I thought blogspam meant low-effort, SEO-optimized articles found on websites trying to sell you stuff. Small opinionated blog posts referring to other blogs are not really blogspam although I can see the comparison in an offhand sort of way.
I wonder how much it would take to get explorer.exe and the rest of the UI (userland) from Win2k running on a newer version of Windows. Backwards-compatibility has been MS' strong point for a long time, and the majority of other applications from the 2k era would probably be fine on Win11 too.
I rode Windows NT 4.0 into the ground. It was a truly professional operating system.
Honestly, Windows 7 and Windows 10 have been configurable into a mostly serviceable state. It was much more of a hassle to keep Windows 10 tamed, but tamed it can be.
I worry that Windows 11 will require a bunch of disassembly to get it operational, so I will keep Windows 10 until it is no longer supported.
Count me in. I'm willing to make sacrifices for this vision, too. HiDPI/scaling isn't required (well, no big deal for me, I try to buy monitors with the DPI I want to use). I can live without searchable start menu (although it would be nice). I'm willing to drop other features too.
Honestly, I'm considering running fvwm95, but that's probably a bad idea.
It's probably my computer/browser, but that feels hella slow. For those getting ideas, Windows 2000 was lightning fast to use. Even on something humble at the time. Those windows and menus popped up instantly.
It's running through an emulator, and not even a native one at that.
I'm not sure if JSLinux will run Win11, but my experience with using QEMU in emulation mode to run it is that even on hardware a decade newer, it's still slower than this Win2k in the browser.
Not really. When I was a kid in the mid 2000s I remember the family computer was hella slow. The menus did not pop up instantly. You probably used it on a top of the line machine. For a lot of us, windows 2000 and xp was sluggish and slow. Our pc used to have 512mb of ram iirc.
512mb should be plenty for win2k, I'd think. My college had a laptop program with Compaq Armada E500s that had maybe 64mb of ram. It shipped with win98se, but ran fine on 2k and xp. (With XP or 98se, but not 2k, you could use the internal display and the vga port independently). That was a nice laptop, but still, if you had 8x the ram, your machine was probably nicer in most ways.
The key for 2k and XP is going to system performance settings and unchecking as many of the UI frivalries as you can stomach. Personally, I don't need window contents to move as I drag and resize windows... just the outline is fine, and it makes it more responsive, so it's better for me.
I loved Windows 2000 and liked XP but 64 MB is not a lot. 2000 probably ran on that but did XP really?
I seem to remember XP using about 120 MB on start-up. That is nothing these days but I cannot imagine trying to run it in 64 MB.
Google tells me that the minimum spec for XP is indeed 64 MB though with 128 MB “recommended”. Back then, recommended was really a lot closer to the minimum in practice ( if you wanted to do more than just look at it.
Archive.org on my school website indicates it may have been 192 MB ram (I see a posting showing 192 MB as the new laptop config, but I'm not sure if that was when they first switched to the e500, or the slightly bumped version the next year students got, and it was 20 years ago, so my memory is getting hazy anyway), but I don't actually remember how much ram we had; that model shows up on internet spec sites with 64 MB, but it was an engineering school, so maybe they got a better than standard spec. Some students ran Autocad, and something called Mechanical Desktop, which I think was a 3d modelling program, others ran Visual Studio, etc. But I do know XP ran fine with what we had. I was in the Windows beta program when I started, and ran betas and RCs of XP on that machine, and remember XP supporting multimonitor that 2k didn't (it didn't show up until after the release date for XP though; I couldn't get an ATI or Compaq beta driver or anything, sadly).
Either way, a 512 mb machine should have been a beast compared to a laptop with < 256 mb and an ATI Rage Mobility.
NT3.5 was noticeably different to Win3.11 because dragging windows dragged the contents; on Win3.11, you got an XOR stipple outline indicating where the window was going to end up.
NT4 ran very well on 64MB. I used it as a daily driver shortly before switching to Win2k. I never ran Windows ME, I went from 95->98->NT4->Win2k->XP. NT4 correlated with me going all in on Win32 API programming.
The biggest slowness for start menu popup back then was disk. Random access loading icons for the entries, I suspect. Things would be faster the second time around. Disk was the general direct reason for slowness in usual use. Insufficient memory -> paging -> more slow disk accesses.
Context menus would be slow (and still are) if you had badly written shell extensions installed. Getting rid of those (sometimes requiring registry edits if you wanted to keep the related app) made a big difference.
Those were the days when you'd generally want to upgrade your PC every year, or at least every couple of years, if you wanted to be able to continue running the latest software.
Family computers were only sold with 98, Me, or XP. Unless someone in your family intentionally installed windows 2000 it probably wasn't running 2000. 2000 lacked the compatibility layer that was added to XP, so a lot of games wouldn't run on 2000.
At work (a college in the UK) decades ago the move from Windows ME/ Office 97 to Windows 2000/Office 2000 on the same hardware was like night and day.
Wonderfully solid and I was able to just get stuff done. Of course, we had IT technicians keeping everything going. I gathered that they had a lot less firefighting to do after the transition as well.
Microsoft saw how much the average user would install, and thought "we can do that too"; of course, by being "official", their own adware is much harder to remove.
Windows can show the weather in the bottom left of the task bar, which is nice
I've never wanted that feature nor found it appealing. I can just look outside if I want to know the weather where I am, or visit a site otherwise.
Personally I use the weather app a lot, but I disabled that godawful taskbar icon the moment it appeared due to the performance hit and the way that it blasts you with right-wing clickbait the moment you click on it. A good version of it would definitely be enabled personally.
It's useful as an excuse for the OS to be continuously connected to the internet, which elides nicely into connecting to the internet for search results when you type something in the searchbox.
And you can't argue that it's /useless/. It's more information, and, ceteris paribus, more information is better.
The problem is it's not data for you, it's data for Microsoft they turn around and sell. Every ping to their servers is more and more tracking data on you. If you sign into the OS with a Microsoft account, which is virtually required with Windows 11, they've got all of that data correlated with you personally rather than some ID string.
> The problem is it's not data for you, it's data for Microsoft they turn around and sell.
Why can't it be both? Being data for Microsoft doesn't preclude it from also being data for you.
Being able to just put in a query without having to fire up a browser might be a marginal improvement for a lot of people.
And Microsoft doesn't sell you data. No advertising platform does. They sell access to you, by using your data to classify you in ways you can be targeted. It's a subtle difference, but it changes the implications. If someone is making money off of being able to reliably target you based on your data, that means your data is precious to them. Selling it (or losing it) is tantamount to selling their competitive advantage, such as it may be.
I must have missed where that was the point. Can you point it out to me in this thread? There was an earlier mention of the weather widget, but that seems pretty different than "news headlines"?
They collect data, which is what I hate about Windows too. But I doubt they sell it; it would be a pretty dumb thing to do. That's how they're building their "graph" thing that gets mentioned at every conference.
The same graph that will soon feed into the various Copilots and GPT-things to personalize the heck out of your search and document creation which leads to more usage which leads to more data to feed into the graph.
I'm sure some of that "accidentally leaks" into their ad business too (despite their privacy assurances), but again, I doubt they'd ever sell it to 3rd parties (if nothing else, out of fear of litigation... FAANGs usually take PII handling pretty seriously).
It's sad, isn't it? In many a Hacker News thread about the Year of the Linux Desktop, someone will inevitably deadpan how there's just no money to be made; there's no business model.
It seems to me that the same is true for Apple and Microsoft. There's "no" money in the desktop itself, only as a value-add, via platform effects or via dark pattern monetization like this.
To be honest, Windows really should just rebase on to Linux. They can make their programs work on linux. But the OS isn't the future for Microsoft when it comes to profits. Their future is software and tooling. I don't follow MS's financials, but I bet their growth with Azure and Linux is far outpacing Windows license keys. I believe they have already indicated that Ubuntu is far more popular than their own server OS. The current and future cash cow is Microsoft making money off developer tooling/infrastructure and their apps.
And honestly, Microsoft isn't doing too bad at tooling. Had you told me 3 years ago I would be developing .NET applications, mostly ASP.Core, on linux, I woulda said you were stoned. But here I am today, cranking out .NET code that runs servers on Linux. And the tooling is pretty good and is just getting better.
Just open up to the WINE project. My understanding is, when you run a Windows 95 program on Windows 11, it essentially fires up an emulator anyways. WINE with the resources could very well offer the replacement at really no cost to Microsoft.
Drivers ABI, being micro-kernel based, even if everything is kind of bundled together, subsystems talk over in-kernel RPC (LPC), nowadays drivers and critical kernel subsystems are sandboxed on their micro-vms, hyper-v is a type 1 hypervisor (Windows runs on top of it when enabled, is just another guest), many kernel subsystems have long adopted C++ (hence VC++ /kernel since Vista, and Windows Implementation Library, a set of C++ templates for kernel, driver and userspace resource management), async IO since Windows NT early days, COM as OOP ABI (even if tooling is somehow clunky), subsystems just like mainframe OSes,....
> Their future is software and tooling. I don't follow MS's financials, but I bet their growth with Azure and Linux is far outpacing Windows license keys.
Azure outpaces everything else. Azure, under the covers, runs Hyper-V on Windows Server.
A massive number of VM's running on Azure are Linux, so investments in that area also pay cloud dividends.
I don't think rebasing on to Linux offers them much. The current interoperability is "good enough", and the rest is UX - something Microsoft struggles with across the board. It's not for a lack of trying either, they've spent years now working on Fluent and it's still mediocre. Every time you think they make a fantastic decision, they turn around and add 10 more horrible UX choices (see Edge). It's so apparent it feels like as soon as the core design and dev team finalizes something, it gets sent to a penny pinching team who requires it have a bunch of unnecessary cheap bloat.
This is something that won't change on the shift to Linux. It has to be a deep cultural shift, until then the company is never going to prioritize experience.
I ran a debloating app on Win11 and I have never ever seen an app, even after countless installs. I am in Europe, so I wonder if there is also a different install here.
They work in the states as well. It's ridiculous that you have to run a third party app to make your OS usable out of the box, but it did work, and I haven't even had much trouble with settings flipped back with updates so far.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 (Win10/11, well-maintained. Closed source but coming from trusted devs with commercial interest in shipping a quality freebie that publicizes their other software)
Word to the wise: "debloating" windows 10/11 does not make it stop collecting data on you and sending it to all Jedi Blue II participants. It just hides annoyances. If you are interested in a lean OS which you actually have control over, consider checking out GNU/Linux.
I am on a pretty vanilla Ubuntu/Gnu install and don't miss a thing.
Zoom works, Google Docs works, Telegram/Slack/Discord works.
Plus the native python integration is a+++
I want to but my main computer needs a lot of graphics/animation/design programs that only have a real alternative on Windows. Linux never had strong graphical contenders, for professionals at least. It’s in improving, Blender and Godot are great.
I do have a Pi, so technically I am halfway into Linux ;)
If you select the locale "English (Europe)" when installing Windows, it doesn't add bloatware. I think that's because they specify which bloatware to include depending on the country, and it's not defined for that locale. You also get a skippable error during installation because the installer doesn't have that locale defined for some message.
There are several layers to "turning it off". You can use Personalization -> Taskbar to turn off the "Widgets" icon which takes care of the immediate problem.
But widgets.exe will continue running in the background, and the only way I found to get rid of that is winget uninstall "Windows Web Experience Pack"
The year of the Linux desktop for anyone who regularly browses this site came a long, long time ago.
If you're running Windows today and still telling yourself that you'll switch once it finally gets bad enough, the sad truth is that you'll put up with anything, as long as Microsoft introduces new bad behavior slowly enough to let you acclimate to their successive, increasingly fucked-up 'new normal's. As long as learning how to mitigate Microsoft's next insult to your dignity seems like it'll probably be less work than mastering a whole new operating system, Linux won't seem 'ready' to you.
But accumulating more knowledge about how to partially unfuck Windows only keeps you stuck. So stop. Cleverly, laboriously contending with your OS vendor as a fundamentally hostile party is not a solution— it's the hallmark of serious dysfunction. Don't do it. Don't reward Microsoft's abuse with further investments of your time and energy in 'mastering' their platform. Divest.
Instead of fixing this like it's a benign papercut, let the full badness of Windows wash over you. And then... leave.
But this is a benign papercut that you fix once per a few years here and there, but Linux would have many more and deeper cuts (and your sad truth is not true, there is a limit)
Look at these HN comments about Linux laptop battery life, for example:
- "you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With additional know how you can get it under 3w" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327618
- "It's only a few years ago that we could expect decent battery life without tweaking on Linux, probably just after the T495 series. (-: These days, tweaking with TLP &c could yield worse battery life, in my experience." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35244689
- "I have a Thinkpad T495 which is also AMD based. [...] Kernel release 5.17 greatly helped battery life. Now it is just horrible even with TLP installed." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35219692
- "Not once, regardless of tlp and other tweaks and many hours of twiddling and forum-reading and keeping stats for weeks on end, has Linux ever approached Windows' battery life on the same machine" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33858033
- "Install TLP, uninstall thermald, and make sure turbo mode is off (it's on by default in Linux - probably applies to Intel only)." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33651208
- "by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and disabling cores directly also works extremely well when I know I need a longer battery life" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32965109
- "on Linux, I used https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj all the time for my preferred use cases (eg, setting the temp limit below when fans turn on to get a completely silent laptop on battery, lowering max power limits if I wanted to hit a certain amount of battery life, etc). (TLP has run-on-ac and run-on-bat commands so you can easily set your defaults based on whether you're plugged in or not (udev can see power events too)." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32689327
- "Every release of Ubuntu and Fedora since has caused a lowering of battery life. Current versions of both get me about 2 1/2 hours of battery life extended to 3 hours if I install TLP." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31594346
Tell me that isn't just "accumulating more knowledge of how to partially unfuck Linux"? Stumble upon the magic three letter command you'd never guess, something which you can tune and tweak which ideally requires "additional knowledge", which may not help at all and may make things worse, but several hours of t...
There's a difference between dealing with shortcomings or taking up a DIY project and contending with malice, or buying from a vendor with fundamentally antagonistic incentives. Both may be struggles, but only one is an insult.
There's a practical difference as well, in terms of what is a regression vs. what is intended behavior come back to haunt you. This shapes what's likely to recur as well as what's the longterm trend over time.
What you're doing here is like pretending that a car with a smaller gas tank than you're used to presents the same kind of problem as one that reports every route you take in order to collect a fee on behalf of someone else— never mind the fact that half of those posts are explicitly about running Linux on hardware not intended for it, or that you are inevitably going to find advice about obsessive optimizations on a site called 'Hacker News'. None of the issues those posts raise are about user-hostile behavior from Linux OS vendors, or the exploitation of user data, or the subversion of the user's attention.
