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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.

> They need to ask some deep questions of themselves of what they want Windows to be.

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.

A classic mistake Apple has avoided. The Mac is not numerically their big platform but it’s key to their ecosystem so they have not abandoned it.

Also Azure sucks compared to most other cloud providers so that’s not a basket I would put all my eggs in.

Aren't Apple starting to roll out more ads in various places?

Compared to what they had 5 years ago? Yes, albeit limited in scope.

Compared to Microsoft? It's several orders of magnitude smaller.

Currently Apple has ads in two place. The News app and the App Store.

- 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.

Inside of the Appstore on iOS

And within the Settings app.

Where in Settings? I've not see any ads there.

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.

I bet that there is already some Linux version reverse-developed inside Microsoft with a windows copy on top and a working compatability layer below.

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?

I doubt it.

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.

It would be incredibly ironic if Linux were to win the desktop, and Microsoft were to become the biggest vendor.

[dead]

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.

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

and their profits have soared

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.

I think the Office team might feel that way. I'm not sure the rest of the company does.

(We'd probably have seen a bit more movement towards making DirectX workable on M-series chips if that were a broad MS feeling.)

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).

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.

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.

>…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.)

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.

It’s not ‘pirating’ to not pay for Windows for quite a while now. The license is optional and I don’t bother with it on VMs.

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.

0: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/get-windows-10-free-or-...

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.

Thanks, I've had a closer look at the Windows EULA and you're right. Guess I should apply some of my product keys to those VMs!

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.

> 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.

Or py-kms.

What annoys me is there is no price I could just pay to get an ad-free, perpetual licence for Windows with no "telemetry".

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 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.

BTW, love .NET and the Linux susbsystem.

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.

>will say desktop Linux has been the worst experience

Im surprised by this take, Ubuntu derivatives have had major improvements in the past decade.

What is the worst thing youve run into?

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.

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.

Sounds like there just wasn't an open-source or proprietary Linux driver for some rare or new component in your system.

Know your classics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI

Ha I've never seen this. Excellent.

It would be great if you can elaborate how you favorite OS would be.

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.

My pet peeve is COM, the idea in abstract is quite good, the tooling besides VB 6 and C++/CX, not so much.

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.

Regarding COM, we created pretty advanced tools to hook/intercept it [1]. It is a good abstraction as you said. DCOM is a mess though.

[1] https://blog.nektra.com/main/2015/06/11/remotebridge-is-now-...

Interesting!

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Which is insane to think about given the hard open-source "engineer first" pivot Satya has taken the company.

It's like Windows team is committed to building the complete antithesis of that vision.

> 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.

>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.

[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.

They in it for the profit. They would not shy away from a revenue stream. Users can still clean it up.

Much agreed.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] https://www.transformation.gouv.fr/files/presse/Declaration_...

> 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.

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!))

Now that they own RH entirely, would we see a push to RHEL on the laptop at IBM (or Fedora, maybe)?

Entirely possible they already have gone in that direction, but you'd have to ask someone on the e-client team, or whatever they call it now!

>> 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.

[1] https://www.idc.com/research/viewtoc.jsp?containerId=US46965...

Most organisations use Excel and it doesn't work on Linux - at least you can't have a seamless experience for a typical office user.

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.

That's why there's Office 365. It runs everywhere there is a modern browser.

Even Linux.

It's on someone else's computer, so it's a no no for many organisations.

Except you dont, not in termos of unchanging UX. Gnome reinvents itself too often…

I’m surprised XFCE isn’t pushed more as an option.

Wouldn't enterprise desktop folk go with the longer lived commercial distro's or LTS releases?

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.

And, you know, a ton of critical software that doesn’t run on Linux.

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.

This might be true for business apps, but I don’t see any suitable replacements (by a long shot) for mechanical CAD, Adobe Suite, etc.

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.

And security issues. The downside of folks wanting to write software for your platform is that not all of it is good for the user.

It's good enough for French military.

[flagged]

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.

> Is it an OS or an advertisement platform.

OS for enterprise customers and Windows Pro users who know how to use Group Policy.

Advertisement platform for everyone else.

Sad times.

Tell your kids to study hard so they can afford to stay away from it.

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.

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.

> No, it's good times. Look at MSFT's stock price. Despite the lousy market, they're doing pretty well.

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.

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.

If containers had been a thing, many of the wild MS ideas of the early 2000s wouldn't have been actually crazy.

They were a thing, on mainframes, micro-computers, and a few selected UNIXes like the (shortly lived) Tru64 and HP-UX.

My introduction to containers was HP-UX Vaults.

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...

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

It depends on the definition of target user/market. For IT professionals definitly yes.

that wasn't remotely the target of Active Desktop

Indeed that was for Electron like applications, and not at all matter of discussion.

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.

Agreed! If I need a copy of Windows, I'd happily pay for a license that lets me run it without ads and other annoying crapware.

Honest question - what do you like about Windows?

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).

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.

Interesting, thanks. Many of those things I'd make the same argument for Linux, I think a lot is simply what you are used to.

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 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?

Not OP but I hate Finder. I just want to see my folders and access them, let me do that ffs, why does that left panel hate me?

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?

Yeah, it's frustrating that I can't easily just access the root directory.

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.

Huh? The "Macintosh HD" folder in Finder is /. Just drag it into your sidebar.

As for hidden files, cmd + shift + . to show them.

> 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'm surprised that it is a fuss to get going! Installing Linux with a full basic suite of applications takes around half an hour.

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.

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)

Tip: there's much, much less fuss if you not it preinstalled, with support.

I'm not sure I count "Have you tried sfc /scannow?" as support!

Then don't?

> 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.

It's very customizable because with enough gumption you can hook into Explorer directly and make it appear and behave however you want.

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.

You think they can control it?

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.

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,...

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.

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.

The UX things are mostly just conventions, you may not like it, but doesn't make it objectively terrible.

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.

> I actually like the OS

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.

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.

    They need to ask some deep questions of themselves
    of what they want Windows to be.

> what they want Windows to be.

A way to make as much money as they possibly can. Was this ever a question, really?

> these concerns being raised consistently

They're being raised on HN, sure, but are they widely-held by the average Windows user? Seems to me the answer is no.

People aren't passionate about it like we are here on HN...

But if a checkbox was there that they could click to not be tracked, they would click it.

>Microsoft would do well

>They need to ask some deep questions of themselves

Are they not doing well though? I see that they are a successful business.

"would do well" does not mean "in order to do well", it's more like cautioning someone on a dangerous path that appears to be fine at a glance.

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.

Who’s going to want to use it if they opt for advertising platform?

[flagged]

There are two Microsofts, as I see it.

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.

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.

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.

it's insane how good Microsoft sales people are

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.

Either that, or your statement that “google cloud and AWS are objectively better at basically everything” is perhaps not shared by everyone.

Counterpoint on GCP: Way too risky to use as a small to medium business. Google has a known history of firing its customers without recourse.

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.

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.

Let's be fair, I would also avoid any company that uses Microsoft Sharepoint!

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.

Every Microsoft product is like that; they think that because every customer uses a different set of features that they need to support them all.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

>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.

I’d still take SharePoint over salesforce for the scenarios in which both products apply.

Have you used Teams? It's worse. It's shockingly bad.

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.

Azure is Microsoft's biggest money-maker, not the inclusion of ads in Windows. Windows itself drives 12% of Microsoft sales[1].

[1]: https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/

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.

when people are buying with their own money -- they're preferring Macs 2-to-1 over PC's now.

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.

And I suspect that the majority of people looking for sub-$1,000 computers are buying iPads, not crappy plastic HP's.

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.

Agree with you except the prefer reason.

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.

How are Windows keyboard shortcuts more consistent than macOS? My experience is that the opposite is true.

