, so no, there isn't some backstop that lets Microsoft be the good actor if they get a bogus warrant.
If the EU could ban Windows, I'm sure they would have done so already.
Source on "they can read your files": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...
Note that this policy began in the Windows 8 days, and didn't originally have the Microsoft 365 branding attached to it. Now that Windows 11 mandates login, they changed the wording.
'Microsoft was entering a mode called "swarming",'
Swarming, as in locusts, or else flies on shit.
microslop isn't going to fix anything. Action matters more than talks.
Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.
They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!
They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.
It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.
Yeah, but...
Did they increase profits and/or stock price or not? That's the only relevant question. Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.
Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.
> Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.
I don't understand this point. Are you suggesting that less people being happy with their product and thus less people buying it is not related to the valuation of the company and their stock?
> Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.
Huh?
I get you're trying to make a point about the bottom line, but that doesn't mean the bottom line is impervious to bad product decisions or that the people who are paying for their products are not in fact their customers.
Parent is pointing at the fact that the relationship between our perception of MS products and their financial success is highly inelastic. The bottom line isn't impervious to bad product decisions, but there can be a large number of user hostile decisions that PMs push through that still increase revenue on the whole even at the cost of user satisfaction, before they move past the optimal point in the payoff curve.
Side note but is this page not optimised for mobile at all or is it just me?
Either way, it's too little too late for me. I'll be trying to get into Linux again after Windows 8 times cause I've had it with Win11.
Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.
Reading the article without Firefox's reader mode is a pain. Maybe it's a secret plan of Mozilla to promote their browser.
Don't all browsers have it nowadays? I feel like it's been in my Brave forever.
Whenever I see stuff like that I ask myself "who is this for", like who wants to see those elements animated for no good reason?
"By October 2025, Microsoft had systematically hunted down and killed every single workaround for creating a local account, the `oobe\bypassnro` command, the BypassNRO registry toggle, the `ms-cxh:localonly` trick, even the old fake email method."
I don't know how it is for Windows 11, but for Win10, activating it is super-trivial, even without downloading some crack .exe. With that in mind, I never bought Microsoft's claim that it hates "pirates". In particular one work around that is even published on github - which is owned by Microsoft - so there is no way Microsoft does not know about it. Why does it not take that github site down?
Clearly Microsoft does not have anywhere near as much as a problem with pepole using Windows as such. I switched to Linux more than 20 years ago so I don't care much about Microsoft anymore. I do have a secondary computer run Win10. I don't see why I would want to switch to Win11 ever though - it only has drawbacks. And Win10 was already really bad. Microsoft used to be objectively better; all that trend to AI or ads, lowered the quality. It seems that corporation past a certain size, become super-lazy.
What an incredibly well-written article.
The forced telemetry and blocking local user accounts is particularly egregious. I've been running Shutup10 for over a decade now, disabling their telemetry after every update. It's outrageous that they force mt to do this.
And local accounts, all the methods required following a guide, using a hidden hotkey like shift-F10 and typing in an obscure command. Nobody did this by accident, or was coerced into it. These were sophisticated users who did not want to login to a MS account. Microsoft not only didn't care about their users' preferences, they actively fought us. It's downright offensive.
And like a battered spouse, we lived with it, we took the hits, because we wanted to play videogames. Well, now Windows is no longer required, thanks to Valve's work on WINE. And suddenly they're apologetic and conciliatory. No thanks, Microsoft.
If it starts to get better after it absolutely cannot get any worse and users start to parade their experience switching to other platforms like badges of honor, is that really a win? After so many got their time and money wasted?
I mean I guess there is no reason to care, since their main products work in a browser, powerbi users and gamers can endure anything and old people will just get their grandchildren to fix their windows.
Wait the local user account workarounds are totally gone now? I assume that means the only reason why it still works for me is because my iso is still on a previous version, good to remember…
Would rather seed 9front torrents at this point than use Windows 11 after seeing how they shoved slopware into everything immediately. Just fuck off with that noise.
And these apologies they’ve been rolling out - to whom? For what? Gabecube is going to eat their gaming market share, servers are already predominantly Linux. I’m sure they’ve got tons of enterprise customers. Fuck ‘em, they can keep them.