You're the real MVP on this thread. Thanks, I'll be moving to 11 on my next computer here shortly and the msn news infection I think will be the most frustrating bit.
One thing i find particularly obnoxious about windows is how they promote their edge browser. It would be one thing if it is well integrated into the rest of the operating system like ie. But in reality its pretty much indistinguishable from Chrome which, incidentally, is the only thing i've ever downloaded on Edge.
My issue with ff is that when you load a tab, it's status is denoted by a horizontal bar moving from left to right which distracts me. It's beyond me why they don't use a rotating loop like the rest of civilisation. It's an incredibly minor thing, but it's the main reason i stick to chrome. A similarly trivial feature makes me dislike edge.
Yet neither Edge nor Chrome seems to have gotten the amount of hate IE did, despite being a leading example of what's wrong with the "modern web". I still use it if I can (otherwise it's Firefox), because it's a very "quiet" and native-looking browser that's also quite configurable --- more so than any Chrome-clone. Certainly makes one wonder who is controlling the narrative.
I went out looking for how much the enterprise (or business) version would cost as I expected those versions would (hopefully) have all this crap removed. Am I wrong in finding you can no longer just buy the enterprise or business version? They want you to either buy a device with it on it or contact their sales rep? Maybe this has always been the casse and I never noticed because most previous versions didn't have this crap on it. Very disappointing.
Can’t access the website, so don’t know what crap we are talking about, but Windows Pro for Workstations, which anyone can purchase, doesn’t have any third party crap installed. Only some MS crap. Much less overall.
There is basically Windows Home, Pro and Pro for Workstations. There's also Enterprise and Education, but those seems to be the same as Pro for Workstations, just distributed differently.
Windows 11 Pro is about $150 from official channels, or $30 for a key from a reseller, and the key can just upgrade your Windows Home install. It doesn't automatically fix everything, but it gives you the group policy editor which lets you permanently turn lots of things off. It also generally treats you more like a responsible adult, e.g. giving you more control over windows updates.
Because using a pirated key on a Windows I downloaded from Microsoft is a lot less likely to introduce trojans or viruses on my system, compared to downloading a pre-cracked Windows from a a pirate site.
Maybe because I previously had Windows 10 on it, but I found a github repo related to Microsoft activator scripts which simply activated windows. It's an open source batch script, seems to have worked. Surely it wouldn't be on github if it were illegal.
I fully agree that this is a big issue, but I also think that an average user does not care at all. It just matches all other software and of course the web (if you ever access it without an adblock).
I love my Xbox but damn that thing is full of ads. From the first second you turn it on and see the dashboard you are bombarded with ads. This is just the Microsoft way of creating UX/UI.
the ads in the start and weather widget bothered me enough to switch to Linux for my desktop. I mostly use Windows to play games and Proton/Steam has gotten good enough that a lot of games I play now work on Linux.
The only place I still use Windows is my laptop since battery management isn't as great... but if it gets better I'm hoping over to Linux as well there.
I'm on Gentoo with mostly stock kernel, Xfce and my battery life is pretty good! It sleeps and goes dim just fine. Lenovo Yoga6. But I had to swap they pieceofcrap RealTek WIFI for Intel - cause the rtw89 module has sleep issues (and that card generally sucks)
when I run windows it's because I want to run a specific program on windows, If I wanted to use the os I would pick an os I enjoy using(for me this is openbsd). For most people it is this way, very few people go "Oh boy I get to use the os to day" they just want to use a specific program. unfortunately microsoft does not sell a "windows just to run programs" version. even worse they feel they have to put effort into "making people want to use windows / monitizing the enormous pool of people running windows" so there is this race to the bottom in stupid pointless feature cruft accumulation.
Edit: I'm comparing it with Windows 10. For me it felt like Microsoft lost it's way after 8.1 and now coming back to the Windows 7 way of things. Design wise aero looks similar.
Windows 11 has been the most beautiful most stable and consistent windows I've ever used. It feels like a modern and rock stable update of Windows 7. I never got a blue screen or anything bad.
Finally it feels like Microsoft is trying to make everything feel part of a single os. Of course there's 30 years of baggage but they are moving at break neck speeds compared to past windows to change everything.
Content on the desktop is something the younger generation actually wants, for people who don't want it, it's shockingly easy to disable everything from settings ang revert to the old windows look. But I do agree with the author about the widget. Although I can't confirm because I've disabled the weather widget when I installed windows.
There are "recommended apps" on the start menu then again most are apps people want to install. In fact the "apps" in start menu aren't really apps, they are not installed. You can click on them to download and install or remove it.
The new context menu is atleast consistent design wise with the rest of the operating system. Applications need to be updated to integrate with it. For those apps which don't update for it, you can still set the old context menu through registry or use the "Show more options" button occasionally. Depends on your needs. I use the old context menu. Notepad++ recently updated to support Windows 11 context. Saw it in a changelog, I don't use the new context so can't say for sure.
The settings app is way better than Windows 10 settings app, I rarely have to use the control panel. Only to change the power profile settings.
> Windows 11 has been the most beautiful most stable and consistent windows I've ever used. It feels like a modern and rock stable update of Windows 7. I never got a blue screen or anything bad.
Preventing updates is herculean and some of those updates inject advertisements [1]. It feels like Windows 11 is constantly changing and I have no control over it.
> or use the "Show more options" button occasionally.
It feels I have to "Show more options" about 50% of the time.
Windows update has never been an issue for me, I think it's because I turn off my computer every night? It just happens itself and never bothers me. I understand other people won't be using their computers like me. You can still disable the Windows update service or use Group Policy I think.
I think the complaint was less WU bothering them with disrupting their workflow by installing updates, and more that WU sometimes installs adware as an "update", and Microsoft decided around Win10 that it was tired of users disabling updates until they wanted to update, and stopped letting you do that without really invasive changes.
Did you get a lot of blue screens with 7 through 10? Or Vista even? Besides one PC that 7 vehemently disagreed with (couldn't run 7 for more than 5 minutes) I think I've had 2 in the past decade.
Personally I think Windows 11 is ugly, the rounded corners, the whole way the icons are shaded, especially the junk they stick in the search bar.
The new context menu is HORRID. It itself is inconsistent! So I'm baffled to see it claimed to be so. There's nothing consistent about having some menu items run horizontal and some vertical. It's awful. Yeah, lets make the most important menu items be smaller targets and harder to parse.
I was thinking of all the bsod complaints some people where posting in other Windows related threads. You're right I didn't had bsod's on windows 7 to 11. Except on 8.1 for some reason but I blame it on the hardware, it was getting old at that point.
Windows 11 did feel weird to me when it launched but when I went back to 10 after a year on it, 10 felt archaic.
I agree the context menu is not for everyone, I still use the old one. By consistent I meant it feels like the rest of the OS. I should edit that to prevent further confusion. Notepad++ recently updated to support Windows 11 context. Saw it in a changelog, I don't use the new context so can't say for sure.
> it's shockingly easy to disable everything from settings ang revert to the old windows look
Is there a built in way to:
* ungroup items on the task bar?
* put your task bar on the side?
* have Live Tiles that open UWP apps (like a weather one that just opens weather)?
* restore sensible context menus?
I did not find "shockingly easy" ways to enable most of the customizations I wanted in Windows 11, even though they had those features in Windows 10. Removing features and giving us news and advertisement content in the start menu doesn't seem like a great upgrade. And Windows 10 has been extremely stable for me across a broad range of PCs (desktops and laptops), so I don't see any room for improvement.
No one wanted ActiveDesktop. It was one of the first things you turned off after installing Windows98. It was removed in XP. Then they brought back a variation of it called Desktop Gadgets. It was poorly supported and full of bugs so, again, the first thing you were advised to disable after installing Vista/7. They ditched it in Windows 8. Now here we are again with Sidebar which we're sure is what Windows users want and definitely won't burn down, fall over, and sink into the swamp.
Windows is my daily driver. I actually like the OS but Microsoft would do well to listen to these concerns being raised consistently. They need to ask some deep questions of themselves of what they want Windows to be.
This reminds me of the days where Ballmers goal seemed to be to lock everyone into Windows and MS products when the real upside turned out to be “make MS products fully available where people already are”. To me this brought about some great changes to their products on android, Mac, and iOS. Even the web versions of their products are actually really good.
I feel like windows is going through the same identity crisis that Ballmer took the MSFT brand through. Like what does it want to be? Is it an OS or an advertisement platform. Right now it’s trying to be both and that sucks. I hope that someone from very high up finally steps in at some point and clarifies the vision for windows and closes up all these crap avenues of revenue squeezing.
> Like what does it want to be? Is it an OS or an advertisement platform.
It's an OS created for enterprise corporations to support and manage the actions of their employees in a digital world. First and foremost. Most MS products are.
The ad platform is MS trying to find ways to continue growing profits. :D
Nah, few enterprises have asked for any of this trash either. I'm pretty sure that most of them would be perfectly happy with a windows 98 style GUI, that supported modern hardware. They don't want all this churn either, they want something that is stable, doesn't change very fast and doesn't require them to constantly retrain their staff or waste their IT admins time fighting with whatever new options require a new set of group policies.
AKA, the new control panel that has been evolving.. most users are likely locked out of it for anything more advanced than changing the sound volume, its the IT nerds that need to figure out the optimal set of setting and push it out. Which is work that the C*'s would be more than happy to not have to pay IT staff to perform.
I think the point was that the big enterprises pay for licenses that don’t display this garbage. The rest, Microsoft is trying to monetize.
I agree big time. We pay for licenses so none of this crap is shown. However, most businesses get the Windows license that is included with their hardware purchase and this crap is shown to them.
The sad thing is that you'd think the revenue coming from license sales to OEMs would be enough for Microsoft to not resort to these blatant attempts to make Windows an advertising platform, but I guess it's not.
It would take a bit more class within Microsoft these days to realize that and maybe they just aren’t ready to take the step in the right direction yet.
>The sad thing is that you'd think the revenue coming from license sales to OEMs would be enough for Microsoft to not resort to these blatant attempts to make Windows an advertising platform, but I guess it's not.
I'm not defending Microsoft here, but just about everyone else is doing that same thing (and not just tech companies, auto, appliance, consumer electronics manufacturers and many others are doing this), so why wouldn't Microsoft do so as well?
Microsoft isn't the problem per se. Rather it's the lack of effective privacy regulations. GDPR (sadly, I'm not in the EU) is a start, but is still far too weak to reverse the perverse incentives that lead to your coffee maker[0][1] spying on you.
Yes, that example is (I think) an outlier, but I used it to point up just how widespread this sort of thing is.
But we shouldn't let Microsoft off the hook for that reason. We should bash them (and everyone else who does this kind of thing) and do our best to vote with our wallets/feet.
Failing that (for whatever reasons), as others have pointed out, Pro/Enterprise versions of Windows allow you to turn this garbage off.
[1] I'd note that the article linked in [0] has some pretty blatant China bashing^W^W jingoistic undertones. That said, concern over this sort of thing out of China is definitely a concern, but less so (at least to me) than the US/Western corporations that are doing at least as much of this disgusting stuff.
As they say, "That's what you get for thinkin'." My Fortune 250 leaves all this crap on by default. Launching Edge takes THIRTY SECONDS from a cold start on a brand new, nicely spec'd Dell laptop. I'm not clear if that's some sort of crazy "security" BS they've layered in (they're always making things worse), or the thing just phoning home to Microsoft. I keep thinking they must have gotten a big discount for NOT doing the sane thing, and turning this garbage off.
Windows has always had this churn. Upgrading from NT4 > 2000 > XP > Vista, etc all required a time investment to figure out new features, group policies, creating an image (Autopilot removed this requirement), etc.
Win 11 changing the Settings CPL doesn’t change the overall body of work required.
It is somewhat strange then that enterprise linux is not more common, you get stability and configurability.
I mostly put this down to bad salesmanship/C*s tending to be effectively technological cavemen...perhaps there are backroom deals we are not privy to, though.
Hmmm, I thought they used to have a non-"workstation" desktop oriented flavour too, but maybe that's been discontinued or rolled into the Workstation thing above.
> It is somewhat strange then that enterprise linux is not more common, you get stability and configurability.
Subjectively, I am under the impression that, in the enterprise desktop space, Linux is a more serious competitor to Windows than mac OS is.
For example in public administration: At one point the city government of Munich had replaced over 12000 desktops from Windows to Linux [1], and you keep seeing ideas to do similar things pop up in political party manifestoes and position papers like [2].
It is also not uncommon for large universities and research facilities to run on Linux.
Meanwhile, an enterprise running hundreds or even thousands of mac OS devices is something I've never heard of.
I think, in the past, enterprises were a bit more locked-in than they were now because they ran Windows software that they custom-developed, or off the rack but very niche and available for Windows only. But with the trend over the last two decades having gone towards writing that kind of software as web-based software, I think that element of lock-in is gradually but steadily decreasing as well.
The problem is that, once this competitive threat against Microsoft reaches critical mass, it's a bit too easy for Microsoft to counter the threat by simply backpaddling on the trash. In the meantime they just want to milk the cash cow as much as they can possibly get away with.
De-trashing an OS is easy. Meanwhile, they are working hard to make sure that Windows is the OS that runs the widest array of software on the widest array of hardware, which is not so easy (anything Windows from ancient to modern, Windows subsystems for Linux and Android). Windows emulation on Linux is also making massive progress, thanks in part to Steam, but I guess that structurally, it will always be easier for Windows to emulate Linux than for Linux to emulate Windows.
I no longer work there, but back in the early 10s IBM were allowing a lot of management and a few engineers to move to macs.
Their thinkpad business had been spun off, the thinkpad exclusivity contract had run out, and IBM were in a "we already give too much money to MS" mood at the time. No idea how far that went.
They also had a RHEL workstation-based distro you could put on your thinkpad (with a few tens of thousands of users on that IIRC), or if you were particularly adventurous, a 'layer' that could be installed on Ubuntu (that had a few thousand users) or Debian(I was one of 22 people doing that at the time!))
> Meanwhile, an enterprise running hundreds or even thousands of mac OS devices is something I've never heard of.
as a former sysadmin in these places, it's not easy to lock down macOS down - and less so to ensure that compliance is being enforced. compliance is huge, far more important than what platform you run on. MS makes this easy, and Linux support is mainly for labs, etc, who get put on a separate network most of the time and locked down.
account management on linux and mac is a nightmare, and just simple to relegate to AD. for all its problem, GPO makes this cakewalk.