What’s the standard Windows shortcut for opening an applications preferences (cmd + ,”? What about switching tabs (cmd + shift + [ or ]).

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.

> the consistent keyboard shortcuts

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.

These days you get the same in Gnome, KDE, and even i3 or sway with minimal effort.

If you haven't found tiling window management that rivals or surpasses Windows in the Linux world, you really haven't looked very hard.

> 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.

Well, guess which part pays the bills for the other one.

Azure

[flagged]

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.

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)

Thanks. It's so weird that it spits almost-but-not-quite correct numbers.

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.

It is getting better, trust me.

C++, Windows and stuff belong to WinDev, not DevDiv.

Additionally, DevDiv is now under Azure, hence all the cool toys and openess.

Linux still can't do high/mixed DPI out of the box?

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.

[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

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.

It does on Wayland. X11 isn't likely to get it because it's EoL.

Currently using it right now on Sway: https://man.archlinux.org/man/sway-output.5.en

And Wayland is compatible with everything one would expect?

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.

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I've been daily driving Linux since March 2020 however recently purchased a Valve Index and decided to pop Win 10 on a completely empty secondary M.2. The setup kept failing because it just could not handle the fact that the primary M.2 had a Linux boot loader on it. It just refused to install. My work around was to setup a QEMU VM inside Linux where I provided the VM with the secondary M.2 as the main install drive. With only one drive visible it completed the install fully. At which point I was able to restart and boot directly from the secondary M.2. Most people would recommend simply removing the Linux M.2 until the installation was complete. My workaround was something only a tech guy like me would even think to try.

These kinds of little things about Windows drive me up the wall. That and the fact that I had to immediately run a few debloat scripts to rip out a bunch of junk.

I type all this while I have Path of Exile running at 200 FPS on my Linux install.

Is anyone at Microsoft listening? I feel like in another 10 years there will be very little reason to ever install Windows. The dominos are falling and at this point there's very few reasons to have Windows at all. Off the top of my head all I can think of is Photoshop and VR.

When I was in high school Linux was unusable for desktop, MacOS was just for designers, and Windows was really the only option. In only 20 years the dynamic has shifted so drastically. I wonder what the next 20 years will bring.

> I've been daily driving Linux since March 2020 however recently purchased a Valve Index and decided to pop Win 10 on a completely empty secondary M.2. The setup kept failing because it just could not handle the fact that the primary M.2 had a Linux boot loader on it. It just refused to install.

That's better than what has happened to me with prior versions of Windows: the Windows installer just deleted the Linux bootloader, even though it was on a completely different drive.

Nowadays I always disconnect all other drives when installing Windows. But it's a pain.

Even doing it the opposite way around still doesn't work (installing Windows first, and then replacing the Windows bootloader). Every time there is a Windows update that is "major" enough, it will wipe the existing Linux bootloader.

I lived like that for about a year, but eventually just gave up and stuck to Windows. I like Linux a lot, but I've found that I save more time using Windows then trying to get Linux to work on whatever piece of hardware I have (driver issues, bugs, some remaining software that still doesn't work with Linux).

You can remove most of the crap via a debloater, but Windows 11 is just overall worse than Windows 10. The UI updates just took all the negatives of using a Mac, but without any the parts that make it actually useful. I miss being able to see the title of windows in the taskbar...

My favorite pet theory about Microsoft is that no one that works there actually uses any of their products and are just on Macs lol

> Every time there is a Windows update that is "major" enough, it will wipe the existing Linux bootloader.

I think that has not been true for a long time. At least if you are using UEFI. Windows respects UEFI enough to just change own stuff in the EFI partition. Windows will change the default boot entry to itself at installation time, but so every Linux distro do. Notice that nowadays you can install Windows *after* Linux and you just need to change the default OS back to Linux if you want so.

I'm a Linux user myself, but this is one of those myths that should end. I have had a Windows partition for almost three years that I only use to update Windows (all Windows 10 versions up until now and Windows 11 in the last update). Not once the update has affected my boot options.

I had Windows 10's installer try to install its bootloader into a Windows dynamic disk volume, which trashed the volume

rather than trust the quality of Microsoft's software: the general rule is to unplug anything other than the drive you're installing onto

Linux Mint has started changing the UEFI boot order every time GRUB updates. Which seems to be quite often recently. It's incredibly rude!

>My favorite pet theory about Microsoft is that no one that works there actually uses any of their products and are just on Macs lol

There have been multiple comments on HN from Microsofters (Microsoftarians?) about how the Windows UI/Design team uses Macs exclusively, which explains a lot. I believe the Visual Studio team is still dogfooding, but can't believe that about anyone else, given how actively user hostile the OS has been.

I find that really difficult to believe.

I have a close relative who works for the beast, and he claims that everyone there "eats the dogfood".

Knowing what I know of him, I believe it and he certainly lives the company life. He even used to have (and claimed to like) a Windows phone. ;)

Having owned multiple Windows Phones, they were awesome. Anyone that "claims" to like them is probably telling the truth.

I still miss the tiled home screen and the excellent keyboard.

>I miss being able to see the title of windows in the taskbar...

To be fair, that dumbass trend started with Windows 7.

I just install StartAllBack these days to be done with it (and it fixes the problems that 10's Start Menu has- that search will probably never work again). Yeah, you have to pay for that extension, but you also have to pay if you want window-snapping on macOS- thus they stopped being better, but they haven't really become worse.

THANK YOU!!! The link if anyone is else is interested: https://www.startallback.com/

> The UI updates just took all the negatives of using a Mac, but without any the parts that make it actually useful.

then

> I miss being able to see the title of windows in the taskbar...

You can't do that on a mac either.

Ah my bad, that was unrelated. Windows 10 had an option to show the Window titles of items on your taskbar if there was enough room.

Most of the time I end up having 2-3 VSCode windows open which you can't switch between unless you hover over the icon first.

I gave up on duel boot a long time ago, Each operating system gets it's own drive. Like you said duel boot was always breaking.

Sadly it seems that the issues they're talking about persist even with each OS getting its own drive. I know I've had issues with that. It seems insane that Windows should overreach onto drives its not even installed on, but here we are.

I've been daily driving Linux for maybe around 5 years, and I only ever need to be boot into Windows when I need to use an android custom ROM tool. This is generally a flurry of activity over a day or few, and then nothing for months.

I've just (re)obtained a desktop PC with a GPU, which I'm using as a Linux gaming prototype box with ubuntu 20.04 LTS running Steam, and I'm reliving some youth in playing through Deus Ex (properly, stealthily). Enjoying the fact that Linux is doing it pretty smoothly (with some initial setup headaches now overcome).

If youean Obsidian, Heimdall on Linux is a pretty excellent alternative, you just need to be specific about which partitions you're flashing

Install GMDX on top of Deus Ex.

Yes, that was something that, for some reason, helped compatibility - there's a launcher that's bundled with it.

My plan is to complete it, slowly, then go from the start again with the Revision mod.

The Revision mod it's really bad. GMDX gives consistency and it doesn't have nonsensic Chinese characters in Hong Kong.

Also, it doesn't crap out the lightning, neither makes superficial changes because of "look, shiny!!!".

The setup tools, and boot management are inexcusable.

BCD (and its associated tools) are a steaming mess when anything goes wrong. The learning curve for GRUB et al. is the shortest curve ever - what its doing is really transparent. Fixing anything in the windows recovery environment is a total nightmare. Linux, worst case you use something like ReFind and can happily boot anything. Windows goes wrong, you're at the behest of of the practically useless "Startup Repair", which gives little or no practical output.

Don't get me onto the drive selection on setup too... Why can't they indicate which drive is which model / serial number? Do I have to guess from the exact size? Also why do I need to turn other drives off in UEFI to ensure they're not touched.