Until they talk about being able to remove Edge, they aren't serious.
Thus begins the next phase of their neverending cycle. They do this same shit every 10 years or so. This has to be what, the third or fourth time?
Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years. Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them, but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm probably leaving some stuff out.
Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.
Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.
Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.
Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.
Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.
Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.
Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely unhelpful logs, but gave up.
I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.
I mean...this is a huge company. For them to do something even mildly consumer-focused I'll take as a win.
Holy shit they crossed the line to "actually fucking evil"
Am I the only one who’s been using 11 on multiple machines for years without any issues?
Did they really fix the taskbar? I still cannot change it to either side of the screen, am i missing something?
no, the big news is that finally they have the intention to do it
I don't think the fix is released yet, except for possibly Insider builds.
Microsoft is on track to be judged for digital genocide.
I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well. It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.
But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.
the funniest thing in this whole "fixing windows" campaign is that you can download "fixed" (read: not enshittified) windows TODAY instead of waiting for microsoft to deliver on these promises
reduces focus on AI, better performance, more stable updates, etc are all already here with windows 11 LTSC, why the hell would i move back to the GA release and deal with their crap?
These flowers smell like shit.
If you don't use Linux or MacOS yet, why?
I use a blend of Windows, MacOS, iOS and Linux.
Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.
I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.
I agree completely about each being good for its own thing. I quite like iOS as a phone OS. The limitations often bother me, but since it's tiny screen that needs to fit in my pocket, I'm creating my own limitations anyway so I'll use it less (1).
I switch around enough that I try not to do crazy amounts of personalisation in my desktop OS. Probably this evens out the OSs and there are aspects I like and dislike about each. I guess I prefer KDE Plasma to Windows or MacOS. I choose that for my own computer, but I spend far more time in Windows. I'm not sure I agree it it much worse from a UX perspective. It allows keyboard only usage very easily, which is something I struggled with in MacOS.
1) I'm only focusing on the UI - there are some things I struggle to forgive, like not being able to set add my own ringtone or alarm tone, or not being able to have the volume of a ringtone increase as the phone rings like on every ancient feature phone.
I've given this a little more thought, and I agree more with "Windows really does suck from a UX perspective" then I was thinking when I wrote my comment.
I really should have included the recent escalation in hostility towards users in my thoughts - built in ads, pushing unwanted products, trash news in new tab pages etc.
I used linux on Desktop 15 years ago, tried it once in a while every few years. But there was always something. Often video driver, tearing, hardware video decoding, or a specific game that I played a lot. And now it would be that my DJ software does not run on it.
Still use it on my server though.
I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.
The last time I tried to use Linux, I said "fuck this" when I had to open up a text editor for something so basic as making a shortcut with command line arguments. This is the easiest menu in the world on Windows, but it took me looking up a bunch of things to get it to not work on Linux.
The real crime, by a lot, it middle click. I did not realize how often I use middle click scroll until I switched to Linux and it didn't work anymore.
So you switched something as fundamental as the OS, and were pissed that it was … different?
You can fault Linux as the primary desktop environment for a few things, but that it’s different to MS is not one of those.
Do you also rant about having no windows key on a MacBook?
Yeah, it's kind of annoying. But middle click scroll is something I use literally every single second of every single day on my web browser. It's a deal-breaker.
Ok that's fair ig. I used to be a fairly heavy user of the middle click scroll feature on windows like a decade ago. Made the switch to Debian w/ Awesome, and that habit just casually fell away. The switch is probably a 3 day annoyance at most. IMO arrow keys and scroll are fine. On laptop trackpads two finger scrolling and momentum scrolling are far more accurate IMO. Also if you have the mx master mouse, it has a crazy good scroll wheel that you can "throw".
Also you can turn on Firefox specific middle click scroll feature "autoscroll" which is the same thing. They may have similar stuff for other browsers. Long story short, in less clicks than it takes you to turn off stupid notifications and ads on Windows, you can get a semi decent middle-click-scroll feature where you need it the most.
Because Windows works just fine for me.
I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.
Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your own.
Depends on whether using someone else’s windows machine leaves you crazy annoyed.
