Windows needs a change in priorities

https://den.dev/blog/windows-priority-shuffle/

by dend • 4 years ago

1194 842 4 years ago

sph2• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure Windows got their priorities straight: telemetry, advertisement are the priority and they're executing their strategy very well.

Your priority as a user are different, but, sorry to say, your voice doesn't count. The year-end revenue and KPI is what counts, because you and 99% of other companies will still be buying and using PCs with Windows preinstalled and paying Microsoft for licences. You say so yourself, you're disappointed with the direction Windows is taking, but you still use it [for very legitimate reasons].

Why should Microsoft sell Windows for $199, when they can earn $199 + $x/month/user from ads and create more value for its shareholders?

dend10• 4 years ago

I would pay extra to buy a "Signature Edition" (kind of like they had with PCs) of Windows that has none of the ads and whatever other "value-add" pieces are integrated in it. One would say - I want LTSC accessible for customers like myself, without the kneecapped ability to run latest Windows software.

1_player2• 4 years ago

They make more off you if you have a regular licence and they can sell your data. You wanting to pay extra not to be spied upon is irrelevant, you have no choice in the matter.

Very simply, the money lost because some people have left Windows for greener pastures is being offset by the increased revenue.

crazysim• 4 years ago

I think there was a Pro for Workstations SKU that installed with a lot less candy crush in the start menu when I tried it.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

.. because the minute your monopoly power crumbles, you will be met with resentment and abandonment, including by the "investors" who were with you minutes ago.. the ecosystem has dealt with hostile insider moves, high profile technology theft, and constant attack vectors already.. more in store here

hughrr• 4 years ago

Windows 11 is the first windows release I haven’t used. It’s also the first windows release I will never use going back to windows 3. I am completely done with it now. The last release which wasn’t a complete punch in the balls was nearly 20 years ago.

AussieWog93• 4 years ago

The last release which wasn’t a complete punch in the balls was nearly 20 years ago.

Windows 7 was actually pretty bloody good.

city41• 4 years ago

Windows 8 came out just about a decade ago. Nearly a decade of Windows pain is still quite unfortunate.

InCityDreams• 4 years ago

I still have a not-connected-to-the-net w7. Runs my software great.

jeroenhd2• 4 years ago

You've got to admire Microsoft's support of open source software. They're doing their best to push users to Linux! By making their UI as ugly and difficult to use as possible so that users don't feel too much of a bump in usability when they try Linux.

I'm sure MS can get the job done and kill off their OS with just a few more years of obnoxious bullshit forcefully shoved into their operating system!

andrewmcwatters• 4 years ago

Not only that, but shipping Microsoft Office onto the Mac makes it so much easier to leave if you're not playing video games.

nyanpasu642• 4 years ago

Sadly I found out that Macs are filled with telemetry as well: https://mspoweruser.com/macos-big-sur-has-its-own-telemetry-... (2020)

flatiron2• 4 years ago

Office on the Mac is awful.

When I worked at apple I wasnt the only person who ran office in a windows vm. It was a supported config.

jrapdx3• 4 years ago

I've had similar thoughts. If GUI programs running in WSL will look just like "regular" Windows apps (as MS said they intend to do) then Windows becomes a kind of front end to Linux. That would solve the "desktop" problems Linux has had.

But between the overwrought UI and the bugs MS never seems to fix, Windows is becoming a less and less attractive platform with each revision.

bsder• 4 years ago

Agreed. Windows 11 and macOS 12 finally gave me the kick necessary to switch to Linux full-time (Lenovo Carbon X1).

macOS 12 cannot maintain a USB 2.0 connection. Not by dongle. Not by dock. Not by monitor. Not with 3rd party. Not with Apple-approved hardware. No way, no how. This is known, reported and totally Apple's fault (some of the earlier macOS 11 builds work fine). And this is the standard problem with Apple, "It just works--until it doesn't. If it doesn't, sucks to be you." I'm done with that.

Windows 10 was already bad enough with "Please, sir, can I have some compute?" with "I say thee NAY! I will now upgrade for the next 40 minutes. Hah!" Add in even more telemetry and inconsistency and I just gave up.

The whole point of Windows and macOS was to NOT have to dork with my OS and just get my work done. If I have to dork with my OS to make it not suck, I should be on Linux! At least then, when I figure out how to make my OS not suck, I'm helping instead of contributing to Microsoft or Apple profits.

So, yeah, I'll maintain a Windows desktop for the few times I need it (Fusion 360 and some videoconferencing stuff), but otherwise it's been Linux full-time for me. And Apple can just go pound sand.

jeroenhd2• 4 years ago

My conclusion is that all mainstream operating systems are now iterative and constantly in a state of semi-breakage, just like all modern apps, in an attempt to be more "modern" and to cut down on costs. I'm especially disappointed in Microsoft for their obsessive data collection. I've never experienced the "good old days" Apple fans seem to be referring to, so I can't comment on macOS (other than that it's clearly not for me).

It's quite absurd, really, because while the Linux desktop environment is certainly good for novices and advanced Linux users, anyone that falls between those categories (and that's a lot of people!) will definitely struggle when they try to switch to Linux. You're either content with the default setup, or need to dive into the terminal at some point, and the fact commercial operating systems are making their UX worse than Linux would be impressive if it wasn't so disappointing.

For what it's worth, I've managed to get Fusion360 running on Manjaro with a script a friend linked me online. I can't remember where I got it from exactly, but it involved auto downloading a bunch of Wine requirements and then just running the setup.

If you're not interested in tweaking your system, feel free to skip over the rest of the comment. If you're willing to give it a go, I've got some experience with Windows stuff on Linux that you may be interested in.

I barely use Fusion360, but the few times I used it, it worked pretty well in Wine. Even had decent 3D acceleration, though you can probably get a lot better performance with more trickery (DXVK etc. to enhance the 3D acceleration for example). Lutris (https://lutris.net/) has an install script (https://lutris.net/games/autodesk-fusion-360/), I recommend you give it a try. Lutris can help enable performance tuning tricks for productivity software quite easily, even if it's originally developed for playing video games. Might work for you, or it might not; if it does, it might just cut down on more unnecessary reboots. If it doesn't, you'll at most lose the time it takes to download the installer and remove the failed installation.

As for the video conferencing, you might be interested in Cassowary (https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary), a tool to run Windows executables in a Windows VM through RDP, with suspend/resume of the VM on demand to cut down on resources used when you're not using Windows. It requires a bit of setup, but the guide is quite comprehensive in my opinion. You can forward your webcam to the Windows VM through USB forwarding to get it to work with video, and modern RDP should just be an RDP stream so there shouldn't be too much quality loss. Even if the Cassowary setup doesn't work, you can probably use the VM anyway.

hnthrowaway03157• 4 years ago

But you have to make sure NOT to fall into the WSL trap. If you use WSL you are essentially using Windows.

sylens3• 4 years ago

This post resonates with me a lot, as I share many of the same complaints. The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hope get ironed out over time), but the level of ads creeping ever higher is alarming. The “accidental” inclusion of an ad in Windows Explorer this week may have tipped their hand - if that’s the direction they are going, I’m moving off the platform entirely.

duskwuff2• 4 years ago

The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hop get ironed out over time)

I wouldn't get my hopes up. Microsoft seems to be introducing new UI frameworks -- each with their own slightly different appearance -- at an ever-increasing rate. If current trends continue, by 2030 there will be more Windows UI frameworks than developers using them. :)

xattt• 4 years ago

Are you saying that by 2030, there will be a custom UI framework for every developer out there? Beat that, Apple!

sbierwagen• 4 years ago

The UI inconsistencies are one thing (that you would hope get ironed out over time)

Windows 8 was released ten years ago. All the old-style control panel dialogs are still with us. Regedit will never get ported to the new UI toolkit.

drsnow• 4 years ago

WHY, though? It's genuinely infuriating

userbinator12• 4 years ago

One hopes it never will, because everything post-Win32 seems to be much worse. UWP (what is used for the new Control Panel/"Settings") is particularly frustrating.

...which is very strange that MS seems to be continuing to rewrite stuff in it, when it's already started saying things like this a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19873198

stuartd4• 4 years ago

Should it be? I imagine the number of people who use Regedit is less than one per cent, and those people really don’t care what it looks like? (yes, RegEdit is a terrible UX but for me familiarity makes me less likely to make mistakes in a tool you really don’t want to make mistakes in!)

worewood• 4 years ago

If they shipped a version of Windows sporting the Windows-11 kernel, so running all the recent software, but with Windows 2000 UI for a thousand dollars I would buy it immediately.

anarazel• 4 years ago

Server isn't too far off...

dend10• 4 years ago

That's true, but then you start running into weird compatibility issues, where a specific game won't work because an Xbox Live component is not installed or DirectX SDK is not at the right version (and you can't install the right version because it only works on the consumer OS).

ComputerGuru• 4 years ago

Server 2012 (or was it 2008?) was absolutely terrible in that was absolutely Windows 8-ified with a forced full-screen metro start menu "experience," but that was fortunately rectified in the next release (Server 2016, I'm pretty sure).

MarkSweep• 4 years ago

It’s not quite Windows 2000, but the LTSC edition has much of the bullshit stripped out. It does not support the store therefore Candy Crush is not installed by default. And I don’t think it’s quite $1000, if you can figure out how to buy it.

elorant• 4 years ago

It's available in volume licensing, with a 5 license as minimal order.

stuartd4• 4 years ago

Been running Windows Server as my desktop dev environment since NT4. Back then it was so the dev environment was the same as the server environment, that’s pretty much fixed now so it’s just to avoid all this horrible store nonsense. Can’t upgrade from 2019 as I don’t have a TPM so no WSL2 or new terminal but happy to accept that trade off. And shout out to win2k server which was awesome!

poglet• 4 years ago

Windows 10 LTSE was under $20 on ebay, unsure of the legality of this.

GekkePrutser14• 4 years ago

The latest LTSC actually doesn't have as much stripped out anymore. Telemetry choices are the same now and also MS accounts are there. I was really disappointed when I tried it.

userbinator12• 4 years ago

I haven't looked at the scene recently but in the past I've seen various projects on somewhat-underground (and often non-English) forums where they try to do similar things, mixing different versions of kernel and userland.

There is this more recent attempt, Win10 explorer.exe with Win11 kernel: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/o6ytuw/so_i_replac...

Sakos2• 4 years ago

That's the dream.

wildrhythms4• 4 years ago

Not Windows, but you might get a kick out of the Serenity OS project: http://serenityos.org/

judge20202• 4 years ago

It would take probably another $100M in engineering pay to do this, so unless there are 100k other people willing to pay $1,000 for this, you're short on how much you need to pay to actually get this done.

wolpoli5• 4 years ago

The operating system would look consistent, but we would still have to deal with all the applications that decided they need to draw their own UI, including everything from Microsoft Office to all the web browsers to all the electrons apps.

It's too late for the Windows ecosystem.

51Cards• 4 years ago

Windows 7 for me but yes, similar sentiment.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Windows at this point is a ball and chain around even Microsoft's leg. They pivoted to a "cloud and services" company under Nadella because they can't make money off Windows anymore -- except by strip-mining its reputation and ubiquity by turning it into adware/spyware. Truly we live in the worst timeline.

jthrowsitaway• 4 years ago

If it pushes people towards better OSes (any *nix IMO) that's a good thing. I was tired of Windows back in the XP days.

8note3• 4 years ago

Imo, the best OS has the software that I want to run.

I think wine is doing a more important job than MS at allowing windows to die

Royi• 4 years ago

The only direction Windows should go is being more modular and less features. Speed is probably the only feature all users want.

So make all features modular with advanced user being able to remove and get a lean and mean OS.

We want less, we want speed.

P. S. It is about time to upgrade the File System. It is too slow...

dend10• 4 years ago

Wholeheartedly support this. I want my OS to be as boring as possible so that I can do all the interesting things I want.

flatiron2• 4 years ago

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/refs...

duskwuff2• 4 years ago

ReFS has the stink of death all over it. It's been the "next generation" filesystem for Windows since 2012, with no signs of ever graduating to being the current filesystem -- in fact, a 2017 update to Windows 10 removed the ability for most desktop systems to create ReFS volumes.

panick21_• 4 years ago

I have not used Windows software in decades, are they still using NTFS?

stuartd4• 4 years ago

Oh yes. Very much so. Hey, it’s better than FAT-32!

hackerfromthefu5• 4 years ago

The problem with this is fragmentation, if I understand you correctly.

It's one of the two reasons why Linux isn't ubiquitous on the desktop. (The other being open source doesn't provide enough incentive to do the boring unsexy work)

Fragmentation kills support. Imagine non technical users searching for help on an issue. First finding articles on Windows, then version X, then getting 'only applies with piece X, Y, Z installed'. That's already a problem and the suggestion of making Windows less 'batteries included' would make it harder for the mainstream users, who are the bulk of users.