If "Linux" could ever fix the consistent sound mixer / bluetooth issues, it could really be the de facto OS. I don't know how but across multiple people and distributions sound issues always start surfacing after 2-3 months.

Would recommend trying out PipeWire[0] if you haven't already. I don't know what your sound issues are but I've had no problems since switching ~15 months ago.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire

Thanks a lot for this. The problems I personally had and seen others have/had are static when no sound is played, and intermittently bluetooth audio playback issues (no sound). Also in one instance heavily distorted sound was reproducibly played when the discord notification came on.

What's wrong with PulseAudio? It's not great for pro use-cases with an unfortunately high latency (not that Windows's audio server is better in this regard), but it kinda has always just worked for me.

> What's wrong with PulseAudio?

What's wrong is that a lot of audio hardware is Windows hardware, i.e. subtly broken.

Excel is the big one. The web version is really, really good on its own terms, but desktop excel really is in a class of its own both in terms of capability and penetration.

Yes, it does give people regular reasons to point and laugh at it, and it's probably dangerous how much of the modern world depends on it, but you only have to use a competitor for a very short period of time to realise that displacing it would be a very, very tall order.

Except for compatibility (which will always be questionable with proprietary formats), I don't think most folks actually need Word or Excel. Most folks aren't delving into VBA and such, they just need a bunch of interlinked cells with a little math.

Compatibility is 90% of the problem, though. While it might be tempting to think that most people might not need Excel, the important thing to realise is that they think they do, the people who are sending them spreadsheets to look at think they do, and your beliefs aren't going to change that.

Yep. But the first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging

Step zero is to realise you're in a hole in the first place.

Any luck getting the Index to work on linux? I hacked away at it for about 3 months w/ Fedora but kept running into issues, random stuff like making sure the names weren't capitalized in files, etc.

It works but it's a buggy mess and the newest AMD GPU driver actually regressed and broke it. The most recent build of [Nobara](https://nobaraproject.org/) (a Fedora based gaming distro) works out of the box but if you update it ... You'll break compatibility.

I was able to get VRChat working but when I entered a world with too many avatars I'd see major issues with sound and GPU problems.

Windows is definitely adware now.

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.

> Windows is definitely adware now.

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.

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.

> Windows really should just rebase on to Linux

No, it should not. The NT kernel architecture is drastically superior to the Linux monorepo.

Mind to elaborate a little more?

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,....

Drivers with a stable API that don't break with each new minor version.

Why on earth would they do this and piss away their huge BC advantage?

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.

I'm assuming BC stands for backwards compatibility?

Yes.

> 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.

Rebasing on Linux would be replacing the great part (the kernel), while keeping the broken part (shell, ads, millions of GUIs, …)

> I've never wanted that feature

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.

> a tiny minority of people trade stocks

I believe the correct term for it is yolo stonks

I agree it's awful because ordinary users don't bother to turn it off.

But it wasn't _that_ hard to turn it off. I didn't have to hack anything, just look for the settings.

Except that it's not turned off, it's just hidden. But it's still running.

and came back for me after an update...

Yeah, looking out the window is usually how I gauge what the temperature is too. That's a reliable way to know what to wear to be comfortable.

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.

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.

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-ooberegion-bloatware.htm...

Which ones do you recommend?

Not OP, but here are a couple I like:

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 don’t see any of those mentioning disabling of MSN content in the Start menu. In fact, at least one of them mentions only Windows 10 and not 11.

I used ThisIsWin11, found on github by builtbybel.

Yeah but what percentage of users wanted that feature? Microsoft probably knows.

Well it is actually a rather useful feature even if op doesn't like it.

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.

[flagged]

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.

This misses the point that I don’t want to see news headlines unless I choose to see news headlines.

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).

In windows XP, microsoft learned their users accepted some abuse,e.g locked theme engine, plastic default theme, DRM. There were complaints, but users took it because where else to go? And to be honest, XP was still an upgrade coming from 98 and 2000 was not available for end users.

Vista was an universally loathed disaster, but users took it because where else to go?

Windows 7 was better, but still an UI downgrade. Users took it because where else to go?

Windows 8, the your-computer-is-now-a-tablet edition. Users took it, where else to go?

Windows 10, forced on user PCs, universally loathed. Still an user experience downgrade, but users took it because where else to go? And after a few years, memory of old versions faded enough that some people actually believed win10 was any good.

Windows 11, ad ridden malware by any definition from 10 years ago. Users will take it, because where else to go.

Microsoft leadership is not utterly stupid. They know users will take the next windows, whatever it does. Notice how every version gets more bold in the abuse. They expect your complaints. They are even polite enough not to laugh at the whole thing until they are in their own ingroup.

I am speaking user experience here, there was some windows tech advancement in the last 20 years. And I know how availability of OS, software and drivers means tou have to upgrade if you want to stay with Windows.

Even so, I never thought the whole world would go from a mostly competitive software ecosystem to stockholm syndrome from 1 abusive software vendor, but here we are. The sheer power of avoiding some short term pain no matter the long term cost is unbelievable.

> Windows 11, ad ridden malware by any definition from 10 years ago. Users will take it, because where else to go.

2 of my last 3 jobs have offered MacBooks, something unthinkable even 10 years ago.

The majority of my friends kids (70-80%) have Apple devices (phones and laptops). A couple of them, surprisingly to me, even have linux and Chromebook laptops.

At my job you need a special dispensation if you want a Windows machine (normally available options are Linux or Mac). That would certainly have been unthinkable 10 years ago.

I'm currently trying to persuade my current employer for a linux desktop. Developers at my company have zero reasons to use Windows, and yet we're using it 'for reasons'.

Apple products (Macbooks especially) are prohibitively expensive in most of the world. The US market is very important, of course, but Microsoft has very little competition elsewhere.

>Vista was an universally loathed disaster, but users took it because where else to go?

Who? "Nobody" used Vista except eg schools.

Same with 8

Maybe for me it feels diffetent maybe thats country difference, but the windows migration felt like: xp 7 10 ... 12?

People were using xp and 7 as long as they could

>In windows XP, microsoft learned their users accepted some abuse,e.g locked theme engine, plastic default theme

No idea what you are talking about, what do you mean?

>>In windows XP, microsoft learned their users accepted some abuse,e.g locked theme engine, plastic default theme

>No idea what you are talking about, what do you mean?

It turns out to be quite hard to find links about this bygone era, even if everyone screamed bloody murder at the time. I found these:

Third party themes, a feature loved by win98 users, are forbidden by microsoft in XP.

https://www.theregister.com/2001/02/16/compatibility_woes_de...

The Luna theme was called fisher price, not plastic, in the complaints - Got confused by KDE I guess. I presume it tried to make computers more playfull and less work. But people felt like Microsoft treated them like toddlers. Not everybody realized it could be disabled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_visual_styles

DRM. Can't even find anything relevant anymore. XP was the first MS consumer OS to implement and require it. There was also the required activation, and the digital signing of system components.

All of these represent a deep change of how Microsoft viewed their customers. Before, the user was allowed to do with his computer what he or she wanted, even if the machine got wrecked in the process. Users were assumed to be responsible agents, and protection against malware or legal usage was their responsibilty.

Starting with XP, Microsoft decided it knew better than the user, and needed to limit user activities with cryptographic measures. The PC should protect microsoft, content owners and end users against the incompetency or malice of the owner, even against their wishes. There were sometimes good reasons, e.g. theming allowed injection of malware into anything. But the final decision of what was allowed or not was from now on made by microsoft, not the owner.