>> Meanwhile, an enterprise running hundreds or even thousands of mac OS devices is something I've never heard of.
Your experience doesn't match with reality. There are multiple sources available describing the growth in macOS usage. One that's quoted in news reports, but hidden behind a paywall, is an IDC report from 2021[1].
It describes macOS penetration at ~23% in 2020 up 6% from 2019. The is supported by descriptions of the impact on enterprise end-user computing management teams that historically have only supported Windows. You can even look at the growth of Intune, and the breadth of acquisitions by Microsoft, to see that Microsoft is very likely supporting 1000s of mac devices.
An important element of how we got here is mobile. Windows had made huge investments in configuration management while OS X was an oddball. Managing it required a different set of tools. iOS and Android adoption in many enterprises caused an end run around the end-user computing gatekeepers from 2007-2012 with a proliferation in MDM solutions.
This eventually led to standardization of so-called "modern" configuration management API/interfaces/tools. The door was opened to more Mac adoption through Apple Business Manager while admins had already adopted modern management tools that covered Windows and mobile.
This doesn't discount the challenge with some users needing to use legacy Windows software. Once upon a time this was a strong moat. For years, IT have been under pressure to make this work on mobile (where feasible) which has cut down the blockers on macOS or Linux usage.
That population is shrinking. Having worked in very large (investment) Banks, other parts of the finance sector, the move is generally to divest from thick clients to web. The whole COVID situation pushed this along even faster with the reliance on diverse VDI solutions, which don't necessarily play very well with crummy in house thick client apps.
High performance, low error-tolerance applications previously only available to Windows are a continuing lock-in, yes - that's part of why gpu drivers are such a big deal.
There have been working comparability layers for the various hard-to-run on anything but Windows software appliances, but a major sticking point has been the GPU support (which keeps the software running well).
I don't think this will be true forever though, graphics drivers continue to make strides in being more open, often to the benefit of the various organizations writing or purchasing the gpus/firmware/drivers.
I'm getting heavy flashbacks to Active Desktop and iirc "Active Channels".
Does anyone remember those? Web feeds on/in your desktop. I believe it coincided with the release of IE 4 and their big web integration push.
Active Desktop and MS DHTML was awesome. Insecure as hell for "consumers", but awesome. VBscript/Wscript on/in the desktop as an application was really useful.
they were not a thing that commodity hardware, but most importantly the target user, was really prepared to run at the time
same as virtual machines were a thing in the early 70s and client-server in the 80s, but not for the target market despite the industry thought so for some time
Aye, BSD jails have been around for a while, and the chroot jail has been a concept since I've been using *nix OS's.
But there wouldn't have been the hardware, resources, or depth of support available for the end user in the 2000s. There are still non-technical folks I deal w/ at work that don't get what a VM is...
No, it's good times. Look at MSFT's stock price. Despite the lousy market, they're doing pretty well.
You can whine all you want about the user experience being terrible, but that literally doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how profitable the company is, and the value it provides to shareholders. Nothing else is important.
If customers don't like being bombarded by ads in their OS, they're free to choose something else. Alternatives are available, but most users don't want to bother looking.
I’m not expecting any big returns from them, but they certainly beat inflation, when amortized over my investment period. And they don’t seem to be going anywhere soon.
This is a very narrow view of what "good" is.
If a company dumps barrels full of toxic DDT in the Pacific Ocean causing widespread pollution, but still make a profit for their shareholders; would you still argue they are a good company?
Same for Windows. They are polluting our visual space. These ads are unwanted and not sought out.
If some company dumps toxic crap in the ocean, you don't have a choice to just go to an alternate universe where companies don't do that. It's a shared resource.
When Microsoft loads their OS with annoying ads, you have a simple choice to use it, or not. You can easily use a different OS if it bothers you so much. I don't see any ads in my OS...
>They are polluting our visual space. These ads are unwanted and not sought out.
You made a choice to buy an OS that has this pollution. That's on you, not Microsoft. MS offered you a crappy OS with ads in it at a certain (presumably low) price, and you accepted their offer. You could have used a different vendor, a free OS, or even a more-expensive version of Windows that doesn't have the ads.
This is nothing like environmental pollution. MS Windows is not a shared resource, it's a product from a private (publicly-held) corporation, offered for sale with the goal of making money for its shareholders.
My assumption is they want to pivot into Windows being really free of charge, with it monetised through advertising. Putting all this junk into the Start menu is testing the waters.
If they must go that route, I sincerely hope they offer a paid SKU in the traditional $100-200 range that dispenses with all of that. It's kinda icky, but if they want to offer a Pro version that's all clean and tidy for money, and a crappy, ad-laden version for free...I don't want to think of all the shitty bargain PCs people will be stuck with, but at least I'll be able to keep building a new PC every 8-10 years with whatever hardware I choose and include a Windows license as part of the parts list.
Make this ad-supported version a budget option for people who can't afford more and won't install Linux if you must hit that market. Just don't ruin the whole thing for those of us who will pay a modest amount for hardware and software compatibility.
At some point MS decided their main rival is Google not Apple. Perhaps they're right.
I'm not a MS user other than occasionally when work requires it, haven't really been for many many years. But looking at their stock and profit, I can't say they are doing badly at all.
At some point, especially when your focus is the consumer market, you're not going to be so scrupulous with certain choices where the trade-off is profit vs consumer interests. This is perhaps even much worse in the mobile market thanks to Google, the company that started with such good press and lofty goals.
I'm skeptical that MS isn't going just fine, and I've never been a fan.
I think they decided that Apple is a coopetitor - i.e. they are a competitor on multiple fronts but they ultimately need to support their products operating on Apple's platform.
They took that decision after windows 8 and all the push for windows phones failed to compete with android and iOS.
Now they just focus hard on offering software for people who pays and ads for people who doesn't. They can't just dictate the technology trends and styles like before (Metro lost space to Material, so they can't even influence the look & feel of computers like before).
One of the few parts where Microsoft is still focusing on being cutting edge and force their proprietary ecosystem is XBox. They're still trying to be unique and stand out against Sony and Nintendo
For deep level changes you're probably right, but showing ads in windows is probably a board level decision. At least Satya doesn't look like the CEO who would approve it with all his product focus, it must come from above.
On top of that, Azure seems to have become the main platform, and most people that cared about their career have jumped from Windows into "Azure OS".
So Windows is left with the GUI civil wars, Windows old timers that cannot let go of COM (think ATL) and classical Win32, or new employees raised on UNIX workflows without any background on Windows development history.
See efforts to put WebWidget2 and Blazor everywhere, while key figures from WinRT are no longer around, designers with macOS only experience get into the Windows UI design team, CLI tooling instead of VS GUI wizards,...
Windows 11 arguably looks better than Monterey. Please don't tell me closing windows on top left is a good UX decision and also don't tell me that Mac's weird 2.5D icons look good. Apple's software design language is actually terrible. Of course that can't be said about the hardware - that's world class.
Windows 10/11 would look great with an interface close to Zukitre for GTK2/3 from BSD/Linux world. Boring, gray neutral, yes; but it has clear buttons and widgets. Put a dark mode based on that and the problem it's solved.
>Like what does it want to be? Is it an OS or an advertisement platform. Right now it’s trying to be both and that sucks.
Microsoft wants Windows to be an ad platform and data sinkhole, it being an OS is mostly Win32 baggage that they've been repeatedly failing to kill off because users want an OS to run Win32 software and couldn't care less about being data sheep.
Maybe I’m wrong but Windows is “free” (as in beer) unless you want to change your desktop, and then you have to fork over 100 dollars (if you don’t just buy a license from one of these grey market sellers who advertise on youtube). It seems pretty clear to me that Microsoft serves ads and collects people’s data to subsidize, at least to some degree the losses of not selling license codes for 150-200 dollars.
This is because Google has its Chromebook platform that sells a laptop with ad subsidized (its their business model afterall) word processing, other cloud apps and “operating system.”
I don’t know if I’m missing something but if I’m not I don’t understand why people think Microsoft is just randomly serving ads on Windows (to keep up earnings wise with google from quarter to quarter as it gives one of its former cash-cows away for free).
> unless you want to change your desktop, and then you have to fork over 100 dollars (if you don’t just buy a license from one of these grey market sellers who advertise on youtube).
That, or you install vlmcsd somewhere and activate against that.
Microsoft doesn't really care about pirate home users, their primary source of income is business users, and these tend to buy many more Microsoft products than just client Windows. Moreover, the vast majority of home users just buys a laptop with a fully licensed copy of Windows preinstalled.
Even then, google proved most people are okay with having their data collected and if they can get away with it, might as well profit off of it too. Also, maybe this is an old thing, but doesn’t ms get some money for having windows installed on prebuilds. And yes, I know microsoft makes most of its profit off of enterprise and government contracts, but thats not gonna stop them from collecting data for immediate (and potentially long term, if they find some new thing to do with said data) profit.
For anyone wondering some details here [0]. You can now easily download the installation ISO directly from Microsoft, and choose to run it either 'activated' or 'unactivated', but there's no piracy involved.
You can download the ISO from Microsoft, and an unactivated OS is usable, but this is still not a properly licensed copy of Windows, which constitutes piracy.
There are no losses. Firstly they charge the manufacturer to bundle a license, secondly their Office revenue depends entirely on users being able to run the software. And their Windows Server and Azure AD revenue depends on connectivity with Windows clients. And they need people to be familiar with Windows UI more than could be achieved just using it in an office.
I'd gladly pay 100 bucks for Win 11 as it came out. But since then it's just getting worse, it's buggy (frequent BSODs/freezes/not-waking-up-from-sleeps on my AMD desktop), Windows Update is still shit (it reboots automatically without even once asking, yes I know there's a setting; sometimes the update takes ages on one of my laptops), it's an uphill battle, very reminiscent of ~2010 Linux desktop era. Oh that reminds me, "i know unix", why am I using this? And then I installed Ubuntu on the desktop box, and it works. And Steam and wine works, and it goes to sleep and wakes up, and amdgpu driver works, and HiDPI works, and so on.
>…Oh that reminds me, "i know unix", why am I using this? And then I installed Ubuntu on the desktop box, and it works. And Steam and wine works, and it goes to sleep and wakes up, and amdgpu driver works, and HiDPI works, and so on.
Funny, friend, thats been my experience too. I’m even living dangerously with a nvidia gpu in my system atm.
I even bought a geforce 2060 super, to eliminate one possible cause of the Windows BSODs. Both work well. (I've even installed some unstable unreleased something from https://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v6.2-rc4/ , and via DKMS nvidia drivers worked pretty well. If I remember correctly. But I wanted to try test Wayland, so switched back to the 5700XT.)
It works! Until you install a bad update that bricks critical functionality of your OS. Just rollback the update! Ok, found a copy of an older package from some repo. Oh no!! This older version requires 5 older dependencies which were updated with 32 others during the update.
5 hours later: Ugh. I'll just have to do a fresh OS install again.
they already have a compatibiltiy layer for "SQL Server on Linux", they had one for WSL1 (but WSL2 just runs in a VM), Edge already has official Linux builds.
And as Office moves to the cloud all they need is just a thin-client running Edge.
WSL2 already uses a VNC/RDP something to show Linux applications on the host, so it's not far-fetched to run the old legacy stuff in Windows VMs on Azure and VNC/RDP that to the user.
but I think corporate IT is still in love with group policies, and many fancy "endpoint security" things (device management for compliance), and they might be slow to change
> but I think corporate IT is still in love with group policies, and many fancy "endpoint security" things (device management for compliance), and they might be slow to change
Aye, AD rules the roost, as does O365 and being able to lock down work laptops.
I've done work w/ FreeIPA and OpenLDAP stuff -- and as much as I hate to admit it, I think AD is better for that, and it's not hard to find an SME. Also kinda liked powershell, though I don't use it very often.
In what world would that make any sense? Like, seriously, how did you get from "Microsoft is pushing ads into the OS they own so they earn more" to "That means that they are spending money to rebuild their OS on top of another OS they don't own" ?
Earn ads mean they don't need to make money with the OS itself anymore, which means they can give it away for free, which means its important for it to be cheap, which means its better to use something free and built on top.
Not sure I agree with the logic, but this is what I imagine the reasoning is.
I don't think the reasoning applies when you still have market dominance, and MS still does on the desktop.
I also doubt it applies when you need to pay thousands of engineering ours to rebuild your OS on top of another kernel... despite already owning said OS and said OS being complete and stable.
I'm suddenly imagining Microsoft abandoning the Windows kernel and switching to a full Linux kernel in the future.
At that point, Windows would just become another Linux distro. We could finally talk about it being the year of the Linux desktop without it being a meme.
On one hand, it could mean MS could lay off a TON of staff since they don't have to maintain their own kernel and can rely on open source. On the other, it would likely mean that software designed for Windows could now easily be run on any other Linux distro with little work. For many people (especially gamers), there'd be no reason to use Windows anymore.
It's a pipe dream, for sure. If it happened, wouldn't it require MS to open source Windows, especially if they made their own modifications to the Linux kernel?
For a start, it doesn't appear from Windows 11 that "looking, feeling or acting like the Windows UI that users want" is actually something very high up the priority list for Microsoft.
There are occasionally ads disguised as alerts, such as when you're running low on storage space it will suggest that you buy a paid tier of iCloud storage.
I think I have seen other ad-adjacent messaging for other paid Apple services but I can't think of any off the top of my head right now.
That isn't really what most people think of as ads. Nothing that requires tracking or ad sales. Offering services within your app isn't really the same as selling banner ads and video rolls.
It's not easy to like windows actually, for the most part, things do what they say on the tin, aka "close" really closes a program/window, unlike Mac. There you need to do that weird right click dance to really close something. The whole thing just feels super dumbed down.
Thanks for the clarification, I wasn't aware of that usage.
I feel the same though. I don't see how these things backfire at Microsoft. Rather than them doing something particular, I see that every such entity is doing things like this, so it's more of just a sign of the times, and MS just doing what everyone else is doing.
So, I recall ballmer doing really well financially at msft during his time. Ignoring stocks, revenue was up. I think profits were up. But then they missed every major trend during that time, and were looked at as creaking in the wrong direction. The reason I said they should ask themselves questions about windows is because it feels the same way to me. A product that still makes its way to enterprise and other money minting categories. But it’s quietly losing its way in the young developer/business/influencer market. Maybe one day MSFT wakes up and looks at windows and realizes they’ve been going in a stupid direction of screwing the long game over the whole time.