Fragmentation also kills products, it increases development costs, reduces velocity etc.

Microsoft knew/knows how to make a better product, they just don't choose to because they evaluate they can make more money by screwing consumers over.

In my opinion we need regulation regarding anti-features. It's not perfect but it's the approach that is the answer in the non-digital world.

fsflover3• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30749512

segphault• 4 years ago

Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely uninstall it, which didn't really help, because they still kept bringing it back after every update. I assume that they're going to do this with Teams now.

For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.

It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship.

rektide2• 4 years ago

It's such an interesting contrast, for both ends of Microsoft to have reversed so heavily. The core consumer product once fought for betterment and improvement. "Where do you want to go today" was the slogan, suggesting users the helm, piloting their Personal Computer wherever they may. Oh, and it was a complete vision, totalizing. Microsoft did not care at all about open source, webdev, Linux, or broader ecosystem outside their castle.

The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.

skoskie4• 4 years ago

But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing

Embracing is the first step in dominating. Don’t fall for it.

GekkePrutser14• 4 years ago

Another thing that really bothers me about Microsoft is all the logging they do. They don't care about privacy at all.

They send me emails about how I haven't done an @mention to enough colleagues on teams this week or that I should spend less time in meetings. Besides this being total nonsense due to not taking into account the type of job I have (of course different jobs have different balances of meetings etc), I also don't want them looking over my shoulder.

I can turn off the emails but not the logging itself. They proclaim that admins can't see what I do but as I was an admin I was actually able to see a lot more than they let on :( Sure some of it was anonimised (not all) but it's easy to filter by criteria narrow enough that that doesn't matter.

They seem convinced that they are helping us manage by data etc but they totally ignore the fact that many people frown on this practice. In fact some of it is illegal in the EU especially countries like Germany. Microsoft is clearly in the church of "Data driven everything" but they should not impose this on customers IMO.

Silhouette8• 4 years ago

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.

Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.

Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them.

Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop/laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren't in large organisations running "enterprise" software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.

hackerfromthefu5• 4 years ago

As a developer I want to implement everything possible on the web platform.

It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.

As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.

rthomas6• 4 years ago

What is wrong with Linux nowadays? I've used it as my main driver for long enough that I can't see the big problems that are preventing everyone from switching. Like, it seems easier than even WSL to me. Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else. If a person has good hardware compatibility, in the face of the bloated pushyess of Windows 11, why not use Linux? What am I missing?

DrBazza3• 4 years ago

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.
Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.

There's the challenge.

Who cared about "hardware"? Jony Ive and Jobs perhaps?

Who cares about OS performance? Linus Torvalds. I'm sure there are MS insiders who we don't know.

Who cares about the desktop? .....

The funny thing is the desktop was a solved problem with the mother-of-all-demos, and everything else is sugar on top, and yet there has to be this continual awful rebranding. Ok we went from VGA, to HD, to 4k HDR, but the underlying design and UI doesn't have to change so poorly each time.

banana_giraffe4• 4 years ago

Even stuff like WSL is loosing it's shine now for me. I've personally hit a bug on multiple computers that I can reliably repo a blue screen if I attempt to update a specific package.

The github bug for this issue last had activity from MS 4 months ago.

Kinda makes it hard to take it seriously if such a major blocker is treated with such low priority.

mwcampbell2• 4 years ago

Is that WSL 1 or 2?

GekkePrutser14• 4 years ago

My system bluescreens when I so much as install WSL2 on my second work laptop with Windows 11. Tried to track it down and it seems to be some stupid Lenovo driver but it's almost impossible to fix :(

sandGorgon• 4 years ago

wsl2 has been very very stable for me. in fact, i have spent a lot of time in the last 6 months on wsl2 (FYI - fedora is my main)

i really recommend trying out wsl2. you now can install it from the window store.

augustl• 4 years ago

You're definitely an early adopter if you're on WSL now. I'd say it's probably not prime time until 2024 or so.

bastardoperator2• 4 years ago

Try doing anything I/O intensive in WSL and it all falls apart. I have a 32 core machine with 128GB using nvme disks and it's getting murdered performance wise by an 8 core AWS instance with 16GB of ram on gp2 disks.

coryrc• 4 years ago

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste" -- Steve Jobs

petilon• 4 years ago

You could say that about the post-Steve-Jobs Apple as well.

pseudostem• 4 years ago

I believe this [1] is the interview from which the quote is taken.

[1] https://youtu.be/rDqQcmVqAm4

8note3• 4 years ago

Nobody has figured out how to get the old windows ink back, unfortunately.

I basically lost the reason for having a windows touch+pen input screen:/ and nobody has found out how to get the killer app back.

I suspect that only pre-windows 8 good features will be retained over time

poopooracoocoo• 4 years ago

Windows Ink? Do you mean Windows Ink Workspace or Windows Sketchpad?

It was Windows Sketchpad that I really loved. After Microsoft axed it, they released Whiteboard. It felt very... not-native but had the titlebar of a UWP app. It was terrible compared to Sketchpad but new functionality like being able to select elements and reposition and resize them was great. UWP's own restrictions meant I could set certain expectations with windowing and suspension. And then they made Whiteboard a pure Electron app which was just too choppy for drawing anything at all. The closest I found to replacements were Inkodo and Scrble.

Windows Ink was just one of Microsoft's phases, just like XR. They now refuse to add support for a partial eraser in WinUI.

QuantumSeed• 4 years ago

To your point, the Programs and Features section of the Windows 11 Control Panel no longer lists Microsoft Teams as a product that can be uninstalled.

mwcampbell2• 4 years ago

To be fair, that legacy control panel doesn't list any apps that use the AppX/MSIX packaging model introduced with Windows 8. I'm still not on Windows 11, so I don't know if Teams is listed in the newer list of apps available in modern Settings, but it's worth looking there.

LegitShady2• 4 years ago

since the announcement that windows 11 will require a microsoft account to install, I've decided that windows 10 is the last version of windows I will use for my personal computers. Your description of microsoft's opinion of their customers ('nobody at microsoft...actually cares') is apt.

at_a_remove2• 4 years ago

I wonder if that will be true of the Enterprise LTSC/LTSB version.

jiggawatts5• 4 years ago

There's also that they "decided" that none of their core customer bases actually matter. They no longer cater to the needs of anyone.

Some random examples:

Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major feature updates since 2016. Microsoft themselves use Linux for many of their Azure PaaS/SaaS services, which is very telling. There's no on-prem equivalents of CosmosDB, Log Analytics, and a range of other "core" services developed for Azure.

Gamers -- Windows gaming is a shit-show and all development effort is focused on XBox. Occasionally, reluctantly, features will be backported from XBox to PC, but usually broken or limited in some critical way. For example, DirectStorage for PC was under NDA until very recently, and there were few (zero?) games shipping with that capability. HDR gaming on Windows is a total mess as well, with one lone blog article talking about bringing the HDR tuning app to PC form XBox "some unspecified time in the future". Without this, HDR is totally and utterly broken, unless the PC is plugged into an external TV... like an XBox.

Content Creation -- Windows used to be better and more commonly used than Apple for a while, especially in some areas. Not any more. The endless series of penny-pinching decisions and broken features have driven artists away in droves. Some random examples: Windows 11 shipped with totally broken colour management. As in, absolutely non-functional. Windows 11 also broke HDR even further, and it was broken in Windows 10 to begin with. You literally cannot display or view HDR correctly on the primary ("built in") monitor of any Windows PC. It was broken on purpose, and then... left like that. It's possible the next semi-annual build will "fix" it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Dolby Vision is not enabled by default. Camera RAW decoders are not installed by default. H.264 is not installed by default. The built-in photo viewers and editors are not color-managed. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) support was removed at every level. It's just gone. Microsoft wants to enshrine SDR sRGB forever in an era where every new phone and every Apple device is wide-gamut and HDR.

Software Developers -- See Casey Muratori's rants about the ludicrous degradation of basic quality controls in Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, etc... For example, VS 2022 can't keep up with debug single-stepping on that fastest machine money can buy, but ancient PCs running older versions had no trouble. But that's just a small annoyance. The real problem is that Windows GUI development is dead. It may as well not exist any more. There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels. Even Microsoft recognises this, and most of their new GUI products (e.g.: Teams) are Electron apps. What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools trying to appeal to the Linux/Mac crowd at the expense of majority used to Windows.

To summarise: if in 2022 I want to develop a GUI app, or display anything with the correct colour, or HDR, or any similarly advanced features, my best approach is to use Google's Chromium. If I want to write a game, use Vulkan, not DirectX. If I want to create a web app, use Linux. If I want to use a database, Postgres. If I want authentication, then anything but Active Directory. If I want to use dev tools, use IntelliJ.

There is nothing left where the #1 best approach is Microsoft Windows or some other Microsoft product.

29athrowaway2• 4 years ago

The cash cow will always be Microsoft Office. That's what governments use and because of that companies use it, and because of that everyone uses it.

ripley128• 4 years ago

What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools

I have no idea why you would say this. VS Code is an incredibly popular and well-liked product.

userbinator12• 4 years ago

There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels.

Win32?

pjmlp8• 4 years ago

Vulkan tooling is still quite poor when compared with DirectX, thanks the way Khronos always leaves to the community to do the needfull.

Hot reloading with C++ outside Visual Studio? Good luck with that if not willing to shell out some bucks for Live++.

Other frameworks are still relearning the ways of WPF and Blend tooling.

Many things make me angry how Microsoft management is dealing with them, yet the alternatives are even worse.

Only the Java ecosystem is a sound alternative to MS tooling, regardless of their current misdirection.

UnpossibleJim• 4 years ago

As far as the Skype thing is concerned, isn't that the exact thing they got sued for with Explorer for in the 90's?... or somewhat similar?

onpensionsterm• 4 years ago

It is, as is the embedding of Edge as a default browser. The attitude seems to be that it doesn't matter anymore or that it's worth doing even if they do get in trouble.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

Would be interestng to know how many non-enterprise Windows users have ever made a direct payment to Microsoft. For that segment, the company suffers from the same problem as "tech" companies. The non-enterprise Windows user is not the customer.

Identitities and personal information are a Microsoft product. Some of that personal data is acquired through Windows or other software and some is acquired through acquisitions of "tech" companies such as LinkedIn.

joe_the_user3• 4 years ago

It's like being in an abusive relationship.

Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced.

I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things).

Linux has glitches but Microsoft manipulates people. Maybe people stay because they think that because Windows hurts them, it cares.

hulitu10• 4 years ago

A lot of people stay because it is required by the school or the employer.

_dain_3• 4 years ago

I've seen so many people say things like: "Windows is fine, all you have to do is [gigantic list of obscure settings changes, registry edits, external freeware programs] to turn off the telemetry!"

It will eventually get to the point where it will take more settings-twiddling to make Windows do what you actually want than Linux does.

AnIdiotOnTheNet5• 4 years ago

While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community. GNOME in particular is pretty user-hostile in both design and in its community interactions, and while you can use a different DE GNOME is the default for the most popular and recommended distributions.

Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use, where you get your choice between "up to date but frequently broken" rolling-release[0] or "several years out of date but probably stable". To me, the idea it is considered reasonable to expect a user to set up a dev environment and compile software from source is ludicrous, but until relatively recently that's been the norm[1]. Thankfully, AppImage and Flatpak have been gaining popularity and making that much less of a problem.

Now the two biggest things keeping me from switching immediately are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane[2], and my Oculus isn't supported at all[3]. Still, I'll go to Linux before I go to Win 11.

[0] which still often has out of date and missing packages

[1] for anything not packaged by the distro or if you need a newer version

[2] thanks Bitcoin Idiots, LLC

[3] and from everything I gather no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.

mulmen5• 4 years ago

WSL is a threat to open software. At best a gateway. Anyone who believes Microsoft has changed is at best naive and at worst a fool. We have decades of evidence to show that Microsoft doesn’t change. The sooner you move to a new platform the better. And don’t bring Microsoft with you.

lproven8• 4 years ago

Strongly agreed.

WSL – both versions – are MS attempting its age-old "embrace & extend" move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.

Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor? https://github.com/google/gvisor

Others have done it.

Joyent enhanced the old Solaris `lxrun` environment to bring it to 64-bit and kernel 3.x or even 4.x: https://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx

The FreeBSD Linuxulator does much the same: https://wiki.freebsd.org/Linuxulator

raxxorrax3• 4 years ago

I think any developer that could long moved from their ecosystems by now. You can see that if you try to get technical knowledge.

I can imagine that there are many departments that have to continually justify their existence and management tries to find the one-hit wonder that gets users engaged. All these departments try to have their dejure product integrated into Windows to have a chance to pump up their KPI.