My windows machine is also “fine” for the most part because i turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could not. Even so, every once in a while, typing “code” and being taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to shreds.
And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.
It isn’t that fine now that I think about it.
Do you use powershell or run WSL
macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and customizations to make it sane for basic things like window management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount of tweaking needed for power users.
And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...
And it sucks at gaming.
Linux on the other hand is great for power users!
I've installed linux (debian LTS with XFCE) on my mom's computer and she recently called me to thank me. She says her computer is much quieter now (meaning fewer notifications). She only needs a web browser and a text editor.
So you're right, it's great for power users, it's also great for other users.
I fucking love XFCE! And have more than a decade of mileage with it.
right? windows 98 ergonomics (that's NOT sarcasm) with more customisation and not trying to re-invent the wheel every month.
I'm a gnome user myself, I do enjoy the year on year refinement they have going there, but I completely understand and respect the XFCE crowd.
Window management: only if you are the kind of power user who needs complex layout. I have used Windows for decades and have used Mac on and off, and have even bought one of those window management app on MacOS, but never needed to use them. In rare occasions where I need several windows open, side-by-side on each of dual screens is usually good enough, if not I probably am working in a terminal where I use tmux.
Gaming: that's a fact but again doesn't matter to most people. Most people play video games on phones/tablets/consoles if they play games at all. PC gaming is a relative minority, and (regular) Windows laptops can only do lightweight gaming anyway. The amount of people who decides what "everyday computer" they should buy based on whether they are going to play games on it is very small. Plus, you get much better ROI by buying a PS5+Macbook Air than spending the same amount of money on a gaming laptop.
you need a ton of third party tools to make it behave like Windows, that's what you mean.
I'm perfectly happy with my "vanilla" macbook. Runs Baldurs Gate 3 and my final fantasy ps2 emulator just fine, and even trackmania was quite easy to get installed and runs well.
Can't comment on that hash thing, but I don't see why that would be a problem? It's not linked to your name or something. Windows does a ton of things too that I find inexcusable, such as changing settings or permissions after updates, those have an actual impact on my daily experience with these things
> you need a ton of third party tools to make it behave like Windows, that's what you mean.
100% this.
Linux doesn't run the software I want to use, or runs it badly. MacOS... lmao.
Games
I have a desktop computer that I use for gaming so it had windows forever. Lately it started running laggy. Occasional frame drops and stuff. Reinstall, bios update etc nothing helped.
For debugging I installed Bazzite (Linux gaming distro) assuming compatibility would be shit but I can at least test native linux builds of some games to see if there is a hardware issue. The thing runs perfectly. I've been playing propert windows games on Proton with higher / more consistent FPS. It is kind of funny at this point. Granted I do not play any competitive / multiplayer games.
I guess Valve did a great job on the Steam Deck sw.
I've been running Fedora (or a flavor) on my gaming PC for two years. All my games work. I understand some competitive games with intrusive anti cheat are incompatible, but with the success of the steam deck I don't think the gaming argument is holding much water these days.
I was playing RE9 at 4K on my Debian 13 last weekend. The vast majority of games work, even some live service games. 5 years ago you would face significant issues, today that simply isn't the case.
Fair. Depends on the game to be honest.
I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora recently. Most of the games I play work without issue but I know there are some which categorically refuse to work (mainly some specific anti-cheating software reasons).
Do you play fortnite? Steam's linux support is really good but I kept a Windows install for a couple of years so I could keep playing fortnite.
I do use Linux at work and for programming at home, but for general office work Windows is just better, sorry.
As for MacOS, I just hate it.
Macs are circling down the same drain.
In what way?
- They are rapidly iOS-ifying the desktop experience
- All core services and apps experience significant performance degradation (to thenpoint that Spotlight regularly fails to find installed apps) which are currently only offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
- Services become more and more pervasive, with ads throughout the system
> offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
I'm really afraid of that one. MacOS engineers don't have to worry about performance optimizations anymore, because the chips gobble it up anyway. Ever more powerful hardware is how we ended up with the awful performance of modern-day computing.
I don't know what that first one means. You mean the glass design?