> "Third party themes, a feature loved by win98 users, are forbidden by microsoft in XP. [...] But the final decision of what was allowed or not was from now on made by microsoft, not the owner."

cough Remember when Win98 had Active Desktop where the desktop and all the Explorer folder views were DHTML and you could style them and write custom pages for them? And then the competition went running to the government to force Microsoft to take their HTML rendering engine out of Windows?

The reasoning is very good, you cannot deny it.

>Users were assumed to be responsible agents, and protection against malware or legal usage was their responsibilty.

This is naive as hell.

Such approach doesnt scale.

There are billions non tech people.

Just because theres loud minority: hundred loudy nerds on HN and other tech news sites screaming about lack of customisability

Then it doesnt mean that it was bad decision, nor that it was actually impactful. Theres way more people outside tech.

I am not advocating that every person is a sysadmin, only that the final decision to be or not be a sysadmin should be taken the computer owner.

Windows 98 and XP still had a lot of low-hanging fruit in this case. Auto patching, firewall, virus scanning, system integrity are welcome things, and it is good that they are enabled by default. In fact, application boundaries are still too porous and it should be perfectly possible to install and delete an application without it rewriting random parts of the OS.

But the user should be allowed to influence, grant exceptions, and even disable all of it.

Compare it with buying a random electrical appliance. The law requires basic safety and compatibility. People are not required to be electrical engineers to buy a lightbulb, even if the device is capable of burning down your and your neighbour's house. The process of replacing the bulb is consumer friendly enough and almost any human can do it. There are fuses for when things go wrong. I'd like to see the same thing apply for computers.

The alternative, what we do today, is trusting a third party. This generally starts out reasonably well, and I presume Microsoft had good intentions with the WinXP mentality change. Long term however, this delegation causes a concentration of power that will corrupt that third party, causing much bigger damage than the damage done by the unresponsible individuals. Microsoft is becoming a good example of this.

Notice how in the past, the nobles pleaded how normal people were not capable of governing a country, and were much better off trusting people with enough time and education to do things right. Same story for women's rights. In fact, this was probably at least partially correct at the time it was said, in both cases. Even so, most blood in history books follows the arrogance of the powerfull when nothing keeps them in check. We are all a lot better off now people vote and take part in politics. Woman successfully live their lives without requiring a male. It is said that most homeless today have better access to food, housing, sanitation, ... than the sun king of France, so even the nobles gained a lot.

There is a price to pay: Everyone needs a basic understanding of the thing at hand, and some people will cause trouble by not having it. So we tolerate the flat earth Trump voter male or female, and we tolerate the idiot getting malware by sheer incompetence. They will tire us with their stupidity, bother us with extra work, cause all kinds of stupid risks. Smile when it happens, as the alternative is worse.

We allow people to have children and do their own finances, both requiring a lot more education and having a lot more life impact than the computer ever has. Most of us deal fine enough.

>We allow people to have children and do their own finances, both requiring a lot more education

How finances require more edu than one of the most advanced machines that constantly change the world, for decades?

Finances for 99% of ppl may be just: be careful with spending, prepare for bigger spendings and maybe tax filling? Thats it? You can even invest money into the stocks with just 15min tutorial.

Meanwhile computers from 0 to just web browser, email, etc is way more.

>Compare it with buying a random electrical appliance. The law requires basic safety and compatibility. People are not required to be electrical engineers to buy a lightbulb, even if the device is capable of burning down your and your neighbour's house. The process of replacing the bulb is consumer friendly enough and almost any human can do it. There are fuses for when things go wrong. I'd like to see the same thing apply for computers.

Light bulb??

Compare OSes with similarly complex stuff like cars.

They are definitely not user friendly and require a lot of training to get shit done

Let's give also credit to 8.1 - it was quite usable.

Yes it was better than 8.0, but 8.x definitely did not sell as well as Windows 7.

Windows 7 got 3 years of ESU (extended security updates), which MS did not bother with Winodws 8 because there wasn't the install base worth the effort (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-8-1-supp...).

It was the same with Vista - it's predecessor, Windows XP, was supported until 2014, which was 2 years more than Vista got

> Windows 7 was better, but still an UI downgrade.

I thought Win7 with the Classic theme was the best Windows UI.

Side note: maybe it's a typo, but why would you use "an UI" instead of "a UI". Whether you pronounce the letters or say "User Interface", it's still going to be "a", unless you pronounce "UI" as "ooey".

I just see your side note now, and this non-English speaker is curious: I thought this was correct.

You start with 'a downgrade of the UI'. Then you shorten to 'a UI downgrade'. Now you you have 2 vowels 'a' and 'U' next to each other, so you must drop an 'n' in between to ease pronouncing it..

Whether it's "a" or "an" is not about the letters, it's about the sound.

When saying letters, in English, "U" is pronounced "yoo". The Y sound, being a consonant, will mean the correct indefinite article is "a". Contrasted with German, I know they just pronounce it like "oo" with no y-sound preceding it. If you pronounce the letter "U" like that, then using "an" would be correct.

a/an being about the sound and not the letter is also why "an hour" is correct, despite H being a consonant, because the H is silent.

That all being said, you'll find people argue over whether "an historical event" or "a historical event" is correct.

>Users will take it, because where else to go.

Until they don't, then there will be nowhere for MS to go.

There's been a long observed tradition that every other version of Windows is trash. 3.1, 98, XP, 7, 10 were good^, 95, ME, Vista, 8 and now 11 are trash. This one is a bit of a fun one because the bits described here are almost sabotage level bad. You can deactivate that pretty easily so it's not a big deal; there's some other clunky ui interface notably in settings where you can still find 4 or 5 different generations of Windows ui. The two things that I reaaaally dont like is the right click menu that's now hidden behind a "more options" first ui someone figured was a good idea, the poorer performance where the antimalware or other bloatware sometimes decides to grab your CPU for itself, the lack of reliability - notably of the wsl, and most of all the sleep management.

What burns me is that my laptop used to wake up instantaneously in 10 when I opened the screen, even after a couple days of stowage. That was even one of the sales arguments, I think it was called "instant on" or something like that. Now if I wait more than 5 minutes it goes into Deep sleep. If I setup the sleep to longer than that the battery drains. I can't rollback to 10.

Even with 250gb free disk, I wanted to dual boot a Linux distro, can't resize the partition because "reasons", that's the first time I'm stuck on that.

So yeah, waiting for 12.

^hold your horses, even if you don't like the system, everything can still be relative

> There's been a long observed tradition that every other version of Windows is trash. 3.1, 98, XP, 7, 10 were good^, 95, ME, Vista, 8 and now 11 are trash.

What about Windows 2000?

Windows 2000 wasn't a consumer version of Windows, so gets left out.

edit: pity, because I think all-in-all it's one of the best versions of Windows I ever used. Very fast, no junk to get in the way, tremendously clear UI, very compatible with games (even weird ones developed for Win9x), etc.

I used it over Windows XP for as long as I could!

> Windows 2000 wasn't a consumer version of Windows

But it worked damn well as one.

Windows NT 4 was also better than 95 and 98. It ran everything but was NT based like 2000 and XP so very stable.

Doesn't fit the narrative so is omitted.

You consider 10 "good"? Maybe compared to 8, but not anything before. It's gotten consistently worse with each new version since ~XP. 8 was a massive nosedive, 8.1 a slight improvement over 8, and 10 roughly the same, and 11 another nosedive.

IDK, I consider Windows 7 a solid improvement over XP. XP, by the time Service Pack 3 came around, was good but showing its age.

As far as I'm concerned, they could have stopped at 7 with no real loss to the business.

10 LTSC is the best version of windows in history. Far better than XP or 7.

Yes. Been using it for over 2 years now, this is the version that I thought what a "Good" windows experience would be like. And this the exact version that Windows tries to hide from the world. Win 10 LTSC for the win.