You should be able to tell an operating system that it is not allowed to phone home. That is not possible in Windows, on the contrary, they have increased their spying dramatically. It has been a adversarial relationship for a long time by now and I don't see any attempts to change course or anyone that really cares for the platform. Their corporate integration and PC gaming keeps Windows relevant for now, but people will look elsewhere.

spc476• 4 years ago

You are not the target audience for Microsoft, the corporation is. Who uses a home computer anymore? (it's all smart phones now) You start work, you get a pre-installed Windows laptop to use by the corporate IT department, configured to be used as they see fit. You no longer own a computer. Nobody is expected to, these days.

kwhitefoot• 4 years ago

Who uses a home computer anymore?

Me (but not Windows), my three grown children, my sister, at least one brother in law. At least half of the people I know personally. Half of them using laptops, the rest desktop machines. All of them have smartphones, and sometimes tablets, as well.

theclansman2• 4 years ago

I think combining Macbooks and gaming PCs then home computers are being used more than ever, but I'm not sure, it's true that you don't need one to browse facebook anymore. But at the same time I don't know anyone without a laptop.

Neil44• 4 years ago

They are doing this with Teams and it gets better, it’s a different Teams than normal that looks the same but only accepts personal MS accounts not business / 365 ones. WTF?

DrBazza3• 4 years ago

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.

I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either.

It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of what people actually want, and make disastrously poor decisions. Falling sales... improve product, increase the price, or introduce ads?

I haven't booted Windows at home for close to 3 years. KDE on Ubuntu is rock solid for me, all the peripherals work, powers both my screens, has all the software I need.

And best of all, it's still 100% offline and I don't have to sign into anyone's "cloud".

robertlagrant4• 4 years ago

Making money and caring about users are related, but there's definitely a difference between making a good product that people would like to use, and trying to make money. The latter may well make you rich, but it may make your product much worse, which you shore up with lots of salespeople and complex pricing schemes and dealmaking to keep people locked in.

cyxxon• 4 years ago

Or they do have an idea what the users want, but it is still bad... at my job, the non-technical managers bought the SAP marketing koolaid, promised our internal users the cool new stuff they were going to get with the new software, and we in the IT just want to scream and say, no, you can't get that, that's not supported, or will take a year to build because we would have to revamp almost everything ourselves... and, yes, all because at SAP no one knows what users need. We have had several rounds with SAP PMs already were they basically said "huh, that's interesting, that's how you work with the software? We need to discuss this internally." Well... good thing you didn't ask before launching the new version then.

MrPatan• 4 years ago

I don't even know what is my microsoft account anymore. I have created so many for so many services and devices over the years that I don't have a "main" one anymore.

So every new install is a crapshot, I try to go local account only, but something gets in the way and I end up creating yet another one for that specific device.

It's madness.

spaniard89277• 4 years ago

From my POV it has come to a time where the tradeoffs you make switching to Linux (xubuntu in my case) are worth it.

A few days ago I had to do some helpdesk for a friend with windows 10. We suspected that one of his three drives failed, and windows just refused to start up, so I wanted to jump into recovery/safe mode and take a look.

But for doing so you need to go through a ridiculous lenght rebooting the PC multiple times and go through a bunch of sub menus. I tried but it didn't work, so we unplugged the hd we suspected it was failing and used my linux laptop with an external hd case to diagnose it.

I have a w10 corporate version in a pc, and it works kid of fine. I had to install windows 10 home to a laptop recebtly and everything feels like an abuse.

If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?

Its just too much effort.

hutzlibu3• 4 years ago

"If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?"

Linux with universal good drivers, is probably what most of us would want and need.

(except for the lucky few, who never had an issue)

shrimp_emoji2• 4 years ago

Try Manjaro with KDE.

Manjaro is way better than Ubuntu; KDE is way better than Xfce.

gytdev2• 4 years ago

Linux is better, but still a pain if You have to spin up a VM every time You need to do Excel or Photoshop. Added: also as Linus said: f*k you NVidia!

syshum• 4 years ago

I dont think it is contempt for the users, It is more that consumers (i.e non-enterprise editions of windows) is the Beta Test group for windows

Microsoft has always been, and will always be an enterprise company, they do not care about Consumers, and they do not care about SMB business. they care about Large Enterprise.

I have seen it countless times in my career, SMB space and can be complaining up a storm about a problem for years but until some 20,000+ employee CTO has the problem MS will not give it the time of day.

It is all numbers, and if you are not a government or Large corporation Microsoft does not give you the time of day

digisign7• 4 years ago

You've just described the passive side of "contempt."

rbanffy3• 4 years ago

Windows and macOS users have different expectations. On a Mac, I expect my login account to also know my Apple ID and connect seamlessly with my iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, Messages, and all other Apple cloud services. I like being able to answer phone calls on the computer when the phone is nearby. When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like, it faces a couple problems - not everyone wants to be on Skype or Teams - some people use Zoom or Slack. To make things worse, even Microsoft products are not well integrated into the platform. Depending on how I open a SharePoint document, I can either have another Edge window, with an online version of an Office app or the standalone app opening (with different UI conventions on how shared edits work).

The article mentions the backwards compatibility. Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now). It also mentions dual booting, which is something completely alien to me - this is what VMs are for. When I needed to run Windows on either my Mac or my Linux box, I'd just spin up a small VM with enough brains to run what I needed.

And, since we are talking VMs, WSL 2 is a horrible user experienced compared to a real Linux environment - file sharing with the Windows side is clunkier than it was with WSL 1 (as things don't exist on a single filesystem, and that silly CRLF convention is what Windows expects) or even the venerable Cygwin (which saved me many times when I needed to use a Windows machine). With Macs and Linux you have full Unix environments without any border separating you from the rest of the machine.

q-big2• 4 years ago

When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like

Just a consideration: Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? In other words: Should Microsoft not rather assume that making Windows more Mac-like might be a bad idea considering their core customers?

edgyquant3• 4 years ago

Yeah I expect that my MacBook, Mac Mini, IPad and IPhone are all connected. I can open up browser tabs from one device to the other, take phone calls or send texts, not have to worry about sharing passwords etc.

I expect, want in fact, none of these things on my Windows PC. I do not trust Microsoft with my data, and this was before the last year of them being owned. It may not be right or even logical, but I imagine a ton of other users fit this same archetype. To me windows is the spyware ridden OS I use to pay a handful of games, and it basically always will be.

CRConrad4• 4 years ago

Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now).

How do you know you aren't regularly running one (or more) of those? Or at least some stuff last updated sometime between W2K and W7?

rbanffy3• 4 years ago

The one thing I find the most terrible is the "10 different UI conventions" thing. Dig enough and I bet you'll find a control panel or some other thing the has Windows NT 3.1 look and feel.

It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.

6yyyyyy• 4 years ago

Open "ODBC Data Sources" from the start menu

Click "Add..."

Click "Finish" with "Microsoft Access Driver" selected (no, you're not finished)

Click "Select..."

segmondy• 4 years ago

As the techie helping my folks with their Windows issue, it was far easier and better for my mental health to spend my own money buying everyone chromebooks and ipads.

yibg• 4 years ago

Is it nobody cares or they care about different things? If you want to be cynical, they care about making money. But could it also be that they're more focused on the general population (who don't care as much about this stuff)?

It's hard to tell for me to be honest, but are we (e.g. HN crowd) just a minority of power users that are in our own echo chamber complaining and making us happy doesn't really move the needle for MSFT?

adhesive_wombat4• 4 years ago

Even on Linux, when I use the Teams Electron program (app? website in a dress?), it comes up in the PulseAudio mixer as Skype.

khaledh2• 4 years ago

This article nails a lot of the issues with Windows 11.

I bit the bullet and upgraded to Windows 11 late last year thinking it must be an improvement over Windows 10. It turned out to be a big step backwards.

- Changing the default browser is a lot of work instead of a single click.

- I can't move the task bar to the side, even though almost every monitor nowadays has much more horizontal space than vertical.

- All apps are not readily accessible from the start menu; I have to click another button to get to them.

- I have a 2-in-1 laptop, and turning it into tablet mode is wonky.

- I can't choose to not have grouped buttons on the taskbar.

- The context menus UX is horrible. Some context menu items are now two clicks away instead of one. Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding?

- The stacked notifications is confusing, and always shows the calendar when I open the notifications panel.

- Lots of crap pushed on me, like chat (aka Teams), widgets (which require a Microsoft account), 3rd party apps that look like they're installed but actually get downloaded/installed on first use.

I was able to fix a lot of those issues with ExplorerPatcher [0]. However, one day after a Windows update, Explorer didn't start at all after login (black screen, I thought Windows was hosed). This has since been fixed. But I decided enough is enough, and finally "upgraded" back to Windows 10.

The only good thing about Windows 11 is wslg, which provides out of the box support for Linux GUI apps (not available on Windows 10). But I can get the same result with an X server and some work.

[0] https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/wiki/All-features

userbinator12• 4 years ago

Also what's with the excessive rounded corners and slim selection padding?

The people who worked on the design use Macs. Seriously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

Sakos2• 4 years ago

When I first heard about this, everything that's ever bothered me about the Windows 8-10-11 evolution makes so much more sense. They're turning it into MacOS.

vxNsr2• 4 years ago

This is the most embarrassing thing I've ever read. That thread goes on to extoll the virtues of dogfooding, and its absolutely true.

I personally believe the reason that chrome/edge/firefox and apps in general have become so resource hungry is because all the devs have been given beefy machines to allow them to compile on-device and this has lead to the devs basically ignoring the app's resource budget. The ultimate "it works on my machine" shrug. imo windows OS and browser devs should be given i3s w/4gb of ram, let them optimize their code for that experience.

interstice• 4 years ago

I have a theory that the people who used the bar on the side and the people who turned the user metrics off are the same people (myself included). But I’m not sure how I feel about the results. In any case I hope shells like litestep make a comeback as a result of ever more hostile ui decisions, either that or everyone jumps ship entirely to put energy into making something else great.

khaledh2• 4 years ago

The problem is that Windows with all its warts now is still far ahead of the competition in that department (desktop GUI). Whether that's due to monopoly or being actually better, it doesn't matter. The fact is competition is almost non-existent.

moltke• 4 years ago

Reason driven decision making is better than data driven decision making.

TonyTrapp2• 4 years ago

I have a theory that the people who used the bar on the side and the people who turned the user metrics off are the same people (myself included)

I keep telemetry enabled in Firefox in the hope that they see that I use all of the features that they later remove anyway. It seems like nobody is using metrics to prove that it's not safe to remove a feature. Or they say "oh, it's only 1% of users using that feature", not realizing how much 1% really is.

neltnerb3• 4 years ago

It seems to frequently be true that Microsoft releases a horrifying nightmare OS, polishes is up and removes hated features, and then releases a new version. It's been a bit of a pattern.

Windows 8 -> Windows 10

Windows Vista -> Windows 7

and even before that:

Windows Me -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP was a pretty solid chain that shows it over three releases (personally I think XP was buggier, I don't know what the idea was there other than to make some more money?).

jonathanlydall• 4 years ago

Windows Me -> Windows 2000

This isn’t a transition which existed.

Windows ME didn’t get replaced by 2000, they were both released around the same time.

In terms of OS evolution, there were two separate branches, Windows NT and Windows 95.

On the 95 branch: 95 > 98 > ME > Discontinued

On the NT branch: NT 3.5 > NT 4 > 2000 > XP > Vista > 7 > 8 > 10 > 11

Non-business users were originally only ever on the 95 branch, then when it was discontinued they were transitioned to Windows XP, but the neutered home edition, which has been the model since.

Joeri• 4 years ago

Microsoft has a tick tock approach to consumer OS releases, where every other OS is “the good one”.

Windows me - bad

Windows xp - good

Windows vista - bad

Windows 7 - good

Windows 8 - bad

Windows 10 - good

Windows 11 - bad

For a bad release windows 11 is pretty good. This gives me hope that windows 12 will be their best ever.

This is why it would have been smart of them to stick to windows 10 like they planned, but like picking at a scab they just couldn’t let go of the idea of rearranging the deck chairs and rechristening the ship as windows 11.

vishnugupta2• 4 years ago

I really need to dig very deep into my memory; wasn't Windows ME kind of dead on arrival? And MS themselves half acknowledged it by releasing XP within a few months.

esalman• 4 years ago

I hate the Windows 11 taskbar and using ExplorerPatcher to revert to Windows 10 style. Thankfully ExplorerPatcher is yet to let me down. If it does happen I will probably switch to Chrome OS Flex.

wanda2• 4 years ago

no side taskbar

This is literally the first thing I do on a fresh install. What the hell were they thinking

start menu further ruined

but whyyyyyyyyyyyy

I honestly never had a problem with Microsoft Windows over its UI decisions until Windows 8.

Windows up to and including Windows 7 were actually ok, because you could put the start menu on the side, switch to classic UI, turn off the graphical embellishments that your shit laptop didn't like, and so on.