I don't think they screw the long game at all. I don't see developers having much choice regarding the OS, so MS needs to deal with their companies, not with them directly. They are also placated with things like WSL, which satisfies many use cases where otherwise someone would have installed Linux or used git bash/cygwin/VM. Or a shiny new editor, like VSCode, and they also have GitHub... Businesses, as always, need things to just work, and in the current climate, that would include handling MS Office formats, and only one software exists that handles them well enough - MS Office. Windows is still bundled with new computers as the de facto free system, running it pirated is easier than ever, you can download from MS directly even. And now every of their offering is also online, bundled with a large cloud storage offering for really really cheap.
I really don't think these offerings can be beaten. It makes business sense to use them, it makes sense personally to use them, and you can't avoid them either, because govts, administration, businesses all use them and expect the people to interface with them over these formats.
I don't feel there's anything stupid about what MS is currently doing. But I DO feel that people are hurt by how they operate.
I dont know how to explain it. I’ve used all major OS’s including a couple of flavors of Linux. I just love windows. 11 is pretty awesome for me where I use it on my surface pro 8 and it’s just really nice especially with touch. Touch is definitely a huge part of my workflow too to the point that when I sit at my desktop I sometimes try to touch the screen.
There are so many tiny quality of life things like being able to use auto hot key to macro my way around daily stuff or how the file explorer works in a way that feels more intuitive. The little thing of being able to win+shift+s and snip a part of the screen where it loads into the clipboard immediately and does not save to a file by default. I heart power toys so much especially fancy zones which I use extensively. I also do like customizing my start menu. I find building my native home brew apps for the OS to be more pleasant. I find the windows terminal to be a fabulous experience I couldn’t live without now. Wsl is a blessing where I have multiple OS’s which I need and they don’t bog the system down. All my games work fine. I just… I really love the OS and what it lets me do.
Other OS’s could probably do similar things (auto hot key is your final boss though) but I guess windows just clicks for me really really well.
Literally, the only things I’d change about it right now are the whole adware/spyware bit and making the file path work like it does in Unix based systems. Backslashes! Urgh.
I would quibble about the fact that the screenshot functionality was stolen from macOS, but the thing that really kills me is your comment about File Explorer. My impression, after decades of Windows and now a decade of macOS, is that you just don't have to spend as much time with Finder in macOS as you do with Explorer on Windows. There's something about working on a Mac that simply alleviates a lot of the work of fiddling with files like you have to do in Windows. Maybe it's because I don't deal with Office docs much any more. I don't know. Anyone else feel this difference?
I guess this is what makes the world go 'round, because I say the same thing about the left panel on Windows. From versions 7 through 10, that thing was a freaking nightmare. They seem to have cleaned it up a lot, but there's still a dedicated folder for "3D Models." Seriously?
> Huh? The "Macintosh HD" folder in Finder is /. Just drag it into your sidebar.
I somehow did not know this. I just saw Applications, Library, System, and Users and figured it was something else.
> As for hidden files, cmd + shift + . to show them.
Ah, that would be why I didn't realize "Macintosh HD" was /.
But how was I supposed to know this? I just went through all the menus and I didn't see any options regarding hidden files and no references to the cmd+shift+. keyboard shortcut.
For me it's the nature of the things I do on each OS.
I use MacOS almost exclusively for work. Most of my file browsing is done via terminal, most of the docs I access are somewhere in the cloud. I don't really mess around with stuff on my mac and don't need to open finder often
I use windows for everything else. The nature of "everything else" implies that I have a lot more weird programs and files scattered about, that I often need to find somewhere in program files or my junk folder because the start menu doesn't find it
Finder is the only think I don't like on OSX. I just wish I could natively install something like Caja and be done with it. I'm a bit new to OSX but I have no idea how anyone could prefer Finder.
For all its faults, Windows is the only operating system that manages to balance practicality, versatility, customizability, and reliability all in one single operating system.
Linux? The fucking thing breaks down if you so much as look at it wrong. No reliability, zilch, nada, /dev/null. I don't trust Linux with anything mission critical, unless I'm paying someone monies to make sure my time isn't wasted (eg: Red Hat, Synology, Steam Deck).
MacOS? Sure, it's practical and kind of reliable, but that's about it. It's not versatile nor customizable. You need to subscribe to the One Apple Way(tm), going off the Way(tm) is a miserable experience. You also really need to fully immerse yourself in the Apple ecosystem to fully use MacOS.
iOS? Android? They are strictly consumption operating systems. They are practical and reliable for consuming content, but that's all they are good (and intended) for.
BSD? No.
So Windows is the only operating system that I can use to do everything I want to do on a computer, in the ways I want to do them, with the software I want, trusting my time will not be wasted on trivially stupid nonsense.
It's funny but I would make the same argument in reverse.
All my windows boxes in my house have suffered BSODs periodically, get stuck in update cycles, and need complete reinstallation around once every year or two to remain stable. Error messages are cryptic and unhelpful. Logs are lacking.
My linux boxes almost never lock up, errors are resolvable and logs are better. The issues I've had were trivial to fix. Obviously I use hardware on which Linux is known to run well. I have run the same OS and updated it in place for years without any problems.
I'm surprised at that on the reliability front - things are a fuss to get going, but if you're on a LTS version of whatever-distro, its usually pretty rock-solid (hence why its powering everything you look at...)
I think I may have been trying to appeal to the masses - would agree, seems to be a lot more straightforward installing linux. The installer "Just works" (try pointing windows setup at a disk with something it doesn't understand on it...), and the driver support is generally fantastic. When you do need proprietary drivers, its generally taken care of too (thinking of NVidia etc)
> Linux? The fucking thing breaks down if you so much as look at it wrong. No reliability, zilch, nada, /dev/null. I don't trust Linux with anything mission critical, unless I'm paying someone monies to make sure my time isn't wasted (eg: Red Hat, Synology, Steam Deck).
From the mention of Steam Deck I'm going to guess most of the "breaks down if you so much as look at it wrong" is from graphics related stuff?
Or maybe using Ubuntu? When I stopped using Ubuntu the bug reporter came up often and quickly crashed.
However I've been using NixOS for many years now and had nearly no stability issues. The one I can remember I just rebooted and went to an old generation.
Before that I was using Debian and also had no issues, but their packages were outdated.
> So Windows is the only operating system that I can use to do everything I want to do on a computer, in the ways I want to do them, with the software I want, trusting my time will not be wasted on trivially stupid nonsense.
s/Windows/Linux or perhaps even s/Windows/NixOS for me :)
Ubuntu is IMO far from the best choice. Even manjaro offers a more stable experience at times. Fedora is what i install newbies today.
Edit:// to be more precise I use Ubuntu LTS on servers because it's stable and runs everything. But as soon as we get graphical there are better choices
Linux used to break down all the time when I used Ubuntu variants and Gnome. Either Nvidia drivers, distro upgrades, gnome configs going awry. Switching to KDE Plasma Desktop & openSUSE Tumbleweed, reliability has been 99.9999% SLA! There are immutable Linux distros too. Very reliable esp. with fs snapshots/rollback and rolling updates.
Is Windows actually customizable? Ever since they removed the Windows Classic theme the most you can really do is change the "accent" color, which barely shows up anywhere.
I use and try multiple operating systems at work: Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, tried ChromeOS Flex, etc.
Windows 11 doesn't pass basic UX principles and I would not rant about bluetooth devices handling. Also, the performance of the UI is subpar ChromeOS flex in 8 years old notebooks.
There are multiple UIs inserted by pressure in the same OS. I know the kernel itself is quite advanced, the problem is at higher layers.
I use Linux (usually Ubuntu or a derivative), macOS and Windows 11 regularly. To me they all “suck”. They all have shortcomings, and my constant switching between them only proves that there isn’t a clear winner. I can think of at least two “dumb” things with each that are easy to address but for whatever reason…. Aren’t.
I will say desktop Linux has been the worst experience for me, and it’s been that way since 2010 when I first installed a desktop Linux distro and tried to use it as my daily. BUT it’s not much worse than macOS or Windows for bugs.
My qualms with:
Windows: - Still relatively-susceptible to malware (these days ransomware is the main concern). - Windows 10 and 11 have ads and lots of tracking ("if it's free, you're the product!"). - It likes to restart to install updates without my permission. Always get bitten by running VMs on a Windows computer (excluding Windows Server of course).
macOS: - Doesn't support DisplayPort daisy-chaining at all. - Expect UI bugs starting with OS X 10.10 Yosemite when they started rewriting Objective-C code in Swift. - "most advanced operating system in the world" but can't adjust volume of speakers on external displays (brightness too). - No NVIDIA support, which means no CUDA support, so anyone who needs CUDA will be SSH'ing into a Linux box with an NVIDIA GPU attached to it. Almost forgot! macOS does not support display scaling AT ALL on 1440p monitors. They used to, when their displays were literally 1440p, but now it’s 4K or bust. You used to be able to mod a conf to enable it anyway, but that only works with Intel based Macs.
Linux: - Probably my most-frustrating point is that "everyone" talks about how "rock-solid" and great their Linux experience is when that has NEVER been the case for me in 13 years of regularly using desktop and server linux distros. - Proton makes running Windows/DirectX games on Linux a breeze, and I do agree. It's a step in the right direction and it looks like many games "just work"... of course the one game I play (Dead By Daylight) doesn't work... although this seems to be on the developer of the game, rather than Proton or Linux. - Font smoothing. Last I read, you have to do a bunch of things to get basic font-smoothing (e.g. ClearType on Windows). Less of an issue now that I have a 4K display, but I am surprised the big DEs like GNOME and KDE never seemed to integrate it. Maybe I am missing something with how difficult it might be? - Random stupid stuff. Lately it's that Debian and Debian-based distros are packaging Python packages that do not follow PIP naming guidelines, which breaks installing other Python packages globally. You can get around it with a Python virtual env, which you should probably be using anyway, but I consider it a massive oversight that this was allowed to happen. You get PLENTY of notice before a PIP goes from "proposal" to "this will break your shit". - I feel like so much dev time is spent making distros, which is a lot of wasted effort. The value of having "niche-but-popular" distros like MX Linux, Manjaro and EndeavourOS seems very low versus getting something like font-smoothing standardized. I realize those are two different "focus areas" though. - Of course I have to mention the lack of native app support. Adobe CC, MS Office, little companion apps for hardware like mice, keyboards, etc.
I don't know about them but the last time I used Ubuntu, it was extraordinarily slow and non-responsive on my test system with a 6600k, 32gb ram, and a 1 TB Samsung SSD.
Pop-OS also had that issue, but stock Debian did not, and Fedora has been consistently a good performer for me.
Keep in mind, it's the worst experience compared to macOS and Windows. The issues are usually display/GUI-related. HiDPI scaling is still buggy regardless of distro/DE. As recently as the past month I have experienced UI scaling issues on KDE and Unity, so most windows are scaling correctly, but occasionally windows will open at the default scaling, and it's built-in apps like Dolphin file manager. Spotify always requires a config file change to get scaling to work. Seems like an easy fix on their end but whatever. GNOME is the least-buggy DE I have tried, but it's also relatively simple.
Worst thing I have run into in the last couple of months would probably be display flickering/artifacts with my NVidia RTX 3060 running Fedora 38 Workstation.
Wouldn’t the “advertising platform” part always suck, though? What I mean is that the problem is not an “identity crisis”. It’s that it’s becoming enshittified.
I agree. I don't think Microsoft is confused - Windows is becoming an advertising/"service" platform. This is entirely intentional. I also don't think that product managers or executives think of themselves as building an "OS" anymore. That's a very technical way of looking at the product vs. whatever business buzzwords at in vogue.
Deep questions like why didn't anyone like Metro UI on Windows 8? :)
Even on touch devices it sucked.
I would say that was an obvious sign of a a sick organization when it effects that kind of carnage on its users. Only reason they got away with it, was that there were no real alternatives to Windows.
Windows 11 is something in the same league, but i would say there are more alternatives now than ever before, so Microsoft better watch out.
Got my first Macbook this year after 25+ years on windows/linux. The more I use it the more I like it much in the same way as when i started using iPhones 8 years ago.
Cause everyone already had learned how to "touch"-gui, but microsoft in typical arrogance, redesigned it from the bottom up, throwing all the learnings away, you either had from android or macos. And like introducing a third language, to do the same tasks you already can perform fluent in two other languages, it was just this constant stepping into the void of expectations.
It came out 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language) and was thus 9 years to late (1 iphone) and 5 years to late (1 android). It was moment were microsoft dediced to go uphill, that journey developers usually have to face, when dragging users away from windows (aka the universal gui). I mean, the normal user learns windows in school.
You only make that sort of learning effort on rare ocassions. And you dont make it just because your vendor locks you out of a previoulsy perfectly working for you ("You learned to know it blind") device.
The Metro touch UI first shipped on the Zune HD in 2009. The iPhone launched at the beginning of 2007, and the iPod touch later in the year. I don't think it's fair to say Apple had a 9 year head start.
Zune's were very basic music and video players(I used to own one.) You can't say with a straight face that the user interface of the Zune had any great similarities to the User interface of a desktop OS.
OP was comparing touch interfaces, and used iPhone and Android as examples that were well ahead of MS and by how many years. I mentioned the Zune because it's a counterexample for the specific claim made by OP about the timing of Metro, specifically with respect to touch interfaces.
> Cause everyone already had learned how to "touch"-gui, but microsoft in typical arrogance, redesigned it from the bottom up
Microsoft had a fantastic touch UI in Windows Phone 8 imho, but on desktop Windows they managed to botch it hard enough that everyone became allergic to tiles. They simply slapped a random UI with absolutely no thought put into it over the desktop, making it a constant obstacle for users to reach the UI they were used to. The old part of the UI was near unusable on touchscreens, the new one was unintuitive and not self-explanatory at all.
It felt like Microsoft wasn't sure what they actually wanted and couldn't commit to a choice until launch. I can't otherwise explain how they released a UI where the average Windows user needed minutes to find the shutdown button.
I can see MS implementing an Ad auction built into Windows. Each rectangle in the UI that can show ads receives bids from advertisers in real time. The latter get a direct link to user data, they can see who the users are, their names, ages, the programs their run, even their webcam feed. The auction will be poorly implenented, so often Windows would switch between two almost winners, resulting in annoying flickering of the ad. The big whales will get access to the VIP ad placement: the one that locks up your screen and shows a full screen ad for a minute.
I recall that you can't uninstall Edge because it shows up in weird places all over the system.