Yeah I didn't mind 10, it was reasonably consistent and, at least in my experience, fine in terms of perfs

Compared to the mess that is Win11, and the previous agenda of Win8/Metro (locking down and dumbing down, replacing 'real windows' with a touch-centric mess), Win10 is wonderful.

Exactly. It's just a local optimum.

XP SP3 was gold for gaming.

For about 3 weeks, and then you had to reimage the system again ...

I personally don't think 11 is trash, to date it's been my most stable OS. Absolutely zero issues whatsoever, it just works. Both 7 and 10 had blue screens frequently (on the same machine).

To shrink your existing windows partition, first disable swap on the partition you want to shrink, otherwise windows may not shrink it enough for what you want. Turn it on again after you're done.

Windows 8 + OpenShell was great. Since you didn't have to deal with the stupid Metro crap, Windows 8 was pretty much just like Windows 7.

I just tested now and OpenShell (release 4.4.170 at this time) does work for Win 11, albeit needing some tweaks.

The start button image has to be replaced so that the replacement intercepts mouse clicks.

Still far better than the MS start menu fetching internet garbage instead of just launching an app as it's supposed to.

For those who know Classic Shell, Open-Shell is its successor.

Open-Shell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

It makes me so angry that companies like Microsoft are so dead set on shoving the culture down my throat by all means possible for a few cents of ad revenue while I do my best to avoid the culture as much as possible. I will pay. I will pay lots. Just fuck off with the shootings and the child abuses and the red vs blue and the things that are ruining our brains.

Agree. And I pay - with my time and expertise - by using Linux :)

[flagged]

My sibling comments have addressed this appropriately, but allow me to offer you a genuinely heartfelt response: Fuck You. Of course it outrages me. What kind of asshole sees someone complaining about seeing headlines about children being murdered in their own schools and immediately concludes that they don't also hate the actual shootings? Or even better, doesn't even think about that and just sees a "gotcha" opportunity.

Your profile says "Everything is terrible". You can improve that, and you can start with yourself.

In your estimation, how much graphic violence should my operating system show me on a routine basis?

Oh, and I'd like to know how many 10 year old kids should be reading about them on a daily basis? I bet that really helps settle their minds when they go to school the next day!

>In your estimation, how much graphic violence should my operating system show me on a routine basis?

I think it's simple: the amount that maximizes the OS vendor's profits.

If you don't like this, you're free to choose a different OS vendor, or use a free OS, of which many variants exist.

Personally, I applaud Microsoft for doing their fiduciary duty and maximizing profits, even if that means pissing off their users who refuse to abandon the platform.

Hopefully the next version of Windows will lock the start menu until the user is sufficiently remorseful for all of society’s failings.

I don't want to read about the stuff because I know somewhere, an 11 year old is also reading about it and it's either causing them anxiety or giving them ideas. I'd rather not support that.

One major cause of school shootings is the reporting of school shootings.

People used to decide that they want to find out about this stuff by themselves. So no, I personally have no desire to find out what the news du jour consists of in whichever country I live, if my OS is force-feeding me this.

The ending of the article this one links to (The Day Windows Died) perfectly sums up my view of modern Windows.

I've been using Linux (Fedora) for a few years now, and occasionally I do look back to Windows. I have my issues my linux (for the record, macos fixes a lot of them but introduces entirely new issues), and maybe with a debloater and some tinkering, I could fix my initial problems with Windows. But as the article says, even if I can fix them, my biggest issue of all is how little I can trust the operating system. My issues with linux and macos aren't issues of trust really, they're just annoyances or things I don't like. My biggest issue with Windows is that I fundamentally don't trust it.

Its a shame as well, because to me Windows used to be a middle ground between the "do it yourself" nature of Linux and the "do it our way" nature of MacOS. I don't even know what it is now, but I don't like it.

If you've never used an older Windows, here is a Win 2000 in the browser:

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 would do anything for a modern version of Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. Now THAT was a professional OS. I would even pay for it.

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.

Google "Enterprise LTSC IoT."

Downside is that "I would do anything" doesn't begin to describe what will be necessary to obtain a legitimate license.

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.

I can't go back to not having a searchable start menu.

That UI is just.. perfect.

Peak interface.

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.

That’s even worse. Microsoft is trying to make money by taking advantage of users’ ‘ignorance’, right? That’s no different from a scammer.

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.

>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.

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.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/24/23569050/microsoft-q2-202...

>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.

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'm sometimes still surprised that some people can find reasons to defend even that. Windows is horrible, it started to derail ever since Windows 8 came into the picture.

This is an OS that does not respect its user. This is an OS that normalizes hostile software design, and makes it acceptable. This is an OS that spits in its users' faces and the users can do nothing about it. It's partly the user's fault as well. I used to use Windows, increasingly disliked it every day yet did nothing about it. Moving to Linux was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The grass really is greener on the other side, especially when you're standing in the Windows garden.

How is this any different than the pre-installed Amazon app on Ubuntu?

What pre-installed Amazon app? That's old news. Ubuntu doesn't include anything like that.

> there is no way to turn this news feed off

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"

Against fixing this behavior, and others:

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)

Ehh, I recently switched to Linux for good.

Couldn't be happier about the move. No paper cuts at all. Honestly, Linux has never been better.

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

- "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 trying will let you know - and to quote one of the other side comments "Can't say anything about quality of Bluetooth stack though since I don't use it".

There's a reason that the thing most people do with Linux is put it in a container, on the end of an SSH session, at the remote end of hundreds of miles of internet link, hand the SSH keys to Ansible, and use it to serve HTTP/S requests to mobile phone users - and that reason is primarily no license fee. There's a reason people use it as a home fileserver and that reason is that installing Asterisk drives a feeling of being clever and getting "something for nothing".

Instead of fixing this like it's a benign papercut, let the full badness wash over you, and then ... leave.

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.

Everything about this article nicely encapsulates why I dropped Windows and moved to Ubuntu 22.04 (with KDE Plasma) about four weeks ago. I've been using Linux on and off since 1999, but now it's finally a really good option on the desktop.

All of Microsoft's telemetry was also an issue, which pushed me to look at NextDNS, which I now pay for. I've blocked MS, Apple, Google, TikTok, Canonical (Ubuntu), and more, from being able to track my usage of their services (except with Google, to a large degree, as I directly use their products.)

I've sacrificed a lot with this move, like being able to use my large collection of Elgato hardware for video production. Also, a lot of games, some of which I was playing with friends, but no longer can (ProtonDB says they're bronze or unplayable some cases, like PUBG.)

Over all, however, I couldn't be happier.

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 chucked but then... I worried some Windows PM is reading this and taking it seriously.

Pet theory: Windows for consumers doesn't get dogfooded by internal employees, as they all use the Enterprise version. So they never get to see the full effect of what the Windows group is pushing out to their grandmas.

I use Windows 11 Enterprise and it has all the things both articles complain about.

Install Win 10 Enterprise LTSC. This is the only usable windows version available. Been using it since 2 years, no regrets/complains.

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.

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.

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.

It technically probably is, but MS would still rather you pirate Windows than use Linux.

I've heard the $2 LTSC keys on aliexpress activate without issue

Why pay $2 for a key which is still illegal to use? Just download a precracked version.

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.

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.

We are talking about the MS crap, actually.

ok, yeah I see now that the website is back up

Windows 11 has made me hate my computer. I have a top end surface book pro and it lags every day. Things like opening the calculator or file explorer are a test of patience and my patience has been tested daily. I loathe windows 11 and regret the day I installed it.

My work installed Windows 11 to fix a drivers issue. After 2 days of understanding most of the quirks, I tried installing the same on my personal desktop. The installed failed with some random bsod. It gave me an option to rollback to Windows 10 thankfully. I will stay with 10 for as long I can.