Windows 8 became very tabletified, but with options to switch to classic UI, and Windows 10 is the same but arguably a bit more bizarre.

Neither UI was really consistent or knew what it wanted to be, and worst of all, the user can't decide what it should be.

But whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

wanda2• 4 years ago

Errata:

    Windows 8 became very
    tabletified, but 
    with options...

should read:

    Windows 8 became very
    tabletified, but 
    without options...

anon19002• 4 years ago

As an engineer working at Microsoft in Windows, I 100% agree...it's just as frustrating seeing these from inside as well

(edit: from throwaway as a protective measure)

WithinReason• 4 years ago

Is it getting raised at meetings?

creakingstairs3• 4 years ago

Not working in MS but I would guess everyone knows about how bad it is. The problem is so colossal (technically and organisationally) thus no one person has the political capital to push for change.

It’s a kind of thing where the usual growth metrics “looks fine”, so it’s hard to justify big initiatives to fix it, yet everyone knows it’s broken. One day, those metrics will start looking bad and then they will try to fix it, but by then it would be too late.

anon19002• 4 years ago

Personally, I've advocated for many user-friendly scenarios only to get shutdown by "business decisions" higher up by folks who have been in Windows for 20+ years. The engineering culture inside of Windows, from my experience, is poor and not improving

markus_zhang• 4 years ago

I'm wondering who in the org has a bigger voice and from where he or she gets the political support?

robertwt72• 4 years ago

just wondering 1 thing.. is there anyone in microsoft that looks at the feedback hub or forum at least? They never seem to listen to ANY feedback..

userbinator12• 4 years ago

They do look at it. Just not to do what you'd expect with what they see... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954266

stg22• 4 years ago

Microsoft's OS business is a classic "cash cow". It's very big and very profitable, but has limited growth prospects and its revenue is currently growing at only single digit percentage points per year. Every MBA course teaches that the way to handle a cash cow is to milk as much profits from the users and spend as little money maintaining it as you can get away with. You do this to maximise the amount you have to invest in other, faster growing businesses that will be the future of the company, even if it causes long-term damage to the cash cow. MS have been milking their OS and Office businesses to fund their cloud and XBox businesses and, so far, it's a textbook example of the strategy succeeding; the cloud already brings in more revenue for MS than Windows and is still growing much faster than it.

The OS features that are getting attention, such as VS Code and WSL are ones that have synergy with the more important businesses and help them sell. Things like fixing the safari park of UI conventions don't have that synergy, so the resources that could improve them go to the other businesses. The ads and forced sign-ins are also part of this; in the long-term, they'll drive some users away from Windows, but right now, they funnel money and users to places that should matter more to the company in the long-term.

MS aren't listening to Windows feedback - and the internal feedback from people working on the product is usually part of it in these situations -, because what's good for Windows isn't what's good for MS.

ReaLNero2• 4 years ago

(Not a Microsoft employee) Even if you do have the feedback, is it worth fixing issues if your boss doesn't prioritize them, and you won't get promoted for it?

emmelaich• 4 years ago

Is Windows Professional relatively free from these shenanigans?

Or do we need to get Enterprise?

thombles2• 4 years ago

As far as I can see everything in the article applies in W11 Professional. It will be interesting, though, to see what happens when more big enterprises start piloting their upgrades to W11. The taskbar changes alone could cause mutinies in thousands of back office departments.

lucasyvas3• 4 years ago

These problems tend to work themselves out naturally - when you purposefully damage your user experience, you lose the early tech adopters that originally drove your product growth. They instead flock to a competitor that leaves you holding your bag of a shitty product.

There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what they want.

lordnacho• 4 years ago

I wish this was true, but there are a heck of a lot of office workers who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else.

You'll get a lot of resistance and rationalisation about why they don't think Linux or BSD or whatever isn't as good, and that the training time is better used to just work.

lucasyvas3• 4 years ago

You're not wrong, but office users should be locked to a browser in 2022 anyway. What do they need Windows for? They can all use a web browser.

Microsoft has done an amazing job convincing the office world they need Windows, when they don't need a single feature that it provides in 99% of cases.

userbinator12• 4 years ago

who have grown up with Windows and can never be trained to use anything else.

When Windows itself is changing so much that it hardly resembles what it used to be, there's going to be a lot of relearning anyway.

On the other hand, you can make Linux look like any version of Windows if you really wanted to.

creakingstairs3• 4 years ago

That’s true but the new generation have grown up with (for better or worse) web/apps. Once they are the main workforce, they will be much less reluctant to switch to whatever OS.

jasonjayr2• 4 years ago

My kid just graduated high school last year.

She would tell me stories about how impressed her peers were with seeing her do something as basic as copy and paste, and navigating files + folders.

There is a generation of kids that have only ever grown up on tablets + the web, so; the desktop + office app market + ecosystem is ripe for disruption.

Maybe it's done right this time, and not married to a single browser version(ha) or platform runtime.

tcmart1410• 4 years ago

I don't think pleasing tech adopters is what help windows at this point. Maybe 20 year ago, sure. Today, most consumers of Windows that are not business/enterprise, are probably doing it more so because that was the defacto OS for them when they were in grade school, and it has been the defacto OS on most computers sub $1K. We are seeing some market shift to chrome OS and there is probably a good future where Chrome OS displaces Windows massively. If it does, it won't be because of tech adopters and such. It will be because Chrome OS is what is gaining popularity for kids in school and they will grow up being used to.

Edit: Defacto above meaning, when I go into best buy, that is what is pre-loaded. Or I go to walmart, that is what comes on the computer.

Edit: 'there is probably a good future where Chrome OS' typo or poor wording. Meant to say something along the lines of, 'there is probably a good chance that a Chrome OS future happens'

Espressosaurus• 4 years ago

If you think Chrome OS is going to save you, you haven't been paying attention to Google for the past 10 years.

skoskie4• 4 years ago

Add MacOS to the list. The continued crippling of the OS for power users keeps pushing us toward the iOS experience, and it’s killing me. I can’t see details of my own log files for privacy reasons. The new Finder design is just awful and accomplished nothing for all the change. Now I learn I can’t make hardlinks for directories on APFS. The list goes on.

GekkePrutser14• 4 years ago

Yes, I moved away too. So much dumbing down, so many things changed just for the sake of it. And of course no settings to revert it. Eventually it was just too annoying to upgrade.

A lot of it is security hardening but the problem is I have to give all control to Apple. There is no way for me to change anything in the read only OS part without the whole rigmarole of booting into recovery mode and blessing my changes with every update. There should be a way I can sign my own changes. It's the Apple way or the highway. And I'm running into more and more issues when the Apple way is just not good enough for me.

I'm really so happy with having options again with KDE. No more opinionated software for me.

astrange2• 4 years ago

You can’t make hardlinks to directories on any other file system either.

pkrumins• 4 years ago

Windows has to revert back to Windows 2000 when it was usable.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

Maybe the personal desktop idea has done its time and they can't find ways to motivate hard work for the reducing profits.

riskable• 4 years ago

No. It's just reached the point where organic growth is all that's possible. This leaves Microsoft no choice other than the turn their users into the product in order to increase revenue.

It's a GOOD thing! The more people that migrate off of Windows the better the world will be because then companies can (hopefully) focus their software development on non-closed, cross-platform ecosystems.

Microsoft is long overdue for a market correction. Hopefully the OS market will diversify, bringing a cambrian explosion of life into the market.

grishka3• 4 years ago

Why do I get redirected to https://den.dev/ukraine? This isn't a good idea.

edit: https://archive.ph/q8ayE

art3m• 4 years ago

Agree. Those tricky Ukrainians become annoying

grishka3• 4 years ago

Yes, I'm Russian. No, I don't support what's happening right now and I stand with Ukraine. No, I can't do anything about it. Now get out of the way and let me read the article.

These performative acts of shoving politics where it doesn't belong doesn't do anything to change the situation, they just make people like me angry.

gruez4• 4 years ago

Because virtue signaling. I'm not saying this to de-legitimize the "russia is bad" message, but the fact is, in instances like this (eg. a personal blog) such actions are far more about benefiting the person performing the action (ie. setting up the ukraine message) than it is actually about getting russia to stop.

isanengineer• 4 years ago

Does anyone have any insight into how much benefit MSFT actually gets from these decisions? I understand that the intent is to 'make line go up', but as a simpler user I can't really imagine how telemetry and shilling OneDrive actually leads to meaningful revenue growth. On the other hand, people have been loudly complaining about this since the Windows 7 days, and I imagine that there must be some reason they're doubling down on such an unpopular strategy.

after_care• 4 years ago

I can't really imagine how telemetry and shilling OneDrive actually leads to meaningful revenue growth.

Microsoft’s ad revenue is $10B (1). Allowing advertisers to send ads based on user profiles is a major feature of digital advertising. Collecting telemetry data improves the user profiling.

These types of changes have a direct positive impact on one of Microsoft’s fastest growing revenue stream. This will lead to meaningful revenue growth.

(1) https://digiday.com/media/microsofts-ad-revenue-hit-10b-and-...

hnthrowaway03157• 4 years ago

I'd argue that once a movement has been installed it's very difficult to rule it out unless someone on the board can PROVE that it hurts revenue. This kind of decision (UI designers overriding anyone else) probably comes from a middle manager who has top support, the exact reason why it is impossible to un-stuck such decisions. Think Apple, you have to get X out before you can unstuck his/her decisions. That's politics.

intern4tional• 4 years ago

Former MSFT here. People tend to think of Microsoft as one unified company with a unified strategy.

That is not the case, its best thought of as a batch of little companies that band together to create a product. These companies may compete for resources and attention internally and so each one will optimize for their own benefit.

Ads in Edge? That's probably a decision made by some Principal Program Manager with director support on the browser team. The metrics that get tracked for that event are likely how many people click through the ad, rather than the over all impact to the OS.

The OS Core team doesn't have the influence to say no, or stop the browser from showing those ads. I recall internally when I (a paying customer for O365) got a toast (that is what a popup ad is called internally) for O365 and I decided to raise an issue.

Some PM II (mid-level PM was running the campaign, and they were showing metrics that more people signed up for O365 as a result of the campaign, so per them it was good. I was not in that organization and since that director had OKRs that required signups, he told me to go away.

The core OS stripped down has none of these things, but at integrated build, lots of stuff gets put in, and when one team says no to something, often another one will say yes. A good example is that Office has its own update infrastructure and tooling outside of Windows Update. Why? Office wanted to deliver updates on weekly basis and Windows Update said no as that would be too impacting for users, so Office simply said ok and built their own.

These issues rarely if ever get surfaced to an executive, as by the time the metrics get up to a CVP generally they are showing broader trends, like adoption, or game breaking bugs, or as you note, the line going up. Executives do not get these problems (such as inconsistent UI) to them. Those things rarely rise above a Group PM or Engineering Manager level, and those people often do not care about the complaint as for that metric helps them or is part of their strategy.

Windows, the product team cannot do anything about it due to political problems internally at MS and that is not the engineering team behind Window's fault. We (as that was a team I was on) hated when a product team would do something obnoxious and if we could catch it prior to release would often bluntly complain. More often than not we would get told that we were the platform and to stay out of the other teams business.

Anyways, there isn't some mass company dark pattern strategy or other conspiracy, just a bunch of little factions that are all optimizing for their own interests. Office is probably the worst offender of the batch (Skype, Teams, OneDrive) and Windows can do little about it.

yuuta• 4 years ago

Windows 7 is the last version made by Microsoft as a software company. Starting from Windows 8, Microsoft became a cloud company, pushing users all these craps.

rbut2• 4 years ago

Talking about dark patterns, here are a couple I've noticed.

In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account.

Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me they are syncing all my browser history to their servers for my benefit..

It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.

_Algernon_3• 4 years ago

Looks like switching to linux when win 7 support ended was the right move.

All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason, but at least I don't have to deal with that BS.

McAtNite• 4 years ago

I’m desperately wishing for Valve to have success with the Deck so that Linux gets better attention from game devs. The last Windows machine in my environment is exclusively for PC games, and I honestly can’t wait to install Linux over it.

foerbert• 4 years ago

Really? I made the same move (or at least finished it 100%) at the same time, and that's not a problem I've ever seen.

Some (surprisingly few, actually) don't perform well under Wine/Proton, or at all, but random freezing I've never seen. And certainly not all of my games.

creakingstairs3• 4 years ago

I can’t wait for Proton to get better so I can ditch Windows for good. I know it’s already really good and it will run for most of the game I play, but I do like to dabble in competitive online or AAA once in a while :(

mobilio• 4 years ago

I do this switch 13 years ago just before 7 was released to macOS.