As for disabling, maybe some of it can be disabled. If the myriad anecdotes across the web are to be believed, however, then updates have a tendency to silently re-enable settings or revert defaults almost at random.
The one with DevDiv and stuff, which has amazing and mostly free development tools like VS Code, VS 2022, Windows Terminal, WSL, Azure, the .NET ecosystem, the MSVC C++ STL, PowerShell, TypeScript, and so on.
And then there's the bean-counting, irritating part of Microsoft that has stuck around since the 90s and doesn't seem to go away. This part justifies adding advertisements and crapware to Windows, pushing for SaaS (while still charging a LOT), changing the UX of Office programs every version, not being able to implement and release a proper UI library after a decade or so, and pushing laggy Electron apps like Teams instead of developing fast, native ones.
Like many others here, Windows is a daily driver for me. I actually like using it, because a lot of hardware and configurations that need painful finagling on Linux (just try using a multi-monitor high-DPI, mixed-DPI setup on Linux, or any game that has anti-cheat, or touch fingerprint sensors, or HDR and wide colour gamut displays) just work on Windows. It has a massive repository of programs that I use frequently. But some changes are just... irritating.
Except those numbers are…wrong? I mean, they’re not far off, but they’re not actually right either. You should probably never trust ChatGPT outright with facts.
I like to using Window because of its advantages about UX, which I cannot find in Linux or macOS. For example: the consistent keyboard shortcuts, the explorer's UX and UI when accessing by mouse and keyboard, the window management including tiling flow, the muti-monitor management...
I feel that there is power at Microsoft forcing Windows including terrible adware as now, just for profit (look at Bing AI). It can be good for short term but I don't think it's good for long term.
Funny, I remember working at a Linux shop a few years ago - two higher-ups in tech there were fairly against paying for any software, but both used Windows for this exact reason.
Windows has (for programs that follow it of course) good tab management shortcuts. Ctrl pgup/pgdown to go left/right (equivalent to MacOS's shortcut mentioned above), and ctrl+tab to cycle through historical tab order (which many Mac programs have as well IIRC).
But for me the nicest shortcuts in windows are Win+# for applications. Win 1, 2, 3, etc. to select a program in that slot on your taskbar regardless of whether it's already open, and holding Windows and cycling through that number's windows, along with your standard alt tab for all windows in historical order. That, combined with the non-centered taskbar icons means you get great muscle memory on both keyboard and mouse, better than Mac OS's dock IMO.
Of course, MS is doing its best to kill this for some reason by insisting on limiting how you position the taskbar, trying to center everything, and randomly sticking "Search" into the taskbar periodically. Also for whatever reason sometimes the keyboard shortcuts are not reliable in Windows 11 lol.
I can't say I like all of Microsoft's plans, but the fundamentals are there, and they were solidly designed at some point.
> I feel that there is power at Microsoft forcing Windows including terrible adware as now, just for profit
Her name is Amy Hood ;)
In seriousness, Finance in no way dictates product decisions directly. Instead, they tell product owners "You are responsible for $XXX million dollars in revenue over the next N quarters. Tell us how you plan to achieve this goal." Product owners run the gamut from amazing to unimaginative. Guess who populates the Windows PM org these days.
I mean, ignoring our personal preferences, which of those two halves of the business sounds like it's sustaining the other? I see a bunch of (cool) tools in one column, some of which admittedly might encourage people to use Windows or other paid MS products, albeit less so than in the past; in the other I see a lot of solid recurring revenue streams.
I think Azure is a bit of an awkward fit in the group, but just sticking with it, it's still eclipsed if we combine Windows, search advertising, "enterprise services," and Office, which would all seem to fit in the originally-provided "bad" group.
I long for the day when someone will dissect the numbers, and show how much of Windows' vaunted desktop share is due to corporate licenses. I think it would show that -- when people are buying with their own money -- they're preferring Macs 2-to-1 over PC's now.
I would suspect the people looking for computers under 1k will get the plastic hp because they need a computer, and will get the cheap android tablet when they want a tablet.
source: all my relatives and acquaintances that can't afford apple take those exact choices.
They are not that different. Look at Azure and tell me with a straight face that it’s not the biggest clusterfuck of all time. Look at it. Azure is the single biggest reason why .NET developers have high blood pressure around the world. Azure is so bad people actively filter out jobs where the company uses Azure. The only other software which triggers this much aversion in people is MS Teams.
Sharepoint is the worst piece of software I've ever used.
I think its central problem is that it doesn't know what it's supposed to be, so it tries to be everything, and feature creep has turned it into a slow, bloated mess.
>Sharepoint is the worst piece of software I've ever used.
>I think its central problem is that it doesn't know what it's supposed to be, so it tries to be everything, and feature creep has turned it into a slow, bloated mess.
I think Sharepoint is exactly what MS envisioned it to be. A development platform to integrate other MS tools/platforms for presentation to internal end users.
If you want something you can just install, tweak and run with, Sharepoint isn't (and never was) an appropriate solution.
But if you want something that (with significant effort) can bring all your MS tools together (encouraging the purchase of even more MS software), Sharepoint and development effort can create something useful.
N.B.: I hate Sharepoint. It's needlessly complicated and overly dependent on other MS products. As such, please don't take this comment as an endorsement of it.
it's insane how good Microsoft sales people are, if they manage to make Azure sell this well when GCP and AWS are objectively better at basically everything, including cost considerations.
Bundling licenses was what finally levered our management to Azure at a previous job. They didn't care what the OpEx was as long insane MSSQL license costs went down -- and they did. Azure was a PITA in all other ways, but they achieved that metric.
I also assumed "referral agent awards" also played a part.
Having seen Microsoft, Google and Amazon people 'pitch' their cloud solutions to a mid sized company I used to work for with quite 'normal' cloud needs, I can tell you it's not that MS sales people are great, but rather that Google and Amazon are terrible and can't be bothered to even make a serious effort for anything but the largest of deals.
From what I understand you do have the option to pay more for more assurances and higher touch support. It's just that the pricing will be the same, or even higher, than Azure.
The question isn't possible to answer, what one person expects to work another person might not consider it important. Likewise, what does "compatible" mean?
I have used Wayland exclusively for over a year and not found any software I could not run.
For example, JAVA doesn't have native Wayland support, so if you launched GUI JAVA software Wayland will run it in a sandboxed X11 server (XWayland) that behaves mostly like Wayland in the context of the rest of your system but is just X11 under the hood.
However, because that JAVA software is technically running in X11 and X11 doesn't have the level of support as Wayland does for HiDPI then that specific GUI program can't inherit your pixel config. This will probably just mean the default layout for that program will be too small or blurry.
This is a good example because it's not unreasonable that in 2023 you may not be running any GUI JAVA software and you may never even realise this was an thing. Equally, GUI JAVA software may be the only software you run in which case this may be unacceptable.
There are other things Wayland does differently to X11 (because it's different software). For example, Wayland doesn't have a method for a program to register a global hotkey - if you want a global hotkey you have to register it in your WM or DE. This is because the tighter security model stops one program from capturing inputs to another AND because the developers can't come to a consensus on the API to enable this.
You may consider Wayland not supporting arbitrary global hotkeys to be incompatible with what you expect. I don't because I have no issue with the centralised global hotkeys in my WM.
It's not compatible with Talon voice for voice to text. I was going to move to Wayland a year back, but I also had hand issues that meant I needed to use Talon.
Apparently per the Talon developer Wayland makes something like Talon very difficult or impossible to implement? Not sure of specifics.
This gave me the impression that Wayland isn't as friendly with regards to accessibility, but not sure if that's a fair takeway or not.
Nope! I used it for a while and had issues with screen sharing/capture in Firefox and OBS (it did work in Chrome but then my webcam didn't work there - classic Linux).
I never thought it would take 3 decades for Wayland to be mature.
How long ago was this? Screen sharing[0] and capture[1] works fine in wlroots.
[0]: Supported with workarounds circa 2020, most were merged by 2022 - https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/wiki/Screencast-Compatibility
[1]: I've had success using `wf-recorder` https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
Right now. On RHEL 8 admittedly, and it Firefox screen sharing did work at first, but it randomly broke at some point. OBS capture never worked in Wayland for me.
Not until extremely recently[1] for fractional scaling. In my books, this is non-working HiDPI, because on Windows, my 15.6-inch full-HD notebook display is at 1.25× scaling, and my 27-inch UHD monitor is at 1.75× scaling. And since this is so recent, most DEs don't have support for this yet.
I was using mixed-DPI set-ups with no fanfare with Windows 8, 11 years ago. And Windows had initial HiDPI support with Windows 7.
I used to do this on Windows and found a ton of apps either broke their layout or got blurry when moved between monitors, so I wouldn't class Windows as 'ideal' here either :/
Not only moving the app itself between monitors. I fairly regularly get mis-scaled icons in the task bar when I've unplugged my laptop from its screen while it's closed.
I have yet to figure out how to get QT apps (and FreeCAD is particularly awful here) how to play well - there's always something scaled wrong no matter what I do.
I am able to do a perfect multi-monitor high-DPI/mixed-DPI on Linux using wayland+gnome. The support for wayland on KDE is getting better and would probably work with KDE as well. This was a huge annoyance, but is fixed. I don`t even remember I am using wayland. Everything works.
With Steam progress on proton, most games run on Linux without problems and with the same performance.
Another huge pain in Linux was installing commercial programs. Now with flatpak, you can be sure it will work no matter what.
I never really used it at home, I went from DOS to Coherent to Linux/BSDs. But from the Work Computers I had, I found one of the NT (around 2000/2005) interesting. Then XP came out, but by then I was on Linux at work.
I do not know how to replicate early PC usage these days where you poke around with the commercial OSs we have now. Maybe a Linux/BSD would be fun for a youngster to mess around with. You can still start with text mode and create silly to useful applications without GUI complexity.
One example for a young person is to pull raw weather data from NOAA and create your own analysis applications using it.
These articles are probably important to really drive the point home, but I also have a bit of a sense that they are akin to saying "the face eating leopard is eating people's faces".
Idk as I approach ten years without windows, the decline has been obvious for a long time. But I suppose when you try to stick with it and use the system there is a part of the brain that really tries to look past this stuff, and then one day you look at what it is with clear eyes and find yourself so disgusted you have to write about it.
Anyway, Ubuntu isn't perfect, and actually does do a teeny bit of advertising to you, but it isn't anything like this. Give it a shot if you haven't. I used to have to really wrangle with it to get stuff to work, but some combination of I finally learned how to deal with it and also it got better means I don't have to do that anymore.
> But I suppose when you try to stick with it and use the system there is a part of the brain that really tries to look past this stuff, and then one day you look at what it is with clear eyes and find yourself so disgusted you have to write about it.
Maybe a combination, plus, like any OS user, you learn what you like and don't like, and you customize it to get rid of the stuff you don't like. I'm using Windows 10 and there are very, very few things to complain about 99% of the time. But sure when I do a fresh install, I'm reminded of things I don't like for roughly 5 minutes, and then I don't think about them again for like 2 years straight. So you can see why it wouldn't matter?
On the other hand, if you use Windows 11, and you don't disable the News and Weather widget, you will be reminded constantly how horrible it is. (I tried Windows 11 on a laptop for a few hours, and it a trash party.)
Now, I tried Linux Mint for just over 2 months, and lots of things were awesome, but there were things that sucked, and I could not for the life of me fix them, including losing brightness controls in situations, very frequent hangs on boot, and some games playing much, much worse than they do in Windows. (There were also a ton of games that played just as well as they do in Windows!)
It's the problems that are in your face, especially if you cannot configure around them that will eat at you over time.
All valid points. I will say that while the trash in your face in Windows is an issue, the stuff that really gets me about Windows is their persistent desire to surveil users in every way possible. I put up with some difficulties in linux because it is generally very anti-surveillance, and that is a bigger issue for me than ads in my start menu. The ads in the start menu just serve as a reminder of what I really mean to Microsoft - I am a consumer who can provide value to Microsoft, rather than with Linux where I am a user who should be provided value by the operating system.
It’s not just that. I personally only use Windows 10 for gaming, and no Windows besides on the daily basis, though I used to be a huge fan. Going back once in a while to see what Windows n+1 is up to, is almost like a mourning experience.
I would be happy if I could turn off the tab rape you get every time you click a link in Edge. You have to manually close the search tab or you end up with dozens of tabs.
I'm a long time Linux user, and for the 1st time I've stuck to a version for a long time with Mint. For the 1st time, I found a distro that hadn't a bunch a little glitches and bugs popping out everywhere and that drove me nuts.
I've been distro hopping for months now and found openSUSE the most stable and bug-free experience out of the main distros. I'm not sure why it isn't mentioned more often. People think more bleeding-edge distros have more bugs but I've found that to be the opposite and even IF something went wrong, it is automatically installed with a snapshot rollback feature!
Oh I like OpenSUSE! Been a while since I used it though. I've been meaning to look into a few things for that distro such as its secure boot implementation and mandatory access control defaults, but I've just not got around to it.
The Windows OOBE experience is trash now. Thanks to their “on by default” widgets, it’s like getting a subscription to the National Enquirer along with an OS.
This isn’t a knock against the idea of widgets btw. Widgets can be useful. The issue is, whoever PMed this feature has applied his or her taste on to millions of Windows users.
This is a masterclass on how not to manage a widely used product.
The stock price has little to do with product quality, especially for a company like Microsoft with multiple revenue streams.
That said, Windows OEM revenue is down almost 40% [1] — yes weak PC sales have contributed, but these days I suspect it’s going to be difficult for Microsoft to find enthusiastic PC buyers. Most buyers grit their teeth and spend time undoing Microsoft’s obnoxious defaults.
>The stock price has little to do with product quality, especially for a company like Microsoft with multiple revenue streams.
Product quality has little to do with profitability, and really isn't very important to the company that makes the product, except as far as it helps them make more profit. With MS, quality just isn't very important: their customers will buy their crapware no matter how bad it is, as long as it does what they need most of the time. Windows actually works pretty well these days (i.e., not blue-screening if you look at it wrong or wait 30 minutes like in the Win95 days); the complaints are mostly about adware now.
>these days I suspect it’s going to be difficult for Microsoft to find enthusiastic PC buyers.
Microsoft doesn't need enthusiastic PC buyers. There's hordes of people and businesses willing to buy their adware-laden OS for $reasons; MS can simply milk them for more and more money with things like ads and tracking.
Maybe next they can take a page from the budget airlines and car companies and charge people extra fees (or subscription fees) for generally-necessary add-ons, like networking/WiFi support, external drive support, etc.