I feel the same. They made me hate this shit. I'm especially salty because to me, originally, Windows was the coolest thing ever - when I first saw Win 3.1.

If you installed it yourself, why can't you install something else?

Remember when the Microsoft Store sold Microsoft Signature PCs? Those PCs were advertised as being fresh Windows installs with no adware, no bloat, and no vendor-added "benefits." Those were the days. Now Microsoft has stopped selling them and decided they wanted a piece of the pie.

However... honestly, I feel terrible for anyone who pays for a legal, retail, copy of Windows 11 Pro. Spend $199, total "F you" response.

It does sadden me that ReactOS has not been mentioned even once in this entire discussion so far. Understandably, it is not a viable alternative at the moment.

However, I will hope against hope. Looking back, Lazarus IDE had languished for a long while, before maturing. As I write this, I have at least 3 applications written in Lazarus running. So I will hope against hope...

Your Lazarus example saddens me. Perhaps it has matured to the point of being awesome. Unfortunately, it seems to have happened too late and so few of us will ever experience it at this point.

I hope that ReactOS can get there while it still matters. Evidence suggest otherwise but I also hope.

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.

Everything I need to run I can run on Linux, either as Linux app or via Wine. The few things I can't run on Linux, they're not that important...

This is relatively mild, by historical standards. Flee while you still can:

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/current/amd64/iso...

> I use Windows to play games, but it truly feels like a trash party most of the time.

Use Linux + Proton. It’s fascinating how Linux became a decent replacement for Windows for video games. (Thanks, Valve!)

Is there a standalone installer for this so you can run items not on Steam? I have many old Windows games you see, with DVDs.

I would try the program 'bottles' via flatpak. Really easy to use and has run all my non-steam games flawlessly.

Yes, AFAIK there is Bottles and Lutris, but I’m struggling with staring games through them. Perhaps it’s just me though.

You can add non-Steam installers to your Steam library, and then select a version of Proton to run them under.

Works for StarCraft II.

You can add non steam games to steam and use proton that way

What if I don't want to use linux? Not many choices available beside consoles.

Then use Windows.

Sadly that seems to be the only other alternative option unless Mac gaming gets to the same level.

I have a theory. People who actually like Windows 11 are mostly new windows users. New as in they haven't used Windows 98 or it's likes, also they were never have been the power users of Windows from that time.

Yead old windows had so many problems, mostly around finding where particular settings are, but otherwise it was fast and usable and was definitely not a Mac.

There is a saying in my language which translates to "when the crow tried to walk like swan, it even forgot it's own walk".

Chiming in as a new user who jumped from XP to 11 (also tried rolling it back to 10 just to see, and reverted it to 11)

Windows has always been to me a "make it work" experience, from 95 to XP at least. Critical aspects have always been broken, a fresh install always started from wiping everything clean, removing junk, going into the registry and adding third party tools to make it viable. And then backing it up, because as some point it will need to be wiped again.

In that respect, Win 11 doesn't feel that different to me. I also was frustrated by the side dashboard, and there's tool suites to remove it quickly. Most of the eggregious stuff can be worked around, getting rid of Edge is the only tough part.

Now, Windows 11 comes with a linux subsytem, Amazon's android subsystem is also promising, touch support is actually workable, hdpi support is good, and using windows on a tablet is actually doable. That's a very long way from the win 2000 area where multi-language support was seen as a cutting edge feature.

Modern windows didn't have to cut down on lots of old features, but they did anyway to appeal to Mac crowd. They got rid of classic theme few versions back, cut down on lots of customizablity. There are lots of useful and convenient features which could have all co-existed, but no, they have be trying to become Mac both in UI and a closed eco system where they can do whatever they want to their users leaving them as little choice as possible.

the look and feel of this type of visual bombardment reminds me of a grocery store checkout aisle https://i.jollo.org/_o8mgw46.png

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.

IMHO we should be boycotting all chromium-based browsers. Use Firefox or Safari (if on MacOS) as your daily driver.

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.

Oh interesting. The rotating loop triggers my aphantasia which is why I stick to Firefox and it's pleasing horizontal bar. /S

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...

I want to use Firefox but simple quality of life features like 3 fingers swipe to go back don't work on my xps13.

Firefox doesn't give a damn. The only thing they have going for them is that they're the underdog and people like underdogs.

This definitely works on my T14, I think it’s two fingers though.

The integration with their microsoft account/office account is growing. They recently turned on 'by default' a sidebar with all sorts of MSN things.

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.

With AI now being a real thing, I’m looking through all these “how it’s done” UI elements through a new lens.

Like weather: Even when I want to know the local weather do I want to watch it in real time? No. I’m having to watch it in real time because I need to predict how it’s going to affect my plans. I’d much rather have an AI do the real-time stuff and nudge me to say “Hey, there’s rain about an hour away” or “The park is definitely going to be great. Check in and make sure everyone is on the same page”.

There are still some things I do still want as a part of the UI, and even at AI’s best I still want a UI, but so much of that information overload is now functionally irrelevant.

Sounds similar to the "digital concierge" thing that was posted here last week.

Which honestly sounds pretty good.

Fine line between digital concierge, nagging, and something like out of the (dystopian) short story "Manna", though (available here: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1)

I just read the story but I can’t find the digital concierge post from last week. Can you link it? I feels like a better place for a further discussion on the story’s topics.

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)

yeah , I've heard Realtek drivers have issues on Linux, it's very hit or miss. How did you swap it on a laptop??

> That's when Windows died for 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.

I took a shirt-term job a few years back and tried giving Windows a go after many many years absence.

Never again. Wow. It’s stagnated in many respects and its leading innovations are, sadly, hostile to users. I was very surprised.

> It’s stagnated in many respects

You can’t say that with a straight face when the Finder on Mac has seen absolutely zero change since 2008. Windows Vista’s file controls blow every OS out of the water.

I’m an Apple user and honestly I don’t remember the last useful feature added other the Universal Clipboard. I asked ChatGPT for a rundown and I just see a list of “moved things around and refreshed the UI”

> Windows Vista’s file controls blow every OS out of the water.

KDE's Dolphin File manager can: 1) Split the file window in two with a simple button press. 2) Pressing F4 opens an embedded terminal in the current directory. 3) Provides a super easy way of adding network drives, and a whole view to save them to. 4) Tags for organising files / folders. 5) Pressing space puts it into a super simple "Selection Mode".

There are more alternative file managers out there than just Mac's Finder. I don't think I have ever experienced Windows "blowing me out of the water" with it's file management controls.

Windows could (can?) read all the metadata out of MP3s and photos and edit it, use it as columns and virtual groups/folders (IIRC). Most file managers I know are limited to filenames and a couple of dates attached (tags are too easy to implement, they’re manual, I’m not impressed)

Coming from Vista, Tiger’s Finder was a joke and it still is to this day (with the obvious exception of QuickLook, which is great)

I don’t know anything about Linux, I just wanted to point out that macOS hasn’t seen much improvement in the past decade other than continuous shuffling and redesigns.

It's a shame because I remember Konqueror as a file manager being really great under KDE 3.5 (oh the nostalgia) and Dolphin seemed useless by comparison.

> I asked ChatGPT for a rundown and I just see a list of “moved things around and refreshed the UI”

Why would you even admit that? Embarrassing.

Lol

> Windows Vista’s file controls blow every OS out of the water.

Please elaborate.

This is a file manager, but it acts as a Media Library. See how it can show the music’s metadata in the columns. You can edit all of the metadata, even in batch.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/7iF2D.png

Here you can find a few examples of its features. Skip the sorting and look at the grouping, custom metadata filtering, etc. not to mention the advanced search with any of this metadata.