So mine last Windows was XP.

seanp2k26• 4 years ago

I've had the freezes happen when my nvidia drivers weren't properly installed and when the kernel wasn't using the nvidia DKMS modules. glxgears should run super fast at a consistent framerate. Check out https://gist.github.com/wangg12/c69b56272eaeed1aba9515d19f55...

nwallin• 4 years ago

All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason,

All?

My experience is that 90% work fine, 9% have weirdness, (for instance, voices in Skyrim are out of sync with mouth movements) and 1% of them have game breaking bugs.

Zardoz84• 4 years ago

I made Kubuntu my main OS a long time ago, and I play a lot of (thanks to Valve, Steam, Wine and Proton...) games, and I never experienced a game freezing. My experience it's so good, that I only touch Windows to play Fornite.

The only annoying bug/problem that I have actually, it's that Dolphin could have a erratic behavior if I had mounted a SMB folder via an VPN and I end the VPN before un-mounting the SMB folder.

rkagerer• 4 years ago

Stayed on Win7 in hopes MS would get their sh*t figured out by now. Looks increasingly like my next PC will need to be Linux and some VM's.

simion314• 4 years ago

All my games may randomly freeze for no discernible reason,

Could be a GPU thermal issue, happens to me with old games that have no FPS limit, then the GPU does so much work that it hangs for some reason(Nvidia GT970), I am not sure if is my GPU broken/dusty, the driver bugged or Xorg, Windows users only see a game crash not a full system crash.

Silhouette8• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how that sort of behaviour isn't a clear violation of all kinds of privacy laws in 2022.

userbinator12• 4 years ago

I'm sure it was specified somewhere in the EULA that you were forced to agree to long ago while installing the OS. It's been a while since I've looked at it too, but I believe there's a clause in there that also permits them to change it at any time without telling you.

thow-58d4e8b• 4 years ago

Just because a criminal hasn't been caught and sentenced doesn't mean they didn't commit the crime

jart4• 4 years ago

That whole thing with Edge has got to be the biggest information heist in the history of the software industry. Everyone on Windows basically woke up one morning and Microsoft was like, greetings, we've backed up your hard drive to our cloud. Always do your work in a terminal folks!

mikevin• 4 years ago

It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.

I'm not even sure it's possible, I've tried multiple approaches but gave up after almost having to do a clean install.

Now I have to deal with an accountname that contains multiple characters that make WSL interactions with the windows paths a game of Russian roulette with shell quoting bullets.

chillwaves• 4 years ago

Can't you just make a new local admin account and delete all traces of the other account, including in the registry?

hef198985• 4 years ago

Oh, I installed two OSes last year: Ubuntu on my then daily driver (it still is my private one) and a clean Windows ten on my son's laptop. That used to be my old back-up and had my old company account on it, in addition to his school teams account. I tried to convert it to a local admin and throw his educational MS Office license on it. It ended with buying a second market Win10 license (I bought two, only one worked) and a clean, new install. Everything else just failed. I'll never use a MS Account for anything again.

That expends to MS Office subscriptions as well. I once bought one through (stupid, I know) GoDaddy as an extension to my domain mail service. It never worked, not once. I still paid for it, so. The user account didn't even exist on MS's end. Only way to get rid of it was to cancel the credit card behind it. MS stopped bothering me after two months of unpaid subscriptions...

nyuszika7h• 4 years ago

Now I have to deal with an accountname that contains multiple characters that make WSL interactions with the windows paths a game of Russian roulette with shell quoting bullets.

Really? For me, when I install Windows with a Microsoft account, it makes my username just something like "nyusz" rather than "nyuszika7h".

Geenirvana2• 4 years ago

I do not mind logging into a Microsoft account however the most bizarre situation happened to me very recently.

I will occasionally log into my personal Microsoft account when accessing a Microsoft website when I am on Lunch to work on some personal projects.

At work last week, I was upgraded to Office 365 and as a result I started downloading the latest versions and trying it out in various ways. One of these was upgrading my old OneNote into the latest version (2013 -> 365)

Saturday morning, I booted up my own different PC at home and notice in the "Recommended" section on the Windows 11 start menu "Work 365". This is the name of the OneNote I created at work when I upgraded the document. I do not even have Office on my own PC. Hovering over it would show that it was located in my Works One Drive folder.

I must have been logged into my personal account on OneNote and it somehow meta-data? links it between the work and personal accounts.

I am now in process of removing all traces of my personal account from Windows on my work laptop as the very last thing I want to happen is to see personal files appearing in the Recommended section of my works laptop!

dustinmoris2• 4 years ago

Wow that is CREEPY AF and very very scary. This is an instant reason to never use Windows because I'd be so scared that I'd leak personal/private data to other people's computers. The really fucking scary thing is that even we both as power users who understand computers, the internet and how things work are even extremely vulnerable to those hostile dark patterns in Windows that less tech savvy family members would be absolute prey to those Microsoft hyenas. There is NO WAY that anyone in my family will ever use a Windows or Microsoft device. It will be iPhones and Macs for them for the rest of their lives.

unhammer• 4 years ago

In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft

and then you try to look at a picture of your kids but it's a HEIC file from an iPhone so Windows says you have to go to the Store and download Microsoft HEVC decoder which for some reason wasn't bundled with Windows but hey it's just a dollar oh that's nearly free we just need your credit card details and e-mail and make a user account and would you like a free newsletter with that LOOK OVER THERE whileweswitchdefaultbrowsers and check out what else is on sale today

alexklark• 4 years ago

But who needs HEVC, when you have 3D objects.

CraigJPerry• 4 years ago

Used to be able to get around this charge by using this link https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/p/hevc-video-extensions-from...

Not sure it’s possible anymore though or what an alternative might be now.

tored• 4 years ago

The future of operating systems will be of microtransactions and loot boxes.

- Oh, you want to format your hard drive? Purchase in store :-)

- Checkout our file utilities bundle, 50% off today!

- Congratulations on formatting your hard drive, here is a free loot box!

- Share your hard drive formatting experience with our award winning app instaclip!

- Subscribe to our feed and give us a thumbs up!

stonemetal12• 4 years ago

Maybe I am being silly about it but Minecraft just migrated from mojang accounts to MS accounts. I am worried they are going to pull these sort of hijinks with that.

zerkten• 4 years ago

It gets more complicated than that. Imagine having to sign into the machine with a work (AAD) account. Potentially, your machine can be taken over and bound to AAD policies operated by IT at the same time it's connected to a personal account. Very messy.

dm319• 4 years ago

Wow, I feel like that goes beyond a dark pattern and strays into unconsensual abuse (excuse the truism). I feel like a dark pattern persuades and tricks you into doing something, but won't outright do something without your consent. Reminds me of when Linked In did that thing where it sent unsolicited emails after getting access to your address book.

vstollen• 4 years ago

It's mind boggling how user-hostile one can make a piece of "premium" software.

You pay 145€ for the Home or 259€ for the Pro Edition and they treat it like it's freeware.

I want my computer to support me in achieving what I want to do, but Windows just keeps grabbing attention with intrusive ads and never-ending notifications.

userbinator12• 4 years ago

For many, it was a "free upgrade".

TowerTall• 4 years ago

I bought 1 pro license for Windows 8. I have used that key ever since. Countless virtual machines and reinstall / hardware upgrade has accepted that key the past 10 years.

IshKebab• 4 years ago

Yeah I think the issue is that for most people it is freeware. Very few consumers are actually paying €145 for Windows. They might have got Windows 7 with their PC (I believe the actual cost is around $10) a literal decade ago and paid nothing since.

I can see why Microsoft are trying to explore other revenue sources. If they give Windows away they make a huge loss but if they charge for upgrades nobody will upgrade and it will become a support nightmare.

lostgame• 4 years ago

We used to call seeing ads in Windows ‘adware’. Now we just call it ‘Windows’.

I’m dead serious - unless you have a specific business reason like most do to use this POS, I can’t imagine anyone actually choosing to use Windows over the alternatives. What a seriously awful piece of software.

ncmncm4• 4 years ago

Windows does what Microsoft wants. Period. Public discussion is just noise. Even more so, Apple.

If you want a computing environment that is responsive to your needs, you need to step away from products of those autocratic organizations.

unsupp0rted2• 4 years ago

What Apple wants and what I want seems to intersect about 95% of the time, at least in terms of phones and laptops.

Mainly what I want is to not think about my tools at all, and just pick them up or put them down whenever the need arises, without worrying about whether I'm making a secret catastrophic error or that my tools are pretending to be my tools, while actually their master is somebody else.

I gladly sacrifice control to Apple the same way I sacrifice control to my doctor or to my sanitation engineer, or, if I had a car, to my car manufacturer.

I'm not a teenager exploring the universe of options anymore. Now I just want to get from point A to point B.

ncmncm4• 4 years ago

In my experience, Apple customers mostly just convince themselves that they must want whatever it is Apple chooses to offer at the moment. This is most easily seen whenever the new version of an Apple product arrives, lacking a feature they had relied on. They immediately set to work persuading themselves they can make do without that.

userbinator12• 4 years ago

This menu is familiar to me because that’s what the Windows API allows you to create (as long as you are not creating it through Windows Forms.) There is no dark theme for this, but at least there are rounded corners.

That is just a huge WTF. Since the very earliest versions of Windows there has always been the option of a dark (or white, or rainbow, or ...) theme, where you could adjust the colours and sizes and fonts, and everything using Win32 would follow it. Here's Win95 example:

https://64.media.tumblr.com/6d3e8c64cd9a38e70d24c0b1b2c73cb5...

Yet if I'm understanding correctly, in Win11 that stopped working completely? It really sounds like the Windows team has no one left who knows what used to be possible but isn't anymore, being replaced with probably younger developers making constant excuses to "modernise" by rewriting and breaking stuff. To use an analogy, they're not just reinventing the wheel but making it square.

8note3• 4 years ago

Mind you, at the same time, there's fewer and fewer users for those old features, so why should they be priority vs the people who are just starting to pick up a computer?

wildrhythms4• 4 years ago

The author is pointing out that the context menu style applied through Microsoft's own software GUI framework is inconsistent with the style applied by the rest of the OS. What 'old feature' are you referring to?

dend10• 4 years ago

Ah, but you see - there is a difference in how theming works in Windows 11, in that it's different from the high-contrast mode. So, you can get a control that swaps the theme to high-contrast (you need to use the native Windows API for that), but you can't get one that works with the Windows 11 style of dark theme out-of-the-box without re-writing it from zero.

userbinator12• 4 years ago

In other words, they decided to rewrite the theme stuff while neglecting to realise that there's existing code (which they mostly broke around the time of Win8 by removing the Appearance control panel...) that would do what they wanted.

I'm in agreement with the others here that Windows 2000 was probably the peak of consistent UI in Windows. XP didn't really regress but added bitmap-style skinning to the elements, and up until 7 the Windows Classic theme was fully customisable. In Win8 they removed that, and it's been a clear downhill from there.

sgjohnson8• 4 years ago

To use an analogy, they're not just reinventing the wheel but making it square.

And then rounding the corners of the said ”wheel” :)

flukus• 4 years ago

In practice it stopped working well long before windows 11 because so few apps were win32 based and/or because developers would explicitly override the theme. I gave it a go on Windows 7 and even apps like outlook and office wouldn't look right.

Gnome/KDE still offer proper themeing that works with proper native apps but even there you've got web browsers and electron apps that ignore it.

eek2121• 4 years ago

Going to disagree. I will agree once Apple allows you to ungroup windows of the same application in the dock. Until then, I will use Windows + WSL2 as my core development system.

Sure, Apple has a different workflow. Pro-Apple peeps insist I should 'learn it'. Why? I know the Apple workflow. In my eyes, it is inferior to the one offered by Windows, and KDE on Linux. Everyone has their opinions of course. I respect people who can get stuff done on a Mac, but I'm not one of those people. I grew up on MS-DOS, Linux, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, 2000, etc. I'm left-handed and use alternative inputs.

I also don't care about the UX design. It's a step above Windows 10, that is all that matters.

Both Apple AND Microsoft could learn a ton of stuff from each other. For Apple: Don't dictate user workflows. For Microsoft, consistency is key.

That is all.

pthread_t• 4 years ago

KDE on Linux

Have you tried other desktop environments on linux?

hpcjoe2• 4 years ago

I will use Windows + WSL2 as my core development system.

Glutton for punishment I see. Seriously, I used WSL2 under Win10 for a year as a (very) poor man's linux for $dayjob. Recently switched to a Mac. I do keep pressing on getting Linux laptops, having run them for work for the last 22+ years ...

WSL2 is garbage. Pure and simple. Even on an 8 core 16 thread 64 GB monster with Nvidia graphics. My view on it is that it is an attempt by MSFT to staunch the flow of developers off their platform. To say "hey, see, we do linux within windows". But then you use it. And get bitten in the behind, repeatably, by the memory compaction bit, even after tuning the overall memory usage of WSL2.