Yeah, spotlight has been rough for years, I grant you that.
I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see them?
You're probably an iCloud services user. Try a Mac without an iCloud account - it's nagging you pretty heavily to set it up, get an iCloud+ subscription, use TV and Music and Game Center subscriptions, and so on.
> You're probably an iCloud services user.
I don't even know what iCloud is, and I have seen zero ads. I don't understand such comments.
Oh please. Unless you’ve never opened system settings and got the device with a user account pre-configured for you, you have been exposed to iCloud several times.
Does it make one especially edgy to pretend to use an Apple device while never having heard the name of their single cloud offering? Whatever floats your boat, mate.
Correct. My device is issued to me by my employer. I never owned a Mac in my life.
I admit that my comment was a bit over the top. But all I know about iCloud is that it's similar to OneDrive. Never used it.
I am not. I don't even have Apple ID.
> I don't know what that first one means. You mean the glass design?
Not just glass. It started with Big Sur at least. It's forcing narrow and/or devoid of controls interfaces into every app, breaking decades-old system behaviours (misbehaving controls, wrong or non-functioning keyboard shortcuts, mobile-like interfaces in desktop apps etc.). It's eschewing MacOS-native development for shoddy half-assed ports of iPhone software even for first-party apps. Etc.
> I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see them?
I've seen notifications for Apple Music, and I've seen ads in the System Settings
Because they suck.
I moved to ultramarine linux and it's great - fast, has a nifty desktop management system, a few bugs but more than happy compared to using microsoft.
"It sucks"
Ha!
Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram, and Linux still can't run proper creative software.
"Most companies still do not publish Linux builds for creative software"
There, fixed it for you.
It's not like Linux is the blocker here.
Doesn't matter, the end result is the same.
This used to be the case but looking at Macbooks now they are not much more expensive than a Windows laptop you would actually want to buy. And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now i think it's about even.
> And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now.
I dont know any private person in my circle that actually sold their laptop until it wasnt broken or so painfully old that the used value was mostly for spare parts. That may change a bit with the skyrocketing pc part prices but still.
This used to be case before the M series. Now each year a new M processor gets released that are "cheaper" than the previous generation MAC - better processor, more RAM and more storage for similar price than last year model. This impacted their price in used market.
My main computer is a 2020 m1 Mac. It handles everything I throw at it. I predict I’ll upgrade in maybe 4-5 years.
are you a creative professional? because I see that argument quite often as if people use Adobe CS daily, and then its mostly people who do basic stuff (that photopea or gimp can handle fine), but they like to feel "pro" by launching their pirated version of photoshop.
I use krita, adobe substance 2024, blender and whatever other software. Professionally.
When I hear these arguments I just think these people are simply chained.
Gimp is ass, what takes me 5 minutes in Photoshop needs an hour in GIMP. Also I edit photos occasionally in lightroom. I actually daily Linux, but I still have to dual boot for gaming and Adobe.
Also Linux isn't flawless either, Fedora broke sleep on my full AMD PC since like a month now and no agent could successfully debug it.
feel free to link a windows computer (pre-built or parts, whatever you want) that outperforms the m4 mac mini while costing either the same or less
> Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram
This hasn't been true for at least a decade. And it's especially not true for the M* series Macs.
Even Macbook Neo can handle editing several layers of 4k video files in several apps while running everything else https://youtu.be/Mo6o8RKn7jE?is=opeCYMDbt7bUAdvS Try that on "the same performance/ram" Windows Machine
I've never seen any adverts in Windows. Just saying.
How many of the people pearl-clutching in this thread actually use Windows?
I think it's more likely that what you consider ads and what we consider ads don't quite line up.
No, I just havent seen anything in Windows that could be described as an advert. Where are all these adverts supposed to be showing up exactly?
OneDrive pop-ups in the system tray, OneDrive buttons in explorer are two of the most egregious because they are presented as though they are not ads.
I turn off OneDrive so I dont think I have seen those. But in what way are those ads? OneDrive is part of Windows, like iCloud is part of the Apple ecosystem
Heartbreaking: The Worst Company You Know Just Made A Great Point
Enough with the memes.