>Most buyers grit their teeth and spend time undoing Microsoft’s obnoxious defaults.
Exactly. Why should MS bother making products people really want, or not annoying them with stuff like ads, when people are going to buy their crapware regardless? It would be a breach of their fiduciary duty not to take advantage of their customers with this situation. The PC market is saturated anyway, so there's no room for new growth; the correct course for them is to milk their existing customers who refuse to go elsewhere.
522 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] threadWhich has already been posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35415758
https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
(The Qemu.js post on the front page today lead me there via a readme link to jslinux.)
Honestly, Windows 7 and Windows 10 have been configurable into a mostly serviceable state. It was much more of a hassle to keep Windows 10 tamed, but tamed it can be.
I worry that Windows 11 will require a bunch of disassembly to get it operational, so I will keep Windows 10 until it is no longer supported.
Downside is that "I would do anything" doesn't begin to describe what will be necessary to obtain a legitimate license.
Honestly, I'm considering running fvwm95, but that's probably a bad idea.
I'm not sure if JSLinux will run Win11, but my experience with using QEMU in emulation mode to run it is that even on hardware a decade newer, it's still slower than this Win2k in the browser.
The key for 2k and XP is going to system performance settings and unchecking as many of the UI frivalries as you can stomach. Personally, I don't need window contents to move as I drag and resize windows... just the outline is fine, and it makes it more responsive, so it's better for me.
I seem to remember XP using about 120 MB on start-up. That is nothing these days but I cannot imagine trying to run it in 64 MB.
Google tells me that the minimum spec for XP is indeed 64 MB though with 128 MB “recommended”. Back then, recommended was really a lot closer to the minimum in practice ( if you wanted to do more than just look at it.
Either way, a 512 mb machine should have been a beast compared to a laptop with < 256 mb and an ATI Rage Mobility.
NT4 ran very well on 64MB. I used it as a daily driver shortly before switching to Win2k. I never ran Windows ME, I went from 95->98->NT4->Win2k->XP. NT4 correlated with me going all in on Win32 API programming.
The biggest slowness for start menu popup back then was disk. Random access loading icons for the entries, I suspect. Things would be faster the second time around. Disk was the general direct reason for slowness in usual use. Insufficient memory -> paging -> more slow disk accesses.
Context menus would be slow (and still are) if you had badly written shell extensions installed. Getting rid of those (sometimes requiring registry edits if you wanted to keep the related app) made a big difference.
Those were the days when you'd generally want to upgrade your PC every year, or at least every couple of years, if you wanted to be able to continue running the latest software.
Wonderfully solid and I was able to just get stuff done. Of course, we had IT technicians keeping everything going. I gathered that they had a lot less firefighting to do after the transition as well.
Microsoft saw how much the average user would install, and thought "we can do that too"; of course, by being "official", their own adware is much harder to remove.
Windows can show the weather in the bottom left of the task bar, which is nice
I've never wanted that feature nor found it appealing. I can just look outside if I want to know the weather where I am, or visit a site otherwise.
And you can't argue that it's /useless/. It's more information, and, ceteris paribus, more information is better.
Why can't it be both? Being data for Microsoft doesn't preclude it from also being data for you. Being able to just put in a query without having to fire up a browser might be a marginal improvement for a lot of people.
And Microsoft doesn't sell you data. No advertising platform does. They sell access to you, by using your data to classify you in ways you can be targeted. It's a subtle difference, but it changes the implications. If someone is making money off of being able to reliably target you based on your data, that means your data is precious to them. Selling it (or losing it) is tantamount to selling their competitive advantage, such as it may be.
The same graph that will soon feed into the various Copilots and GPT-things to personalize the heck out of your search and document creation which leads to more usage which leads to more data to feed into the graph.
I'm sure some of that "accidentally leaks" into their ad business too (despite their privacy assurances), but again, I doubt they'd ever sell it to 3rd parties (if nothing else, out of fear of litigation... FAANGs usually take PII handling pretty seriously).
It's sad, isn't it? In many a Hacker News thread about the Year of the Linux Desktop, someone will inevitably deadpan how there's just no money to be made; there's no business model.
It seems to me that the same is true for Apple and Microsoft. There's "no" money in the desktop itself, only as a value-add, via platform effects or via dark pattern monetization like this.
And honestly, Microsoft isn't doing too bad at tooling. Had you told me 3 years ago I would be developing .NET applications, mostly ASP.Core, on linux, I woulda said you were stoned. But here I am today, cranking out .NET code that runs servers on Linux. And the tooling is pretty good and is just getting better.
No, it should not. The NT kernel architecture is drastically superior to the Linux monorepo.
Azure outpaces everything else. Azure, under the covers, runs Hyper-V on Windows Server.
A massive number of VM's running on Azure are Linux, so investments in that area also pay cloud dividends.
This is something that won't change on the shift to Linux. It has to be a deep cultural shift, until then the company is never going to prioritize experience.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 (Win10/11, well-maintained. Closed source but coming from trusted devs with commercial interest in shipping a quality freebie that publicizes their other software)
https://github.com/builtbybel/privatezilla and https://wpd.app/ (both not super maintained)
I do have a Pi, so technically I am halfway into Linux ;)
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-ooberegion-bloatware.htm...
But it wasn't _that_ hard to turn it off. I didn't have to hack anything, just look for the settings.
Same for the obligatory stocks feature every OS is obsessed to put when (certainly outside the US) only a tiny minority of people trade stocks.
I believe the correct term for it is yolo stonks
There are several layers to "turning it off". You can use Personalization -> Taskbar to turn off the "Widgets" icon which takes care of the immediate problem.
But widgets.exe will continue running in the background, and the only way I found to get rid of that is winget uninstall "Windows Web Experience Pack"
The year of the Linux desktop for anyone who regularly browses this site came a long, long time ago.
If you're running Windows today and still telling yourself that you'll switch once it finally gets bad enough, the sad truth is that you'll put up with anything, as long as Microsoft introduces new bad behavior slowly enough to let you acclimate to their successive, increasingly fucked-up 'new normal's. As long as learning how to mitigate Microsoft's next insult to your dignity seems like it'll probably be less work than mastering a whole new operating system, Linux won't seem 'ready' to you.
But accumulating more knowledge about how to partially unfuck Windows only keeps you stuck. So stop. Cleverly, laboriously contending with your OS vendor as a fundamentally hostile party is not a solution— it's the hallmark of serious dysfunction. Don't do it. Don't reward Microsoft's abuse with further investments of your time and energy in 'mastering' their platform. Divest.
Instead of fixing this like it's a benign papercut, let the full badness of Windows wash over you. And then... leave.
Couldn't be happier about the move. No paper cuts at all. Honestly, Linux has never been better.
- "you can get a brand new Lenovo idling under 5w without that knowledge and by simply installing tlp. With additional know how you can get it under 3w" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327618
- "have you looked into tlp? Have you tried tuning it for battery life?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35327071
- "It's only a few years ago that we could expect decent battery life without tweaking on Linux, probably just after the T495 series. (-: These days, tweaking with TLP &c could yield worse battery life, in my experience." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35244689
- "I have a Thinkpad T495 which is also AMD based. [...] Kernel release 5.17 greatly helped battery life. Now it is just horrible even with TLP installed." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35219692
- "Not once, regardless of tlp and other tweaks and many hours of twiddling and forum-reading and keeping stats for weeks on end, has Linux ever approached Windows' battery life on the same machine" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33858033
- "Install TLP, uninstall thermald, and make sure turbo mode is off (it's on by default in Linux - probably applies to Intel only)." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33651208
- "by using $ powertop --auto-tune and $ tlp start. Disabling touchscreen, and disabling cores directly also works extremely well when I know I need a longer battery life" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32965109
- "on Linux, I used https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj all the time for my preferred use cases (eg, setting the temp limit below when fans turn on to get a completely silent laptop on battery, lowering max power limits if I wanted to hit a certain amount of battery life, etc). (TLP has run-on-ac and run-on-bat commands so you can easily set your defaults based on whether you're plugged in or not (udev can see power events too)." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32689327
- "Every release of Ubuntu and Fedora since has caused a lowering of battery life. Current versions of both get me about 2 1/2 hours of battery life extended to 3 hours if I install TLP." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31594346
From: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Tell me that isn't just "accumulating more knowledge of how to partially unfuck Linux"? Stumble upon the magic three letter command you'd never guess, something which you can tune and tweak which ideally requires "additional knowledge", which may not help at all and may make things worse, but several hours of t...
There's a practical difference as well, in terms of what is a regression vs. what is intended behavior come back to haunt you. This shapes what's likely to recur as well as what's the longterm trend over time.
What you're doing here is like pretending that a car with a smaller gas tank than you're used to presents the same kind of problem as one that reports every route you take in order to collect a fee on behalf of someone else— never mind the fact that half of those posts are explicitly about running Linux on hardware not intended for it, or that you are inevitably going to find advice about obsessive optimizations on a site called 'Hacker News'. None of the issues those posts raise are about user-hostile behavior from Linux OS vendors, or the exploitation of user data, or the subversion of the user's attention.
Firefox doesn't give a damn. The only thing they have going for them is that they're the underdog and people like underdogs.
Fyi you can customize the loading SVG in Firefox. Isn't it nice to use software that respects you?
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/hy9ibw/tree_sty...
Windows 11 Pro is about $150 from official channels, or $30 for a key from a reseller, and the key can just upgrade your Windows Home install. It doesn't automatically fix everything, but it gives you the group policy editor which lets you permanently turn lots of things off. It also generally treats you more like a responsible adult, e.g. giving you more control over windows updates.
I love my Xbox but damn that thing is full of ads. From the first second you turn it on and see the dashboard you are bombarded with ads. This is just the Microsoft way of creating UX/UI.
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...
https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso...
The only place I still use Windows is my laptop since battery management isn't as great... but if it gets better I'm hoping over to Linux as well there.
Windows 11 has been the most beautiful most stable and consistent windows I've ever used. It feels like a modern and rock stable update of Windows 7. I never got a blue screen or anything bad.
Finally it feels like Microsoft is trying to make everything feel part of a single os. Of course there's 30 years of baggage but they are moving at break neck speeds compared to past windows to change everything.
Content on the desktop is something the younger generation actually wants, for people who don't want it, it's shockingly easy to disable everything from settings ang revert to the old windows look. But I do agree with the author about the widget. Although I can't confirm because I've disabled the weather widget when I installed windows.
There are "recommended apps" on the start menu then again most are apps people want to install. In fact the "apps" in start menu aren't really apps, they are not installed. You can click on them to download and install or remove it.
The new context menu is atleast consistent design wise with the rest of the operating system. Applications need to be updated to integrate with it. For those apps which don't update for it, you can still set the old context menu through registry or use the "Show more options" button occasionally. Depends on your needs. I use the old context menu. Notepad++ recently updated to support Windows 11 context. Saw it in a changelog, I don't use the new context so can't say for sure.
The settings app is way better than Windows 10 settings app, I rarely have to use the control panel. Only to change the power profile settings.
Preventing updates is herculean and some of those updates inject advertisements [1]. It feels like Windows 11 is constantly changing and I have no control over it.
> or use the "Show more options" button occasionally.
It feels I have to "Show more options" about 50% of the time.
[1] https://sports.yahoo.com/microsoft-isn-t-done-shoving-150500...
You can revert to the old context menu in that case: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restor...
Personally I think Windows 11 is ugly, the rounded corners, the whole way the icons are shaded, especially the junk they stick in the search bar.
The new context menu is HORRID. It itself is inconsistent! So I'm baffled to see it claimed to be so. There's nothing consistent about having some menu items run horizontal and some vertical. It's awful. Yeah, lets make the most important menu items be smaller targets and harder to parse.
Windows 11 did feel weird to me when it launched but when I went back to 10 after a year on it, 10 felt archaic.
I agree the context menu is not for everyone, I still use the old one. By consistent I meant it feels like the rest of the OS. I should edit that to prevent further confusion. Notepad++ recently updated to support Windows 11 context. Saw it in a changelog, I don't use the new context so can't say for sure.
Is there a built in way to:
* ungroup items on the task bar?
* put your task bar on the side?
* have Live Tiles that open UWP apps (like a weather one that just opens weather)?
* restore sensible context menus?
I did not find "shockingly easy" ways to enable most of the customizations I wanted in Windows 11, even though they had those features in Windows 10. Removing features and giving us news and advertisement content in the start menu doesn't seem like a great upgrade. And Windows 10 has been extremely stable for me across a broad range of PCs (desktops and laptops), so I don't see any room for improvement.
This reminds me of the days where Ballmers goal seemed to be to lock everyone into Windows and MS products when the real upside turned out to be “make MS products fully available where people already are”. To me this brought about some great changes to their products on android, Mac, and iOS. Even the web versions of their products are actually really good.
I feel like windows is going through the same identity crisis that Ballmer took the MSFT brand through. Like what does it want to be? Is it an OS or an advertisement platform. Right now it’s trying to be both and that sucks. I hope that someone from very high up finally steps in at some point and clarifies the vision for windows and closes up all these crap avenues of revenue squeezing.
It's an OS created for enterprise corporations to support and manage the actions of their employees in a digital world. First and foremost. Most MS products are.
The ad platform is MS trying to find ways to continue growing profits. :D
AKA, the new control panel that has been evolving.. most users are likely locked out of it for anything more advanced than changing the sound volume, its the IT nerds that need to figure out the optimal set of setting and push it out. Which is work that the C*'s would be more than happy to not have to pay IT staff to perform.
I agree big time. We pay for licenses so none of this crap is shown. However, most businesses get the Windows license that is included with their hardware purchase and this crap is shown to them.
It would take a bit more class within Microsoft these days to realize that and maybe they just aren’t ready to take the step in the right direction yet.
I'm not defending Microsoft here, but just about everyone else is doing that same thing (and not just tech companies, auto, appliance, consumer electronics manufacturers and many others are doing this), so why wouldn't Microsoft do so as well?
Microsoft isn't the problem per se. Rather it's the lack of effective privacy regulations. GDPR (sadly, I'm not in the EU) is a start, but is still far too weak to reverse the perverse incentives that lead to your coffee maker[0][1] spying on you.
Yes, that example is (I think) an outlier, but I used it to point up just how widespread this sort of thing is.
But we shouldn't let Microsoft off the hook for that reason. We should bash them (and everyone else who does this kind of thing) and do our best to vote with our wallets/feet.
Failing that (for whatever reasons), as others have pointed out, Pro/Enterprise versions of Windows allow you to turn this garbage off.
[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jun/14/chinese-sma...