I was able to get a rough linux desktop by using MobaXterm, single root display, and then running Xfce4 (which I had to build myself, as our corporate approved WSL2 distro was/is broken in so ... so many ways). This setup regularly crashed WSL2, and often windows.

When I mentioned this in various fora, windows fans claim that the OS isn't buggy, it must be the hardware. Many BSOD, many hangs, crashes, etc. Couldn't be the OS. Had to be hardware. Or drivers.

Yeah. About that.

thekyle• 4 years ago

allows you to ungroup windows of the same application in the dock

I believe that feature was also recently removed in Windows 11

lxe• 4 years ago

Windows 11 adds another layer of chrome on top of 10, 8, 7, XP, and 98/95. All the code is there. I also see Firefox having the same issue albeit at a much smaller extent -- lots of legacy screens and maybe even some XUL.

Borgz• 4 years ago

It was a bit odd to have a section criticizing UI inconsistencies followed by a section criticizing Microsoft for fixing those UI inconsistencies in Notepad and Task Manager.

dend10• 4 years ago

As I mentioned in the blog post - both Notepad and Task Manager aren't that inconsistent with the rest of the OS. Notepad is just a giant text box. Task Manager is a compact, tabbed view (tabs didn't go anywhere in the latest version of Windows) that now became Fluent-ified and in the process now looks very wasteful of vertical space.

Above all, I think the problem is in priorities - Notepad and Task Manager _should_ be consistent with the OS. But when so much focus is assigned to those instead of the core pieces of the OS, it's fair to start raising some questions.

ripley128• 4 years ago

when so much focus is assigned to those instead of the core pieces of the OS

Do you have any evidence that Notepad and Task Manager required "so much focus"?

The new Notepad's about as bare-bones as the old Notepad, it just happens to use XAML Islands for the UI. It would be surprising if it significantly detracted from other efforts.

anonymousiam• 4 years ago

Complaining about Windows UX inconsistency sort of misses the point that the OS and the windowing system should be separate. The function of an OS is not to manage windows, it is to provide an abstraction layer between the applications and the hardware.

Stevvo• 4 years ago

It is called Windows, the name does suggest that the product is more than a kernel.

tcmart1410• 4 years ago

I think your argument is valid for something Linux where you can actually decouple those things. Technically, it is still true for windows, but practically it isn't. What you get from Microsoft is a complete OS without any officially sanctioned way to decouple the OS part (kernel and perhaps a few critical user land utils) and windowing system.

frosted-flakes• 4 years ago

That's, just your opinion, man.

wenmoon• 4 years ago

windows is great (/s) for having multiple areas with the same settings like regular "Control Panel Mouse" and "Mouse and Keyboard" and "Gaming"

as a user it makes getting help when something is not working (which is often) very difficult and borderline impossible

not to mention completely infuriating

if i could boot directly into a launcher for my games i would do it in a heartbeat. get the OS out of my way please

eyelidlessness3• 4 years ago

I’m not a Windows user and I know this is not a popular opinion, but… I really wish Windows 8 had been better received. Sure it was a huge break from Win<8. But it was a bold, thoughtful and thorough one, with a lot of potential. Refining Metro but ultimately sticking to its core ideas would almost certainly have produced a better Windows experience overall than the basically incoherent changes which followed.

nyanpasu642• 4 years ago

I'm convinced Windows 8 is a better tablet OS than 10. I don't know if it's a better desktop OS.

eyelidlessness3• 4 years ago

It wasn’t a better desktop OS, but it was a just as good desktop OS with potential to become a better one.

tonyedgecombe4• 4 years ago

What I don't understand is why they decided to shoehorn Windows onto their tablets instead of the Windows Phone OS. Windows phone was well received, it would have made far more sense. Apple could see that wasn't going to work, why couldn't Microsoft.

jenscow2• 4 years ago

Well, you're right about one thing,

I know this is not a popular opinion

eyelidlessness3• 4 years ago

I also wish the Zune and Windows Phone had succeeded. I’m not very good at gambling either. It’s good to recognize one’s strengths or lack thereof :)

lamontcg• 4 years ago

I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues

That probably isn't a good thing. Not without firing up some kind of explicit emulator.

hpcjoe2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I read that, and wondered if that is a real justification for, well, anything.

I have and can run Linux binaries I had compiled (statically) from the late 90s. Doesn't mean that I should. If you are running ancient games, run them on the ancient OS.

Using this as a reason to dismiss Mac and Linux? Not the best thought out argument. Kinda makes the opposite point than the author intended.

Sugimot0• 4 years ago

Also with package managers like Nix you can install older versions of a program along with that program's corresponding dependencies at the corresponding version and so on. It's not baked-in to unix but things like this are made easier on unix and I think that's where the sauce is.

wolpoli5• 4 years ago

Windows 11 looks great in screenshots, but when I actually try to use it, it was terrible.

I tried to move a file in Explorer using the context menu and I couldn't confidently tell Cut/Copy/Rename icons apart because they are just abstract lines that represents the file operation.

I started looking at ways to get the original Context Menu back, and then I just decided to rollback to Windows 10.

Sophistifunk• 4 years ago

All of these gripes are valid. And none of them aside from the new actively-evil stuff in 10 and 11 like telemetry can ever be fixed, because all of this poorly-matched stuff is exactly why almost all old Windows software (apart from games, that's just a lie thanks to DRM and GPU vendors) still run.

hnthrowaway03157• 4 years ago

Windows 11 is probably the last straw that pushes me to Linux. I'm still using Windows 10 on my Lenovo 470S laptop, but my next one is going to be a Linux one. I still have to keep a Windows gig somewhere to play old school games but that's pretty much all I need.

I'll also try to avoid any job that requires MS Office. Nowadays I have to "Save as" to easily navigate to a local folder, otherwise it takes quite a few steps to move away from the OneDrive default folder. Windows 10 is bad enough, but whatever I heard about 11 seems to be much worse.

MSFT has made the decision to suck money on Cloud, which is fine. I'd like to remind you not to fall into the WSL trap. Use a standalone Linux instead. Once you are getting used to WSL you are probably getting sucked into Windows anyway.

barbs3• 4 years ago

Out of curiosity, what games do you play? Would wine and/or a virtual machine suffice?

hnthrowaway03157• 4 years ago

I actually play a lot of old school games so 1) Dosbox solves a lot of them and 2) Never tried that but maybe Wine solves the rest.

A list of freq games:

1) Baldur's Gate EE Trilogy (And their EE cousins)

2) Quake I (this I'm sure can be played in Linux directly)

3) Diablo 2 (Also think there is a Linux version, they even have a MacOS one)

That's pretty much it, and TBH I don't really play them frequently, maybe a few times a week? So yeah I can probably move into Linux right now, and the only "obstacle" is that I removed most bullshits from Windows 10 Pro and it is now usable, so I'm kinda lazy to change. On the other side, since I want to learn sys programming, that's some incentive to move to Linux...

keithnz• 4 years ago

I don't mind the UX so much, its pretty good for the most, I'd probably put any gripes I had at the bottom of the list.

But 100% agree that they have got to kill treating windows as a marketing channel to advertise and arbitrarily making edge hard to customize to avoid being pushed the Microsoft narrative. Telemetry I'm not as concerned about, but it should be easy to turn off, and it should ask you before using windows if you want to turn it off. I'd leave it on. But obscuring this stuff just loses peoples trust. Trust is the battleground at the moment, google, facebook, apple, microsoft are really burning their bridges in this area. You don't get that back easily, people are still angry at Microsoft for stuff they did 3 decades ago.

robertwt72• 4 years ago

having both mac and PC (windows), it is honestly very frustrating to see how significant small bugs are there when it is launched. I found myself constantly trying to raise my voice in microsoft but don't know where to go. Simple things such as task manager and file explorer are super laggy. I'm not sure how does the PM / QA approve that when they launch?

At least in apple, it just works, I don't think I've ever felt super frustrated that I feel like I want to find a way to report a bug. Sure they've got a feedback form / assistant that may or may not be answered as well, but I don't remember the last time I want to report something in apple. Community forum is good, apple support is 1 click away for hardware related. You just feel the definition of "it just works".

Sure its hard to manage 2 of the biggest tech companies in the world. but when will MS ever learn?

perryizgr8• 4 years ago

I fully understand the need to express support or condemnation for any popular worldwide topic, but why did they have to make it persistent? The bottom bar is so annoying on this site.

dend10• 4 years ago

Thank you for the note. Because the worldwide topic touches directly on me and my family, I've decided that this was the right approach for my own blog.

hsnewman• 4 years ago

RIP windows.

Havoc• 4 years ago

That’s ok - my computer still thinks it isn’t TPM capable.

So it seems that craziness will save me from the other MS craziness

LegitShady2• 4 years ago

I have been a relatively happy windows 10 user since its release. Lots of small issues but overall very solid and no serious concerns.

Windows 11 doesn't seem to justify its existence in any way, and since the decision to require a microsoft account, I've decided I won't be upgrading to Windows 11 for any reason.

When windows 10 reaches EOL I will find an alternative. If its osx, ok. If its linux, ok. But Microsoft seems to continue to make their product worse and worse and pretend they're upgrades.

mberning• 4 years ago

I ponied up for a win11 pro license so I could run the ARM version in Parallels on my M1 mini. All this just to run an old piece of CAD software. If it weren’t the M1 I’d still be running that CAD software in a Win7 VM. Microsoft is living well of of similar scenarios all across the world. It’s terrible within the enterprise. It starts off with the premise that people need windows desktops and laptops. Then it turns into you need AD. Now you need an AD team with half a dozen engineers and even more severs in your “forest” Now you need exchange. Hire a team for that. Might as well get teams too. And so on and so forth. Then accommodating all of these shitty Microsoft products has you paying millions of dollars in engineer salaries and even more in licensing costs. And every year MS just keeps bending you over with worse software and higher costs. Some day enterprise customers will get tired of supporting all this crap and start making long term decisions to reduce their reliance on windows on the desktop and therefore this leviathan of bullshit that infests their organization.

throwaway22032• 4 years ago

For about ten years now I've only used Windows for rare tasks I can't do on Linux.

Slowly I've just stopped doing those things until eventually, now, we're talking like, a dual boot I use a couple of times a year for things like running exam software or whatever.

Why would they change a winning recipe? Millions (billions) are perfectly happy with their shit sandwiches.

rr808• 4 years ago

I have always used Windows, but the reasons to are really going away. I mostly just use browsers and IntellJ, even Linux can do that.

artificialLimbs2• 4 years ago

I stopped playing Minecraft recently again. I first quit a few years ago, but wanted to show it to my young son. Trying to go back and EVEN JUST INSTALL it now is filled with Microsoft-ian circles of login catastrophe and "upgrade your account" nightmares.

The installation process was so difficult, I will never play again.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

Minetest scratches that itch pretty well, open source and no MS nonsense.

taneq• 4 years ago

Was going to mention Minetest, we’ve been running a family mineclone2 server for a couple of months now and it’s been great.

jasonjayr2• 4 years ago

I've been playing the same Minetest SMP server for 5+ years now. Minetest is pretty good, the engine is C++ but the game world is defined via lua.

There are some quirks that will drive hard-code Minecraft players nuts, but it's not that bad overall, especially if you like the building aspect of MC.

MereInterest• 4 years ago

As somebody who started playing back in alpha, it's amazing how many user-hostile changes have been made. Needing to transfer accounts multiple times, finding the cross-platform Java version among all the various Windows-only or mobile only versions, finding out that the account had been archived years ago.

And that's not even getting into the mess that is the licensing that was Minecraft Alpha. That was changed even before Microsoft took over, when lawyers took one look at the license and realized that players getting "all future versions" [0] would include any sequels, spin-offs, platform ports, etc.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20101214061702/http://notch.tumb...

wincy• 4 years ago

I lost my Minecraft alpha account apparently because I was allowed to “activate” Minecraft VR in the oculus store rather than the Microsoft Store. I sold my oculus and it’s impossible to launch Minecraft in the Oculus store without a VR headset, despite it being the full game!

martinmakesgame• 4 years ago

Use multimc.org. When the launcher changed to a microsoft app we moved to using the multimc launcher. It has far more predicatable and reliable behaviour than what microsoft is offering

grumpyprole• 4 years ago

I tried to play Minecraft with my kids yesterday. It forced us to migrate accounts, but after clicking lots of buttons, the presumably final Microsoft account creation part just hung and wouldn't finish. My kids were like "By why can't we just play? We paid for it!". They couldn't understand why "Microsoft accounts" were even needed for local network play. Neither can I.

pjettter2• 4 years ago

I still don't understand what a "Microsoft Account" IS. Is it Hotmail? I know what an Apple Id is! And it just works!

kleene_op• 4 years ago

Same experience with my youngest sister.