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/transform-windows-explorer-f...

It has a field for “word count” (!!!) while in Finder I’m lucky if it remembers that I want my files to NOT appear overlapped on the desktop.

Custom File Properties aren't new in Vista - they date back to the Windows 95 Shell API. The only thing Vista added was the ability to filter and group directly from the list-view column headers (in Windows XP you could group-by, but with limited options, and no in-place filtering).

I think XP's File Explorer was the best. Keyboard shortcuts that actually do things useful: keypad * will expand all directories under the current one if you select the item in the tree on the left. A great way to make your hard-disk using friends sit for a while - select C:\ and press * on the numeric keypad...

What value does Microsoft get by pushing MSN content on normal computer users (especially business computer users)?

Is there such value in getting eyes to linger on MSN that it's worth slowing down or distracting people who use their computers for actual tasks (as opposed to just wasting time and following any tempting "news" link)?

Is this a top-down decision from Microsoft, or is this a lack of adequate oversight on the part of the top execs who define strategy for Windows?

Disclaimer: I am unaffiliated with the developer/company/product mentioned below.

When I was still on Windows 10, I used Start10. After...overwriting my Windows 10 image with Windows 11 (I needed WSL2 to operate my Seagate NAS/Linux based software RAID5 after Seagate's own firmware declared that all four physical drives had failed simultaneously--they of course hadn't, what an incredible slap in the face), I upgraded to Start11.

Yes, I agree, in principle it's absurd to pay anything at all to replace a window manager component whose functionality seems to diverge from what I personally consider useful with every iteration of the underlying OS. Nor am I under any illusion that all the crap is no longer wasting system resources, merely because I no longer see it.

I suppose sometimes there is a bit of comfort to be derived from appearances alone, and the developer of Start11 cleverly figured out what I consider a very reasonable price point to attach to said comfort.

The sad thing is, Windows (even 11) can be great.

I bought a new PC 18m ago, and due to the particular software I need to run, I needed a primary Windows installation. The PC came with a Windows 11 license, but I downloaded a stripped out ‘gamer’ focused ISO and installed that instead.

It’s brilliant. Thanks to the nature of the ISO, it is totally debloated – far beyond just the obvious removal of things like ads and spyware. As a result, it boots faster than any operating system I’ve ever had – once you get past the bios shenanigans, it takes about 5 to 7 seconds and it’s fully ready to go. (That’s a clean boot, not from sleep). It’s similarly fast in regular use, and it has been perfectly stable.

(The only downside of this approach is you have to be careful what’s been stripped out before you make your choice. In my case, I’ve not been able to install a printer, and WSL has also been removed. These are minor irritations, which so far I haven’t led me to abandon this installation – because otherwise it’s just great.)

I just bought a new HP ENVY laptop with a Win 11 Pro license. I replaced the RAM and M.2 before first power-up and made a USB boot drive with the Windows 11 media creation application to do the install. The installer lacked wifi drivers so I had to google how to get past that to create an account, but now I have a local-only login and I've turned off the location/weather/ads things and Win 11 is fine. I'm not a fan of the Start menu (Win2k was my preferred) but the laptop is very usable.

Coming from Windows 8.1 on the previous PC, my setup of Windows 11 is fine.

I don't know how normal people buy a new PC and not accidentally sign up for a subscription or three, there's SOOOO many nags with unintuitive choices, but once past all that it's fine.

> The only downside of this approach is you have to be careful what’s been stripped out before you make your choice.

Not just about what's been stripped out, but what malware may have been added.

Typically these are open source projects they are referring to. EG: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas

I think you can understand Microsoft’s Windows 11 development policy well if you look at the following subreddit.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/123br95/news_in_...

More precisely, this:

This post is locked. You won't be able to comment.

Some subs exist solely to provide space for product promotion using unaware users as medium, so yeah it's not surprising this thread is locked.

Many large concentrations of power have moved toward to softly excercising their powers, rather than hard. Users (also citizens) can take a lot of abuse IF their superiors position them to be vulnerable to them, and also give things to them at the same time. This kind of thing was a classic in interpersonal relationships, and now significant leaders found out that it works well on a large scale too.

And just to underline this point, I invite you to look at comments of people reacting to situations like this. They sense that something is very wrong, but as they are vulnerable and attached, they don't like the idea of letting go at all - so they defend, apologize, rationalize, do whatever they can so that they detach the undesirable thing from the beloved entity. Just like how poor abused people do to make sense of their partner hurting them.

That's when Windows died for me...

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...

I dislike the bloat and adding in news sections without asking.

Not just windows, but Android, brave and Firefox browser as well.

Please don't add recommended stories to the new tab, I just want my saved links and most visited. Nor do I want dodgy sponsored crap. Oh the woes of you are the product.

This doesn’t excuse any of that behavior but none of this stuff is enabled/exists on Win11 Pro.

**ing Microsoft. I was trying to compare editions of Windows, and ended up on this page (don't click it) which commandeers your back button for exactly zero (valid) reason: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare

Anyway, at least officially[0] omitting the News and Weather widget is not a feature of the Pro version to my knowledge, but perhaps you found better options for disabling it? Can you enable the weather widget without the news feed? I would love to learn how to do it if I ever end up on Windows 11 again for some reason!

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/compare-windows-11-h...

You really have to customize windows now with something like

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

You can turn all that shit off but the defaults are terrible now in Windows 11

Ever since the "tile"ification of windows 8, they've been monetizing the OS like it's a TV and they're the only one allowed to run commercials on it.

I really feel like if you purchase money to use software, aside from security updates, you should be able to effortlessly have a clean experience with it, free of ads, mandatory metadata collection, and promoted trash from MSN's tabloid-headlines.

Every smart feature in Windows is an insidious plot for Microsoft to brand themselves further into our lives, and I've been using and recommending linux whenever possible because of it. I miss the simplicity of Windows 7.

I can turn off all the UI trash. What I can't turn off is this stupid bug where it intermittently generates spurious keystrokes. I thought until recently that it was the trackpad on my laptop doing it but it happens with an external mouse and keyboard too. It's just intermittent enough that it's hard to pin down, while being frequent enough to be infuriating.

The worst part is that sometimes one of the meta keys will get 'stuck down' and I'll have to press them all until I find the one that's 'stuck'. A couple of times I've even had the right mouse button think it's being held down.

Maybe try booting into a live Linux USB and poke around and see if you can replicate the problem there.

I nearly switched to Windows 11 (from 10), but then I thought, do I have to? Instead I'm now running Fedora instead and my only concern is a printer driver, which I haven't needed to look at just yet.

The forced tabloid news is honestly horrific. I was begrudgingly willing to turn a blind eye to candy crush adverts on the start menu as I tend to like the OS, but this is just terrible. I have bad enough focus issues as it is without Windows bombarding my with crap notifications and clickbait in the widgets menu. I have turned off as much as I see possible and my blocklist for the news must be hundreds of entries long but I still get absolutely inane crap recommended to me. Oh I hate it so much it makes me rage. This is worse than the Windows 8 start menu.

Honestly, Windows is trash but so is MacOS. They both have surveillance software and their crap that they force upon you. Microsoft is obviously way worse but Apple is no saint here.

Just disable the weather indicator (I bet there is a 3-rd party alternative), install the Windows Classic Menu to replace the start menu and you are good to go.

I held on to Windows for years, finally had enough after I was forced to make a live account one day (the wizard just appeared providing no alternative one day).

... and sent you on a quest accompanied by the elves Analytics, Required Diagnostics and Better Experience and the dwarf twins Location and App Usage History. The epic journey took you through the mythical Optional Fields to Microsoft Land where you were to slay the dragon of User Choice and allow Men to once again reap their harvests of personal data without fear.