[1] I'd note that the article linked in [0] has some pretty blatant China bashing^W^W jingoistic undertones. That said, concern over this sort of thing out of China is definitely a concern, but less so (at least to me) than the US/Western corporations that are doing at least as much of this disgusting stuff.
Edit: Clarified prose.
Win 11 changing the Settings CPL doesn’t change the overall body of work required.
I mostly put this down to bad salesmanship/C*s tending to be effectively technological cavemen...perhaps there are backroom deals we are not privy to, though.
I’m surprised XFCE isn’t pushed more as an option.
Doing a quick check, Red Hat still has a "Workstations" product for RHEL:
https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...
Hmmm, I thought they used to have a non-"workstation" desktop oriented flavour too, but maybe that's been discontinued or rolled into the Workstation thing above.
Subjectively, I am under the impression that, in the enterprise desktop space, Linux is a more serious competitor to Windows than mac OS is.
For example in public administration: At one point the city government of Munich had replaced over 12000 desktops from Windows to Linux [1], and you keep seeing ideas to do similar things pop up in political party manifestoes and position papers like [2].
It is also not uncommon for large universities and research facilities to run on Linux.
Meanwhile, an enterprise running hundreds or even thousands of mac OS devices is something I've never heard of.
I think, in the past, enterprises were a bit more locked-in than they were now because they ran Windows software that they custom-developed, or off the rack but very niche and available for Windows only. But with the trend over the last two decades having gone towards writing that kind of software as web-based software, I think that element of lock-in is gradually but steadily decreasing as well.
The problem is that, once this competitive threat against Microsoft reaches critical mass, it's a bit too easy for Microsoft to counter the threat by simply backpaddling on the trash. In the meantime they just want to milk the cash cow as much as they can possibly get away with.
De-trashing an OS is easy. Meanwhile, they are working hard to make sure that Windows is the OS that runs the widest array of software on the widest array of hardware, which is not so easy (anything Windows from ancient to modern, Windows subsystems for Linux and Android). Windows emulation on Linux is also making massive progress, thanks in part to Steam, but I guess that structurally, it will always be easier for Windows to emulate Linux than for Linux to emulate Windows.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] https://www.transformation.gouv.fr/files/presse/Declaration_...
Their thinkpad business had been spun off, the thinkpad exclusivity contract had run out, and IBM were in a "we already give too much money to MS" mood at the time. No idea how far that went.
They also had a RHEL workstation-based distro you could put on your thinkpad (with a few tens of thousands of users on that IIRC), or if you were particularly adventurous, a 'layer' that could be installed on Ubuntu (that had a few thousand users) or Debian(I was one of 22 people doing that at the time!))
as a former sysadmin in these places, it's not easy to lock down macOS down - and less so to ensure that compliance is being enforced. compliance is huge, far more important than what platform you run on. MS makes this easy, and Linux support is mainly for labs, etc, who get put on a separate network most of the time and locked down.
account management on linux and mac is a nightmare, and just simple to relegate to AD. for all its problem, GPO makes this cakewalk.
Your experience doesn't match with reality. There are multiple sources available describing the growth in macOS usage. One that's quoted in news reports, but hidden behind a paywall, is an IDC report from 2021[1].
It describes macOS penetration at ~23% in 2020 up 6% from 2019. The is supported by descriptions of the impact on enterprise end-user computing management teams that historically have only supported Windows. You can even look at the growth of Intune, and the breadth of acquisitions by Microsoft, to see that Microsoft is very likely supporting 1000s of mac devices.
An important element of how we got here is mobile. Windows had made huge investments in configuration management while OS X was an oddball. Managing it required a different set of tools. iOS and Android adoption in many enterprises caused an end run around the end-user computing gatekeepers from 2007-2012 with a proliferation in MDM solutions.
This eventually led to standardization of so-called "modern" configuration management API/interfaces/tools. The door was opened to more Mac adoption through Apple Business Manager while admins had already adopted modern management tools that covered Windows and mobile.
This doesn't discount the challenge with some users needing to use legacy Windows software. Once upon a time this was a strong moat. For years, IT have been under pressure to make this work on mobile (where feasible) which has cut down the blockers on macOS or Linux usage.
[1] https://www.idc.com/research/viewtoc.jsp?containerId=US46965...
There have been working comparability layers for the various hard-to-run on anything but Windows software appliances, but a major sticking point has been the GPU support (which keeps the software running well).
I don't think this will be true forever though, graphics drivers continue to make strides in being more open, often to the benefit of the various organizations writing or purchasing the gpus/firmware/drivers.
Some companies tried to use free alternatives to Excel, but there were always compatibility issues when customer or partner use Excel.
I think if someone had created 1:1 alternative to MS Office (with all its quirks and bugs), then switching to Linux would likely be a no brainer.
Even Linux.
My introduction to containers was HP-UX Vaults.
same as virtual machines were a thing in the early 70s and client-server in the 80s, but not for the target market despite the industry thought so for some time
But there wouldn't have been the hardware, resources, or depth of support available for the end user in the 2000s. There are still non-technical folks I deal w/ at work that don't get what a VM is...
OS for enterprise customers and Windows Pro users who know how to use Group Policy.
Advertisement platform for everyone else.
Sad times.
You can whine all you want about the user experience being terrible, but that literally doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how profitable the company is, and the value it provides to shareholders. Nothing else is important.
If customers don't like being bombarded by ads in their OS, they're free to choose something else. Alternatives are available, but most users don't want to bother looking.
MSFT is one of my major blue chips. Between Office, Azure and Windows; they always perform pretty well:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MSFT/
I’m not expecting any big returns from them, but they certainly beat inflation, when amortized over my investment period. And they don’t seem to be going anywhere soon.
When Microsoft loads their OS with annoying ads, you have a simple choice to use it, or not. You can easily use a different OS if it bothers you so much. I don't see any ads in my OS...
>They are polluting our visual space. These ads are unwanted and not sought out.
You made a choice to buy an OS that has this pollution. That's on you, not Microsoft. MS offered you a crappy OS with ads in it at a certain (presumably low) price, and you accepted their offer. You could have used a different vendor, a free OS, or even a more-expensive version of Windows that doesn't have the ads.
This is nothing like environmental pollution. MS Windows is not a shared resource, it's a product from a private (publicly-held) corporation, offered for sale with the goal of making money for its shareholders.
Make this ad-supported version a budget option for people who can't afford more and won't install Linux if you must hit that market. Just don't ruin the whole thing for those of us who will pay a modest amount for hardware and software compatibility.
I'm not a MS user other than occasionally when work requires it, haven't really been for many many years. But looking at their stock and profit, I can't say they are doing badly at all.
At some point, especially when your focus is the consumer market, you're not going to be so scrupulous with certain choices where the trade-off is profit vs consumer interests. This is perhaps even much worse in the mobile market thanks to Google, the company that started with such good press and lofty goals.
I'm skeptical that MS isn't going just fine, and I've never been a fan.
(We'd probably have seen a bit more movement towards making DirectX workable on M-series chips if that were a broad MS feeling.)
Now they just focus hard on offering software for people who pays and ads for people who doesn't. They can't just dictate the technology trends and styles like before (Metro lost space to Material, so they can't even influence the look & feel of computers like before).
One of the few parts where Microsoft is still focusing on being cutting edge and force their proprietary ecosystem is XBox. They're still trying to be unique and stand out against Sony and Nintendo
Lack of design in Windows is a direct consequence of MS's inability to steer its process and product strategies.
Multiple competing GUI teams, user experience, core devs unable to roll out features because of the number of stake holders, etc.
So Windows is left with the GUI civil wars, Windows old timers that cannot let go of COM (think ATL) and classical Win32, or new employees raised on UNIX workflows without any background on Windows development history.
See efforts to put WebWidget2 and Blazor everywhere, while key figures from WinRT are no longer around, designers with macOS only experience get into the Windows UI design team, CLI tooling instead of VS GUI wizards,...
Microsoft wants Windows to be an ad platform and data sinkhole, it being an OS is mostly Win32 baggage that they've been repeatedly failing to kill off because users want an OS to run Win32 software and couldn't care less about being data sheep.
This is because Google has its Chromebook platform that sells a laptop with ad subsidized (its their business model afterall) word processing, other cloud apps and “operating system.”
I don’t know if I’m missing something but if I’m not I don’t understand why people think Microsoft is just randomly serving ads on Windows (to keep up earnings wise with google from quarter to quarter as it gives one of its former cash-cows away for free).
That, or you install vlmcsd somewhere and activate against that.
0: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-windows-10-free-or-...
Funny, friend, thats been my experience too. I’m even living dangerously with a nvidia gpu in my system atm.
5 hours later: Ugh. I'll just have to do a fresh OS install again.
It's all rent seeking and I will drop Windows like a bad smell as soon as Linux works well for a couple of things I use that are Windows-only.
Still on Win 10 for my desktop but the laptop came with Win 11 which is an abomination.
I bet they did exactly that and the answer was: we're going to milk our users as long as Windows is still relevant.
Windows doesn't seem to have much of a priority anymore at MS now that Azure is the new darling.
And as Office moves to the cloud all they need is just a thin-client running Edge.
WSL2 already uses a VNC/RDP something to show Linux applications on the host, so it's not far-fetched to run the old legacy stuff in Windows VMs on Azure and VNC/RDP that to the user.
but I think corporate IT is still in love with group policies, and many fancy "endpoint security" things (device management for compliance), and they might be slow to change
Aye, AD rules the roost, as does O365 and being able to lock down work laptops.
I've done work w/ FreeIPA and OpenLDAP stuff -- and as much as I hate to admit it, I think AD is better for that, and it's not hard to find an SME. Also kinda liked powershell, though I don't use it very often.
Not sure I agree with the logic, but this is what I imagine the reasoning is.
I don't think the reasoning applies when you still have market dominance, and MS still does on the desktop.
At that point, Windows would just become another Linux distro. We could finally talk about it being the year of the Linux desktop without it being a meme.
On one hand, it could mean MS could lay off a TON of staff since they don't have to maintain their own kernel and can rely on open source. On the other, it would likely mean that software designed for Windows could now easily be run on any other Linux distro with little work. For many people (especially gamers), there'd be no reason to use Windows anymore.
It's a pipe dream, for sure. If it happened, wouldn't it require MS to open source Windows, especially if they made their own modifications to the Linux kernel?
For a start, it doesn't appear from Windows 11 that "looking, feeling or acting like the Windows UI that users want" is actually something very high up the priority list for Microsoft.
Also Azure sucks compared to most other cloud providers so that’s not a basket I would put all my eggs in.
I think I have seen other ad-adjacent messaging for other paid Apple services but I can't think of any off the top of my head right now.
Compared to Microsoft? It's several orders of magnitude smaller.
- banner ads inside of the Apple News app. Similar to what other news sites include but fewer ads.
- App Store home page - at least some of the apps featured there are paid placements.
- pay for placement listings on the App Store. When you do a search, the first result or two is a paid listing.
- App Store app page with "you might also like" lists at the bottom of the page.
Because it allows you to do stuff that MacOS/Linux won't, or do you actually like it as software, in and of itself?
If the former, that's understandable. If the latter, then may God have mercy on your soul.
>They need to ask some deep questions of themselves
Are they not doing well though? I see that they are a successful business.
I feel the same though. I don't see how these things backfire at Microsoft. Rather than them doing something particular, I see that every such entity is doing things like this, so it's more of just a sign of the times, and MS just doing what everyone else is doing.
I really don't think these offerings can be beaten. It makes business sense to use them, it makes sense personally to use them, and you can't avoid them either, because govts, administration, businesses all use them and expect the people to interface with them over these formats.
I don't feel there's anything stupid about what MS is currently doing. But I DO feel that people are hurt by how they operate.
I used windows from 3.1, NT, 95, 2000 until XP, at which point I switched to Linux for my main OS.
Obviously I used all the later versions of Windows too for work, but each version seemed worse and less usable (7 was ok I guess).
There are so many tiny quality of life things like being able to use auto hot key to macro my way around daily stuff or how the file explorer works in a way that feels more intuitive. The little thing of being able to win+shift+s and snip a part of the screen where it loads into the clipboard immediately and does not save to a file by default. I heart power toys so much especially fancy zones which I use extensively. I also do like customizing my start menu. I find building my native home brew apps for the OS to be more pleasant. I find the windows terminal to be a fabulous experience I couldn’t live without now. Wsl is a blessing where I have multiple OS’s which I need and they don’t bog the system down. All my games work fine. I just… I really love the OS and what it lets me do.
Other OS’s could probably do similar things (auto hot key is your final boss though) but I guess windows just clicks for me really really well.
Literally, the only things I’d change about it right now are the whole adware/spyware bit and making the file path work like it does in Unix based systems. Backslashes! Urgh.
I don't use touch in my main OS, but maybe I should consider it!
Wsl does look really useful too (although the one time I tried to use it failed because it didn't support shared memory yet).
EDIT: Backslashes argghhh! Agree strongly here. Would be nice to get away from drive letters too and have a unified file system.
I feel that MacOS tries very hard to hide the fact that it's Unix under the hood and tries to hide all the Unix directories.
As for hidden files, cmd + shift + . to show them.
I somehow did not know this. I just saw Applications, Library, System, and Users and figured it was something else.
> As for hidden files, cmd + shift + . to show them.
Ah, that would be why I didn't realize "Macintosh HD" was /.
But how was I supposed to know this? I just went through all the menus and I didn't see any options regarding hidden files and no references to the cmd+shift+. keyboard shortcut.
I use MacOS almost exclusively for work. Most of my file browsing is done via terminal, most of the docs I access are somewhere in the cloud. I don't really mess around with stuff on my mac and don't need to open finder often
I use windows for everything else. The nature of "everything else" implies that I have a lot more weird programs and files scattered about, that I often need to find somewhere in program files or my junk folder because the start menu doesn't find it
Linux? The fucking thing breaks down if you so much as look at it wrong. No reliability, zilch, nada, /dev/null. I don't trust Linux with anything mission critical, unless I'm paying someone monies to make sure my time isn't wasted (eg: Red Hat, Synology, Steam Deck).
MacOS? Sure, it's practical and kind of reliable, but that's about it. It's not versatile nor customizable. You need to subscribe to the One Apple Way(tm), going off the Way(tm) is a miserable experience. You also really need to fully immerse yourself in the Apple ecosystem to fully use MacOS.
iOS? Android? They are strictly consumption operating systems. They are practical and reliable for consuming content, but that's all they are good (and intended) for.
BSD? No.