I bought her a Minecraft account via my Microsoft one, getting her the necessary permission for multiplayer took an hour to do so, parsing through cryptic microsoft documentation which essentially consists of a maze of links that loop back to pages you already visited.

The funny thing is that one of my brother told me before I started that I could just download the pirated client, that way I wouldn't have to pay for Minecraft for the 938th time and the pirated client just works out of the box contrary to the official version.

It'd been years since I had to interact with anything Microsoft, I thought he was exagerating. What a shock when I realized pirates actually do a better job than MS at making their own products accessible.

ridgered4• 4 years ago

I've really been dreading the Microsoft account switch for Minecraft, which I run only on linux. Is it going to demand my phone number? A credit card (even though I already own the game)? I have no idea and I don't want to give them any of those things.

hoosieree• 4 years ago

I tried to use a different email address to sign in to Windows from the one associated with my Minecraft purchase, and what a nightmare that was.

Spent hours flailing with the Xbox store, Microsoft store, Mojang and Minecraft accounts, resetting passwords, etc. Eventually got it to work but I have no idea what fixed it.

e40• 4 years ago

A year or so ago my son tried to activate his Minecraft account. He gave up. Said it was days and days of hell and he was really upset.

EDIT:

Reminds me of what happened years earlier when we turned on our XBOX and had to update. Basically, it took an entire day of logic loops in the login/verification system, which required several hours of being on the phone with MS.

It was a forced upgrade, so otherwise we would have ignored it.

So, this Minecraft stuff is nothing new for MS.

neltnerb3• 4 years ago

I've been using Linux for 21 years. I currently have to deal with maintaining specialty software for 50+ computers.

From everything I've seen I dread upgrading to Windows 11 only slightly less than just figuring out how to convert it all to work on Linux somehow. I imagine like everyone I will put it off until the last possible second.

No need to reply about how you can do everything on Linux now, until wine works perfectly with $100k equipment that only works with Windows software from 2004 100% of the time it's too risky ;-)

The point is that I understand how much of a pain it would be to convert to using Linux and still think it could potentially be worth it compared to upgrading to Windows 11. I would never consider it at all if it was just an OS instead of an experience... what are the odds that the software works on Windows 11 perfectly anyway, my experience going from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was pretty miserable and that was 3 years after Windows 10 was standard.

IceHegel• 4 years ago

I can't stand the ads. I feel like a sucker whenever I use windows for games, like I'm just there so the computer can extract something from me.

fmakunbound• 4 years ago

What you’re seeing there in Windows is a two-dimensional, stylized representation of the bloody turf battles between business units within Microsoft. Most recently adtech has entered the battle and seem to be really killing it.

astrea• 4 years ago

This is the only comment that needs to be on this post. Microsoft has been designing-by-committee Windows much to the chagrin of their users for years. I don't know the last time I was truly excited for a release.

Loughla2• 4 years ago

I don't know the last time I was truly excited for a release.

Honestly, and I know it's a joke because of the very nerd-tastic dancing, but it was for this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkuJXGldrM

grogenaut• 4 years ago

The only thing keeping me on windows at this point is getting all 5 of my monitors to work under Linux with my 3090 and 2080ti. The only other issue was fusion 360 but someone fixed that.

user_7832• 4 years ago

You know, for an operating system that's meant for an average user and not a tech-savy person (that most of us likely are), Windows 11 is fine if you strictly use the basic features. But if the average person of my dad's generation had a start tile, and clicked on windows on the left... they'd have no idea what's going on.

A lot of this appears to be changed just for the sake of it. What I don't understand is - it takes effort to change something. Why not keep the basics the way they are? Start tiles got a reskin I think 2 years ago, and while it changed the visual look (positively) it kept it functionally identical. The current changes... are not. Despite windows being the OS I'm most familiar with, I'm quite certain I'm going to go Linux with wine/proton after Win10 EOL (2025 iirc) - almost every Win11 article gives more reason to hate it, despite me wanting to love it. I'm setting up a server and I think I'll start dabbling with Linux from now itself so the transition is smooth.

slaymaker19072• 4 years ago

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I really don't care that much about UI visual consistency so long as it doesn't make the application confusing (i.e. not underlining hyperlinks or something). However, stuff like tasks on startup should be managed in one location that is easy to find.

ripley128• 4 years ago

stuff like tasks on startup should be managed in one location that is easy to find

Task Manager's Startup tab?

slaymaker19072• 4 years ago

It doesn't show everything there. For example, it doesn't show Steam or Discord on my machine at all. There are many ways of implementing startup tasks on Windows.

Traster• 4 years ago

The problem I have with windows is two-fold. Firstly, I came to windows before Vista. So I know how powerful the old windows settings/features were. I knew exactly where to access everything I wanted. I have a feeling this is probably the same for many people from all sorts of backgrounds (Personally, I experimented with Apple - Hello touchbar!). But the second issue is the new damn UIs aren't exhasutive! THey're a thin layer on top of the acutal data, which don't tell you what you actually need, and often revert you back to the old UI. If you're going to ship a product that refers me back to the old UI for half the stuff I'm interested in... just don't ship the new UI. It's not worth the time.

It's been 15 years since Vista and this hasn't been fixed. It's difficult to find people to actually just deliver on basic stuff apparently. This is why the commandline works. Becuase if all else fails there is 1 interface. I don't think this is unfixable but it requires a lot of gruntwork.

charles_f• 4 years ago

If you're going to ship a product that refers me back to the old UI for half the stuff I'm interested in... just don't ship the new UI.

That's exactly the problem of each iteration on Windows. New overlay on top of the old one that always misses the one thing you need, and you either get lucky and find the right menu right away to get to the old screen that gives you what you want, or you get into hell.

The new network screens are notoriously bad, and it always takes me 5 minutes to find how the hell to get to the adapters screen again.

alternatetwo• 4 years ago

I put a shortcut for specifically that screen on my desktop ... and ClassicShell makes it easy to open the original control panel.

mmis1000• 4 years ago

Although most points are true, I don't think ms is the one to blame about limit of changing new tab page.

The reason of limit of change default edge new tab is simple. It is just due to adwares. The adwares changed the dawn new tabs instead of the users changed it everytime. The popularity is so high that there is no benefit to allow users change it by default. Because users won't do it, adware will.

shp0ngle2• 4 years ago

Well, what are you going to do. Not use Windows?

Linux still barely works in 2022 (and if one distro will become really popular, with a big investment of money like Ubuntu did once, they will ad ads, like Ubuntu added Amazon), and MacOS works just on Apple HW (and has ads for Apple services baked-in too, just less obnoxious).

You can use ChromeOS! Which is literally ad tech.

Pick your poison.

ficiek2• 4 years ago

Linux still barely works in 2022

I have had zero problem running linux as my daily driver for the last 10 years, care to explain your comment? The only problem that I have is that video games don't always work because the developers don't care.

hypertele-Xii• 4 years ago

Last time I tried Ubuntu it exclaimed I'm not "the owner" of my external hard drive and wouldn't let me access my files. Very fundamental basics completely broken somehow.

dimgl3• 4 years ago

I see this argument in every thread about Linux. There's always this one magical user where everything "just works", has had 0 issues and everything's just dandy.

pndy2• 4 years ago

Not the parent comment but I'm getting random freezes on two different machines with different guts; sometimes system resumes and sometimes it requires a hard reset. Doesn't matter if its Manjaro or Linux Mint or Fedora, or which kernel I'm using.

My GPU is no longer supported and I couldn't revert to last working Nvidia drivers in Manjaro because things were changed. Not sure how the open source version is capable of rendering 3D or compatible with Lutris/Wine.

It's not the "barely works" in my case but there are issues around that are giving me a feeling I'm using Windows 98 and ME again.

barbs3• 4 years ago

"Linux still barely works in 2022"

What do you mean by this?

drpixie2• 4 years ago

Well, around 2% of PC users use Linux. It might be a small percentage but in absolute terms it's still a big number of users. And about 25% of developers use Linux.

And about 90% of phone users use Android, which is (distantly) based on Linux. That's a lot of users!

fgonzag3• 4 years ago

I've been running Linux ever since Windows 11 was announced, even though I was relatively happy with W10 + WSL. I had tried it quite a few times over the years but had never stuck with it until now, because it all just works... All my games have worked mostly flawlessly. I'm a developer, so all my tools were already available. I'm in love with KDE's design and customizability and relatively happy with its performance. The AUR is a godsend.

I actually have to use office quite a bit and settled on freeoffice (which is freeware and not open source). It works perfectly for my needs. The Teams client is crap but I've always dodged it.

Evolution suits my needs (O365 connectivity + a host of other personal email accounts). We still need a better Linux email client, I'm seriously considering it making it my lifetime hobby project (I'm imagining a server + client implementation to make it easier to decouple the UI as I'd really like both a TUI and GUI).

The only thing for which I spin up a VM every now and then is for graphics editing (I use the affinity suite which is amazing for its price but just doesn't work with Wine).

Really the only people who can't use reliably use Linux are those who use proprietary apps that don't work on Wine (which there aren't that many) and designers. If you're a power user I'd definitely recommend you give a spin. You might like what you find.

DeathArrow9• 4 years ago

I'm a developer, so all my tools were already available.

I use Visual Studio, so that is not my case. And besides working I use Photoshop and Lightroom a lot. And some gaming, which I can't do on Linux.

Apart from that, even not doing anything else in Linux but browsing the web is a poor experience for me.

ranger207• 4 years ago

Linux still barely works in 2022

You're getting a lot of comments about "what do you mean linux barely works" but I switched to Linux full time in the middle of Windows 10 and know exactly what you mean. There's a lot of stuff in Linux that's simply _different_ than Windows, and general infamiliarity means that some things that you know how to do on Windows seems to be impossible on Linux, until you learn how Linux and your particular distro chooses to organize things

But then Windows has the same problems as compared to Linux. I switched to Linux for programming purposes, and there's a lot of things that Linux does that I don't know the easy way to do in Windows[0]. Ultimately both OSes are simply different, and once you get used to one the other starts to seem really weird

That being said, a lot of things in Linux do take a lot more effort than in Windows. Part of it's because Linux is made by programmers for programmers. In MacOS, it either works or it's not possible. In Windows, it might work out of the box, it might take tweaking some registry keys, or it might simply not be a thing you can do (the latter category is fairly rare). In Linux, it might work out of the box, or it might takes you a couple of weeks of chasing down weird issues and compiling random patches from GitHub gists to fix something that really shouldn't be a problem in the first place

[0] For example, "search all files in this directory and its subdirectories for this particular phrase" is `grep -nR phrase` in a Linux terminal. In Windows I think I'd probably open the folder in VS Code and use its search tool. In the Windows case I can then click around to look at the results, or in the Linux case I can pipe it into a file and open it in vim and be able to grep my grep. They might eventually accomplish the same thing, but there's just different ways to do it, and I think which one is better depends heavily on what you prefer and what kind of work you're doing

Siira2• 4 years ago

Launching Chrome to run ripgrep is not “just a different way to do it.” It’s more similar to setting up winetricks to run a game on Linux.

Though honestly, I do think you can just install ripgrep and use it in PowerShell.

ramijames• 4 years ago

Honestly, I picked my poison in 2010 or so: MacOS. You're right that it does have Apple services baked in, and that it is limited to Apple's hardware.

To the former: I never use them and they literally never push themselves on me.

To the latter: Apple's hardware is far and away the most pleasant to use. Every windows machine I've used in the last decade (bought an XPS 13 in 2019 out of necessity) is just wonky. Feels less polished on the hardware side, and fighting with drivers and bloatware is not what I want to deal with. Like, does a laptop really need some stupid, custom audio interface to be able to control whether I'm using a headphone jack or built-in speakers? On the XPS, you do. It's absurd.

goosedragons6• 4 years ago

I mean Apple put a whole stupid ARM chip in my laptop to interface with the keyboard and trackpad (among other things). This has the "fun" benefit of essentially killing support for non-blessed OSs because who wants to use a laptop that doesn't have a functional built-in keyboard and mouse? Oh and I've even had Bridge OS crash a few times knocking out the keyboard and mouse in macOS forcing me to restart.

holyyikes• 4 years ago

I find it hilarious that people even entertain the idea that the only roadblock for MacOS is that it only works on Apple hardware. Gamers would NOT want an OS run by those psychopaths. MacOS is junk.

And Valve/Steamdeck is really just creating even more Windows dependence. Because of Proton everyone just assumes you don't need to make cross platform games anymore, so game devs are just happy making Windows only games.

donkarma• 4 years ago

steam could instantly reduce the weight by insisting that all games must run on linux by policy

Loughla2• 4 years ago

I run Linux mint as my daily machine. It just works? I have yet to find a substantive issue with it (other than video gaming, but that doesn't really count for most people's use).

neop1x• 4 years ago

I have been ArchLinux desktop and laptop daily user for 10+ years. I used Gentoo for a year before and still use Gentoo on the server until today.