I wonder how much tinkering you need to make an enterprise version that removes all the time sink and telemetry.

not everyone that deals with sensible data has IT education beyond windows and office, and you can't demand every bank clerk and hospital receptionist in the world use arch Linux for safety reasons.

On the other hand, these click bait articles in the main UI are timesinks that could reduce productivity in a company

Oh it's this thread again.

It really sucks because there are users who practically must use Windows. People with disabilities aren't considered within FOSS, so are left out in Microsoft's cold embrace. Luckily there's WSL, and I use that quite a bit with Emacs and Emacspeak. But it's nothing like having a full Linux OS with no ads using up CPU cycles and RAM. I can't even see the ads.

I agree accessibility is more ergonomic in Windows, but accessibility concerns aren't universally ignored in FOSS. GNOME and KDE both have accessibility projects which have existed for a little while now.

Is it as polished? I would say no. But if there are shortcomings that impact you, the best way to help is to suggest changes, or write up a pull request yourself (if you are able to with the existing tooling that is).

I say it everywhere windows comes up, but if you're curious about Linux, please try Fedora. Or, if your friend insists it, even Linux Mint.

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.

Glad to hear it! Mint is definitely a strong pick if your workflow exposes you to a lot of bugs. Love their UI flair as well.

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.

Stop complaining! This is exactly what you want!

If you really don't like Windows, you would already be using Linux, *BSD or MacOS - like me ;)

Stupid defaults but who cares, can't be bothered to get upset about stuff that's disableable. Life is too short. It gets the revenue from the casual users. It's the price of free.

Solution: Don't let your kid on a fresh windows install.

I get the critique, 10 year younger me would be smoking out of my ears. These days, I just remove the unwanted stuff and continue with life.

The fact that it pops up on mouse over makes it especially irritating

It's a recurring theme though. Noticed yesterday how Amazon Prime switched the "Free to me" button for a "Free with ads" one. Subtle but important change - takes away the users ability to browse a "safe" no sales pitch part of their turf.

My computer is a couple of years old and a bit slow. When I search for something and I click on it in the Windows 10 Start Menu, the search lag causes something completely else to appear under my cursor and a completely different program opens.

This is absolutely insane! New results should not replace the already found ones.

I remember vividly the day I installed windows XP in 2002. It took me only 30 minutes to finally realize that Microsoft will never fix Windows. They are incapable of making good OS today as they were 20 years ago. I've been happily using Linux ever since.

You can turn off the widget. Whether that actually turns it off under the hood, I don't know.

Windows 11's UI is trash, no question. However, it can be easily fixed with ExplorerPatcher. https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

I feel like Windows UI/UX teams go back to their homes throw their laptops running windows out of the window and boot up a Mac. Windows 11 UI can go fuck itself. Absolute shit, I had to go back to Win 10 LTSC version after using it for a day.

The thing is. Most Windows users don't care. You are not MS target customer.

While piling on windows 11, I love (sarcastically) that you cannot give feedback about windows 11 without the feedback hub, even if your installation of windows 11 is completely trashed by a botched recovery.

And doesn't Feedback Hub require signing in to that app with a Microsoft Account? And the default behavior when signing in is a prompt that says "sign in with a Microsoft everywhere", with the "just this app" option in the corner? Dark patterns everywhere.

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.

Install Firefox?

Edge and Bing is quite compelling apart from that

Surely there's a registry key.

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.

I have completely ditched Windows for Gentoo/Arch, I cannot stand the crapware installed by default and all the hoops you have to jump through to get rid of it.

I'm sticking with Windows 10 for my development PC.

He starts out speaking of the computer being for his child and the inappropriateness of default content shown for a child.

I think it's worthy of mentioning Microsoft Family Safety. It's pretty useful after you create a minor Microsoft Account for your child through it. My only gripe was the Microsoft Edge new tab page, which still shows some content inappropriate for a child, with no way to disable it through the UI. The Microsoft Support sanctioned way to disable it was by adding ntp.msn.com to the Windows hosts file.

I solved these frustrations by using CairoShell.

No more start menu.

I wish I could move away from Windows, but I have a few Tobii EyeX devices I got used to, and they are not supported on Linux.

I haven’t used a as weather widget in decades lol

We’ve come full circle with the Bing button/sidebar ad in Edge. No more spammy toolbars, except of course Microsoft’s.

You're no longer the customer. You don't pay for the operating system, so you're the product.

>You don't pay for the operating system

What do you mean? Windows 11 costs money. The cheapest version is around $100 in Hungary.

It's not even free when bundled to stuff - backchannel business deals take care of that.

So we both pay, and also we are the product. Always have been, I believe.

Hmm. We got it for free here in the states.

Every laptop that you buy has the cost of windows included in it. So yeah you are paying for a premium + being shown ads. Pathetic from windows.

As if Windows or MS-DOS were ever good!

They did help the entire world get work done for 30+ years so they can't have been too bad.

Sigh

I watched a colleague once spend half an hour to get a classroom PC booted, mirrored to the projector, calibrated to the interactive whiteboard and a presentation converted to the whiteboard software.

Endless reboots, popups about out of date software, error messages, popups from the system tray that had to be clicked on, popups from Powerpoint....

So over that 30 years we are talking how many lifetimes wasted?

How long did it take to get the Mac working with the interactive whiteboard?

I liked DOS because it was an executable loader. You told it what program you wanted to run and it got out of your way.

(That being said, I use a real OS these days and don't want to go back.)

is any of this not able to be disabled? uninstalling is disabling, but better.

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.

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.

How is this worse than Apple's App Store outright displaying ads?

What comparison do you think you're making here?

People are up in arms because Windows is showing news that you can actually swith off, but on the other hand Apple is actively showing (unwanted) ads.

Windows is the best DE for Linux.

prove me wrong

So this is a longwinded way of saying the author doesn't like that they put news in the start menu?

There's News, and then there's the cesspool of filth that is NineMSN.

its pronounced "microshit" and there is no reason to use it

[flagged]

Stockholm syndrome is real.

Just pay for a Pro license and stop complaining.

This is mostly blogspam for this: https://thomasbandt.com/the-day-windows-died

Which has already been posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35415758

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 agree. Some people do great things with whatever they have on hands, and some... well... just whining.

This one adds another example of the distracting invasive mess that article doesn't have.

Go to Personalization / Taskbar. Turn off the widgets icon. Hide the Search bar. Turn off the Chat icon.

Voila! Just Windows. Instead of cursing at the sky, I just turn off what I don't want.

MacOS is an old, outdated clown car of an OS that looks like it hasn't been updated in 15 years. Let me know when the Year of Linux happens.

Meanwhile, Windows is the most efficient, easy-to-use OS for development and media tasks. WSL is amazing. Hyper-V is fast if I need it. And it all Just Works.

You might be interested in this I'm working on, it also came up when the original mentioned articles was posted here.

It's fine tuned for my own needs but I think I'll add another more barebones config set.

https://github.com/lloydjatkinson/configuration

while you do all that needed tinkering I'll be just working/playing games thank you very much.

Jokes aside, Windows is just as viable as an daily driver like MacOS or Linux. But to state it is the most efficient & easy-to-use, that's stretching it a little bit.

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.

[1] https://sports.yahoo.com/microsoft-isn-t-done-shoving-150500...

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.

You can revert to the old context menu in that case: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restor...

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.

Oh I agree I had Candy crush installed after an update on Windows 10. But I had nothing of the sort in Windows 11. Yet.

> 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.

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.

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.

ot but i don't think it's in good faith to be downvoted for having an opinion other people don't like.

That "opinion" sounds nothing more than parroting the marketing BS.