So Windows is the only operating system that I can use to do everything I want to do on a computer, in the ways I want to do them, with the software I want, trusting my time will not be wasted on trivially stupid nonsense.
All my windows boxes in my house have suffered BSODs periodically, get stuck in update cycles, and need complete reinstallation around once every year or two to remain stable. Error messages are cryptic and unhelpful. Logs are lacking.
My linux boxes almost never lock up, errors are resolvable and logs are better. The issues I've had were trivial to fix. Obviously I use hardware on which Linux is known to run well. I have run the same OS and updated it in place for years without any problems.
Same thing on Windows takes about half a day for me, and involves hunting for drivers and so on...
Maybe much is simply what you are used to.
From the mention of Steam Deck I'm going to guess most of the "breaks down if you so much as look at it wrong" is from graphics related stuff?
Or maybe using Ubuntu? When I stopped using Ubuntu the bug reporter came up often and quickly crashed.
However I've been using NixOS for many years now and had nearly no stability issues. The one I can remember I just rebooted and went to an old generation.
Before that I was using Debian and also had no issues, but their packages were outdated.
> So Windows is the only operating system that I can use to do everything I want to do on a computer, in the ways I want to do them, with the software I want, trusting my time will not be wasted on trivially stupid nonsense.
s/Windows/Linux or perhaps even s/Windows/NixOS for me :)
Edit:// to be more precise I use Ubuntu LTS on servers because it's stable and runs everything. But as soon as we get graphical there are better choices
And that's just the shell.
What, where and how Windows can do something for you depends entirely on what you install and how you configure everything. Windows is a blank canvas.
Windows 11 doesn't pass basic UX principles and I would not rant about bluetooth devices handling. Also, the performance of the UI is subpar ChromeOS flex in 8 years old notebooks.
There are multiple UIs inserted by pressure in the same OS. I know the kernel itself is quite advanced, the problem is at higher layers.
BTW, love .NET and the Linux susbsystem.
Even with .NET we need a whole book on COM interop to actually understand how they go together, and now CsWinRT has rendered most of it outdated.
[1] https://blog.nektra.com/main/2015/06/11/remotebridge-is-now-...
I will say desktop Linux has been the worst experience for me, and it’s been that way since 2010 when I first installed a desktop Linux distro and tried to use it as my daily. BUT it’s not much worse than macOS or Windows for bugs.
Im surprised by this take, Ubuntu derivatives have had major improvements in the past decade.
What is the worst thing youve run into?
Pop-OS also had that issue, but stock Debian did not, and Fedora has been consistently a good performer for me.
Worst thing I have run into in the last couple of months would probably be display flickering/artifacts with my NVidia RTX 3060 running Fedora 38 Workstation.
It's like Windows team is committed to building the complete antithesis of that vision.
I would say that was an obvious sign of a a sick organization when it effects that kind of carnage on its users. Only reason they got away with it, was that there were no real alternatives to Windows. Windows 11 is something in the same league, but i would say there are more alternatives now than ever before, so Microsoft better watch out.
Got my first Macbook this year after 25+ years on windows/linux. The more I use it the more I like it much in the same way as when i started using iPhones 8 years ago.
You only make that sort of learning effort on rare ocassions. And you dont make it just because your vendor locks you out of a previoulsy perfectly working for you ("You learned to know it blind") device.
Microsoft had a fantastic touch UI in Windows Phone 8 imho, but on desktop Windows they managed to botch it hard enough that everyone became allergic to tiles. They simply slapped a random UI with absolutely no thought put into it over the desktop, making it a constant obstacle for users to reach the UI they were used to. The old part of the UI was near unusable on touchscreens, the new one was unintuitive and not self-explanatory at all.
It felt like Microsoft wasn't sure what they actually wanted and couldn't commit to a choice until launch. I can't otherwise explain how they released a UI where the average Windows user needed minutes to find the shutdown button.
They're being raised on HN, sure, but are they widely-held by the average Windows user? Seems to me the answer is no.
But if a checkbox was there that they could click to not be tracked, they would click it.
A way to make as much money as they possibly can. Was this ever a question, really?
sure, it is annoying to have crapware installed by the manufacturer.
maybe my test potato isn’t powerful enough to warrant using windows as more than something on which to run a browser. poorly.
ignoring that detail, windows 11 is fine as windows goes.
As for disabling, maybe some of it can be disabled. If the myriad anecdotes across the web are to be believed, however, then updates have a tendency to silently re-enable settings or revert defaults almost at random.
Welcome back to reality. took you long enough.
M$ has no motivation to put anything in there, or take anything out, unless it's going to profit M$.
Of course, most people on this propaganda feed are firmly in the "if it's good for a billionaire it's good for me" boat.
Good luck with that...
The one with DevDiv and stuff, which has amazing and mostly free development tools like VS Code, VS 2022, Windows Terminal, WSL, Azure, the .NET ecosystem, the MSVC C++ STL, PowerShell, TypeScript, and so on.
And then there's the bean-counting, irritating part of Microsoft that has stuck around since the 90s and doesn't seem to go away. This part justifies adding advertisements and crapware to Windows, pushing for SaaS (while still charging a LOT), changing the UX of Office programs every version, not being able to implement and release a proper UI library after a decade or so, and pushing laggy Electron apps like Teams instead of developing fast, native ones.
Like many others here, Windows is a daily driver for me. I actually like using it, because a lot of hardware and configurations that need painful finagling on Linux (just try using a multi-monitor high-DPI, mixed-DPI setup on Linux, or any game that has anti-cheat, or touch fingerprint sensors, or HDR and wide colour gamut displays) just work on Windows. It has a massive repository of programs that I use frequently. But some changes are just... irritating.
From the horse’s mouth, https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html:
Productivity and Business Processes: 53.9B (not 53.7)
Intelligent Cloud: 60.1B (not 58.4)
More Personal Computing: 54.1B (not 53.6)
I like to using Window because of its advantages about UX, which I cannot find in Linux or macOS. For example: the consistent keyboard shortcuts, the explorer's UX and UI when accessing by mouse and keyboard, the window management including tiling flow, the muti-monitor management...
I feel that there is power at Microsoft forcing Windows including terrible adware as now, just for profit (look at Bing AI). It can be good for short term but I don't think it's good for long term.
Funny, I remember working at a Linux shop a few years ago - two higher-ups in tech there were fairly against paying for any software, but both used Windows for this exact reason.
What’s the standard Windows shortcut for opening an applications preferences (cmd + ,”? What about switching tabs (cmd + shift + [ or ]).
But for me the nicest shortcuts in windows are Win+# for applications. Win 1, 2, 3, etc. to select a program in that slot on your taskbar regardless of whether it's already open, and holding Windows and cycling through that number's windows, along with your standard alt tab for all windows in historical order. That, combined with the non-centered taskbar icons means you get great muscle memory on both keyboard and mouse, better than Mac OS's dock IMO.
Of course, MS is doing its best to kill this for some reason by insisting on limiting how you position the taskbar, trying to center everything, and randomly sticking "Search" into the taskbar periodically. Also for whatever reason sometimes the keyboard shortcuts are not reliable in Windows 11 lol.
I can't say I like all of Microsoft's plans, but the fundamentals are there, and they were solidly designed at some point.
Her name is Amy Hood ;)
In seriousness, Finance in no way dictates product decisions directly. Instead, they tell product owners "You are responsible for $XXX million dollars in revenue over the next N quarters. Tell us how you plan to achieve this goal." Product owners run the gamut from amazing to unimaginative. Guess who populates the Windows PM org these days.
[1]: https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/
I suspect that most people actually spending their own money are spending less than $1000, which more or less puts Apple out of the running.
I think its central problem is that it doesn't know what it's supposed to be, so it tries to be everything, and feature creep has turned it into a slow, bloated mess.
>I think its central problem is that it doesn't know what it's supposed to be, so it tries to be everything, and feature creep has turned it into a slow, bloated mess.
I think Sharepoint is exactly what MS envisioned it to be. A development platform to integrate other MS tools/platforms for presentation to internal end users.
If you want something you can just install, tweak and run with, Sharepoint isn't (and never was) an appropriate solution.
But if you want something that (with significant effort) can bring all your MS tools together (encouraging the purchase of even more MS software), Sharepoint and development effort can create something useful.
N.B.: I hate Sharepoint. It's needlessly complicated and overly dependent on other MS products. As such, please don't take this comment as an endorsement of it.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
I also assumed "referral agent awards" also played a part.
Having seen Microsoft, Google and Amazon people 'pitch' their cloud solutions to a mid sized company I used to work for with quite 'normal' cloud needs, I can tell you it's not that MS sales people are great, but rather that Google and Amazon are terrible and can't be bothered to even make a serious effort for anything but the largest of deals.
Currently using it right now on Sway: https://man.archlinux.org/man/sway-output.5.en
I have used Wayland exclusively for over a year and not found any software I could not run.
For example, JAVA doesn't have native Wayland support, so if you launched GUI JAVA software Wayland will run it in a sandboxed X11 server (XWayland) that behaves mostly like Wayland in the context of the rest of your system but is just X11 under the hood.
However, because that JAVA software is technically running in X11 and X11 doesn't have the level of support as Wayland does for HiDPI then that specific GUI program can't inherit your pixel config. This will probably just mean the default layout for that program will be too small or blurry.
This is a good example because it's not unreasonable that in 2023 you may not be running any GUI JAVA software and you may never even realise this was an thing. Equally, GUI JAVA software may be the only software you run in which case this may be unacceptable.
There are other things Wayland does differently to X11 (because it's different software). For example, Wayland doesn't have a method for a program to register a global hotkey - if you want a global hotkey you have to register it in your WM or DE. This is because the tighter security model stops one program from capturing inputs to another AND because the developers can't come to a consensus on the API to enable this.
You may consider Wayland not supporting arbitrary global hotkeys to be incompatible with what you expect. I don't because I have no issue with the centralised global hotkeys in my WM.
Apparently per the Talon developer Wayland makes something like Talon very difficult or impossible to implement? Not sure of specifics.
This gave me the impression that Wayland isn't as friendly with regards to accessibility, but not sure if that's a fair takeway or not.
I never thought it would take 3 decades for Wayland to be mature.
I was using mixed-DPI set-ups with no fanfare with Windows 8, 11 years ago. And Windows had initial HiDPI support with Windows 7.
[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...
I have yet to figure out how to get QT apps (and FreeCAD is particularly awful here) how to play well - there's always something scaled wrong no matter what I do.
Additionally, DevDiv is now under Azure, hence all the cool toys and openess.
With Steam progress on proton, most games run on Linux without problems and with the same performance.
Another huge pain in Linux was installing commercial programs. Now with flatpak, you can be sure it will work no matter what.
It is getting better, trust me.
I never really used it at home, I went from DOS to Coherent to Linux/BSDs. But from the Work Computers I had, I found one of the NT (around 2000/2005) interesting. Then XP came out, but by then I was on Linux at work.
I do not know how to replicate early PC usage these days where you poke around with the commercial OSs we have now. Maybe a Linux/BSD would be fun for a youngster to mess around with. You can still start with text mode and create silly to useful applications without GUI complexity.
One example for a young person is to pull raw weather data from NOAA and create your own analysis applications using it.
Idk as I approach ten years without windows, the decline has been obvious for a long time. But I suppose when you try to stick with it and use the system there is a part of the brain that really tries to look past this stuff, and then one day you look at what it is with clear eyes and find yourself so disgusted you have to write about it.
Anyway, Ubuntu isn't perfect, and actually does do a teeny bit of advertising to you, but it isn't anything like this. Give it a shot if you haven't. I used to have to really wrangle with it to get stuff to work, but some combination of I finally learned how to deal with it and also it got better means I don't have to do that anymore.
Maybe a combination, plus, like any OS user, you learn what you like and don't like, and you customize it to get rid of the stuff you don't like. I'm using Windows 10 and there are very, very few things to complain about 99% of the time. But sure when I do a fresh install, I'm reminded of things I don't like for roughly 5 minutes, and then I don't think about them again for like 2 years straight. So you can see why it wouldn't matter?
On the other hand, if you use Windows 11, and you don't disable the News and Weather widget, you will be reminded constantly how horrible it is. (I tried Windows 11 on a laptop for a few hours, and it a trash party.)
Now, I tried Linux Mint for just over 2 months, and lots of things were awesome, but there were things that sucked, and I could not for the life of me fix them, including losing brightness controls in situations, very frequent hangs on boot, and some games playing much, much worse than they do in Windows. (There were also a ton of games that played just as well as they do in Windows!)
It's the problems that are in your face, especially if you cannot configure around them that will eat at you over time.
Or a utility with a funny icon, named in camel case, that fixes it.
Or a utility written by a demoscene group that somehow manages the behavior through a DOS TSR.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/123br95/news_in_...
This post is locked. You won't be able to comment.
This isn’t a knock against the idea of widgets btw. Widgets can be useful. The issue is, whoever PMed this feature has applied his or her taste on to millions of Windows users.
This is a masterclass on how not to manage a widely used product.
The MSFT stock price disagrees with you. Looks like they're managing it just fine to me.
That said, Windows OEM revenue is down almost 40% [1] — yes weak PC sales have contributed, but these days I suspect it’s going to be difficult for Microsoft to find enthusiastic PC buyers. Most buyers grit their teeth and spend time undoing Microsoft’s obnoxious defaults.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/24/23569050/microsoft-q2-202...
Product quality has little to do with profitability, and really isn't very important to the company that makes the product, except as far as it helps them make more profit. With MS, quality just isn't very important: their customers will buy their crapware no matter how bad it is, as long as it does what they need most of the time. Windows actually works pretty well these days (i.e., not blue-screening if you look at it wrong or wait 30 minutes like in the Win95 days); the complaints are mostly about adware now.
>these days I suspect it’s going to be difficult for Microsoft to find enthusiastic PC buyers.
Microsoft doesn't need enthusiastic PC buyers. There's hordes of people and businesses willing to buy their adware-laden OS for $reasons; MS can simply milk them for more and more money with things like ads and tracking.
Maybe next they can take a page from the budget airlines and car companies and charge people extra fees (or subscription fees) for generally-necessary add-ons, like networking/WiFi support, external drive support, etc.
>Most buyers grit their teeth and spend time undoing Microsoft’s obnoxious defaults.
Exactly. Why should MS bother making products people really want, or not annoying them with stuff like ads, when people are going to buy their crapware regardless? It would be a breach of their fiduciary duty not to take advantage of their customers with this situation. The PC market is saturated anyway, so there's no room for new growth; the correct course for them is to milk their existing customers who refuse to go elsewhere.