Yes, occassionally there is a problem. HW incompatinility (new laptops), missing drivers (rarely as I am explicitly trying to buy well-supported HW), won't boot after a bad update (messed up ramdisk or config file) but easily fixable. You have to get used to couple of annoyances. But KDE DE is awesome, KDE Connect for Android too and lots of software works perfectly and let me do jobs I daily do. I have zero need to switch to Mac or Windows (used both before as well) and I enjoy having more control over my computing, updates, configuration. I can pick almost any HW I want on the desktop. I am not limited by a single range of badly-built, heavy and easy to dent macbooks, etc.

But people are different with different needs. It is not for everyone. Though I am really a happy linux user and do not plan to change that and I don't care about any M1 marketing bullshit, truetone or windows defender, cortana or whatever. Those may be nice-to-have, provide couple of fancy slight conviniences but in the end the actual hard work is done by all your skills, not the machine or OS.

ficiek2• 4 years ago

I mean, I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues

Ok, I think this person hasn't tried to run many old games.

dend10• 4 years ago

It's not ideal, but to be fair, a lot of them (not all) that don't require funky DRM APIs (a-la Grand Theft Auto IV with Games for Windows Live) do work decently. Some might need to have a right-click, run in compatibility mode check done.

seanp2k26• 4 years ago

I don't see any mention of Cortana or how hard that is to rip out of the OS, but I think it's worth mentioning. The tool called "Everything" by https://www.voidtools.com/ is so insanely better than Cortana and blazingly fast that I'm not sure why they're still trying to push Cortana.

https://www.getblackbird.net/ helps a lot and it's one of the first things I do to Windows installs when I need to use them, but it can break stuff if you're too aggressive with it (e.g. Windows store / Xbox stuff, which for some reason is how to record screenshot videos in Windows... https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/record-a-game-cl... ).

The article also didn't mention the Microsoft Store and how awful everything around that experience is, especially compared to macOS, where the worst part is how signing apps works ( https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Se... vs https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/package/signin... ).

mizaru• 4 years ago

Blackbird gets blocked by Defender immediately. Not sure why I'm surprised.

edit: Then again, that tool does seem to make it quite easy to damage your Windows installation.

skissane• 4 years ago

I don't trust it because it is a closed source binary and there is a lack of detailed documentation of exactly what settings it changes.

Quinner• 4 years ago

Search being broken for local files is infuriating. I've tried to do registry modifications to fix it and remove Cortana and it STILL won't find a file searched for by name in the root C: directory! But it'll give you random web results!

CursedUrn• 4 years ago

The point of Cortana was to harvest user search data and push Microsoft services in the search results. Actually finding the user's files was a low priority secondary goal.

causality0• 4 years ago

I switched over to castrated versions of Windows a while ago, like AME and Ninjutsu OS. The polite word is "custom" versions, but I call them castrated versions because they can't fuck me anymore.

Galanwe• 4 years ago

I did not develop a graphical Windows application since around 15 years now. At the time it was mainly Win32, and WPF just starting.

I remember that Qt was a big thing though. They had this CSS like capability that would allow you to style your application after the fact. You could also just change the rendering backend at build time.

Is Qt not an option anymore to have all the various GUI details right?

withinrafael• 4 years ago

The problem is, to really nail the look and feel, you're going to have to create your own controls with the same exact behaviors, looks, etc. and none of that is documented.

princevegeta892• 4 years ago

Bought a high-end laptop recently and really wanted to give Windows 11 a try [after being a Linux user for about 7 years]. While the WSL and WSLg aspects of it along with development-related features have improved considerably, the base of the system as a whole was still the same mess.

So much telemetry stuff running in the background, so many unnecessary updates kicking in, heavy CPU and memory usage and the general perceived slowness of the OS have all immediately pushed me back to Linux. There's no bloat, the difference in performance is night and day, and I have to never worry about any privacy-related stuff.

Long live Linux Desktop.

azangru• 4 years ago

a high-end laptop recently

Oh, cool, a recent high-end laptop that works well with linux. Could you share the model?

princevegeta892• 4 years ago

Dell G15 Ryzen Edition. From my experience all Dells and Lenovos are great with Linux compatibility.

Decabytes• 4 years ago

I’m curious to see if Microsoft will lose market share to Linux and MacOS over it’s user hostile practices

NL807• 4 years ago

So long it's deployed on laptops by default, probably not.

gfaster• 4 years ago

That can only happen when those other OSs match the level of functionality, reliability, and support that windows enjoys. I would love to switch my main OS to a Linux distro but it is still unstable enough and not supported enough that I can't reasonably switch.

As far as I can tell, our best hope is for Linux to improve at the same rate or faster as it has over the last 5 years for at least the next 5. Only then will Microsoft start to face any meaningful competition in operating systems.

everyone• 4 years ago

There already is an ideal version of Windows 10, without windows store, metro, cortana, xbox live, ads etc. etc. It also will get support and security updates but zero feature updates or changes for 10 years. It's called Windows 10 LTSB. They dont sell this useful version of windows to normal people though, only to corps via a volume license. This is one of those situations that behooves one to pirate it, and there are plenty of copies of this + crack on torrent sites.

neilv• 4 years ago

Vote with your feet. Debian, Arch Linux, etc.

ta220320119• 4 years ago

It's been my issue with some of the non-azure MSFT products generally speaking. You can play games and have fun backgrounds in Teams, but the app eats up all your memory and chatting sucks. Windows is the same as the article is pointing out. It somehow became harder to save documents in office. Feels like all the feature sets in the products are pushed with the wrong agenda. "better is the enemy of good"

slategruen• 4 years ago

It's funny how much it's been becoming more difficult it is to tweak Windows with janky workarounds compared to just installing a Linux distro altogether

ryandrake• 4 years ago

There's been a big shift in the whole software industry from "enable what the user wants to do" over to "we want the user to do this". Back in the '90s, we would go out, talk to customers, find out their needs, gather requirements, and write software that enables them to do what they want to do. Now, in a lot of software companies, it's the opposite. Product leadership starts with "What do we want users to do?" and then every software decision is in service of encouraging / forcing / channeling users' behavior into these paths. I've sat in product meetings where people would just say "No, the user should not be allowed to do ABC, we (Company) need them to do XYZ!" It's arrogance, it's hubris and it's everywhere.

The slogan "Where do you want to go today?" is dead. It's now all "This is where we will let you go today!"

srvmshr2• 4 years ago

That misguided notion of product features and integration, where the user has minimum role, started out at Apple. The standard pattern used to be talking to OEMs and discussing what users wanted from them. That review phase generated update ideas for next release and so on. Apple turned that question on its head and made it "the one last thing" show business.

We have employed a generation of PMs now who idolize Steve Jobs' mantra: "Users dont know what they want until you show it to them".

EDIT: We does not mean I am employed by Apple. It signifies the general trend for companies to enable product development by PMs

devmunchies• 4 years ago

We have employed a generation of PMs now who idolize Steve Jobs' mantra: "Users dont know what they want until you show it to them".

just because a bunch of dumb PMs are pushing hot garbage to the user doesn't mean that statement is false. There almost always IS a way to improve and innovate a user experience—a new experience that the user hasn't thought of before. Its just that the PM incentives aren't aligned with the users these days.

astrange2• 4 years ago

Note that Apple doesn’t have PMs.

freedomben2• 4 years ago

Absolutely, although something that really grinds my gears is that there's sometimes this weird Orwellian lie that they really start to believe, that they actually are doing it "for the user." There's something deeply disturbing about mass group delusion.

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

The skype thing kinda makes sense. People want software which just works without configuration. When you sign in to an iphone or macbook, it immediately sets up facetime which is always active waiting for a call in the background. No one complains because this is expected and it has always happened.

But then Microsoft wants to give their users the same conveniance as Apple users get with their "just works" setup and people call it user hostile and malware. It makes perfect sense that users would like a way to call other windows users in a way that doesn't involve installing things and fiddling around with more accounts/configuration.

kyriakos• 4 years ago

I see your point but maybe the reactions are because most of these efforts feel half baked? For example they are forcing teams on users, which I use as a daily driver at my work and I feel that it's the worst piece of software I have to use.

On top of that the way things are integrated always looks and feels forced. Like going into lengths to hide control panel in windows 10 even if it's still there and while the settings app which replaces it only has a fraction of the functionality.

dustinmoris2• 4 years ago

It's not the same though.

If I buy an iPhone then it is so that people can call me on it. The Mac makes it easy that I can also receive a call on my Mac if I am working on it. It's an additional convenience feature. It's not like the Mac is forcing me to do this. The call would still happen on my phone, I'd just have a much harder time to respond to it if I didn't get the smooth integration on my Mac whilst working on it. If I didn't have an iPhone then I also wouldn't get random calls on my Mac. Besides, if I don't want this feature to work then it is very easy to disable it form a very self explaining settings app and that setting will persist during updates.

It literally couldn't be more different to how Windows operates.

Also, perhaps Apple makes things enjoyable in how they work, which is maybe why less users have a desire to disable these handy features. It certainly feels more straight forward, down to the point, no dark patterns and very obvious as a macOS user. I can't say the same about Windows.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

When you sign in to an iphone or macbook, it immediately sets up facetime which is always active waiting for a call in the background. No one complains because this is expected and it has always happened.

People actually complain. We’re past the point where everyone only has one set of devices, a single apple ID, and everything is simple.

You might not want your iPad to receive the “family” account Facetime. You might not want your second phone to register for iMessage. You might want these services from an ID different from the device’s main account.

There’s optout ways out for all these services, but following the 80/20 rule, I think there is a “20” part with circumstances that make the blanket “turn it all on” grating and tedious to get rid of.

zaphirplane• 4 years ago

It’s probably driven by all the unicorns and massive tech companies that got where they are by building what they think the customers will want.

Not defending, but I do recall the ford quote of “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’”

numpad0• 4 years ago

I guess the ultimate goal is profit, and strategy was implementing what users wanted. “Strategy is how not what” etc etc.

The goal is now growth, not even profit, and control over users is strat.

What comes next? Jerk(2nd derivative of speed, rate of acceleration changes)? — the speed at which users conform a platform?

Capitalism is so ripe for disruption, or innovation, it seems!

AnIdiotOnTheNet5• 4 years ago

Indeed. One need only look at something as simple as UI styling to see the drastic difference. It used to be that the user could set every aspect of the UI widgets to pretty much whatever they wanted in terms of color, don't, and size. It wasn't even really noteworthy to come across someone who used italic comic sans in their title bars on a purple and green widget scheme.

Nowadays getting a bespoke dark mode for applications is an advertisement worthy feature.

isoblvck• 4 years ago

there's also built in keyloggers, eye tracking, and an absolutely insane amount of telemetry. revoke permissions for the camera and mic and see how many times "your settings blocked access" notifications show up.

ghostly_s• 4 years ago

What’s the point of these changes? My first impression is that someone used a macOS machine a bit too much and decided to rip off the macOS-style Dock without really porting over anything else from the Dock behavior and trying to shoehorn it into Windows without considering any of the past conventions that make Windows what it is.

Why does this story sound so familiar as a Linux desktop user...

nla2• 4 years ago

The problem is that it is garbage and has always been garbage. I just bought my wife a new laptop that had 11 pre-installed. It REQUIRES a MS account to use the laptop. So I returned it today and got her a Mac. Problem solved.

Quiark• 4 years ago

When I was buying a new computer last month, I spent a some time considering if it should be Mac or Linux. The Windows option was rejected rather quickly. And I was a Windows developer around the time .NET was starting.

mc4ndr3• 4 years ago

From the author's own words, sounds like he should stop supporting Windows.

I only support Windows and macOS as a masochistic exercise in extreme cross-platform support, and even then it's only CLI applications and programmatic API's, never GUI bother.

lifeplusplus• 4 years ago

If not have left xp if it wasn't for automatic driver installations

killjoywashere• 4 years ago

Windows can only deprecate things at the rate people retire, so it ends up looking like a house that four generations of a family live in. Junior’s flashing the lights in the hall in time with Bassnectar using a programmable lightbulb he wired to an arduino while grandma is playing pinochle on the back porch with a couple of birds from church. Mom’s in the kitchen counting her blessings, enjoying her circa 1997 gas stove while Dad’s trying to figure out if he has to pony up for a new laptop for daughter to finish her homework, or is her problem that the latest Word won’t run Java applets? Did Word ever run applets? Meanwhile, Junior barely knows pinochle is a thing, but Grandma is convinced he has summoned demons. Kids these days.

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

Am I the only one on HN who doesn't care about these? I mean they're just the standard Windows 11 complaints (UI style inconsistency, requiring a Microsoft account, not being able to easily change the default from Edge). But they come up again and again, and everyone acts that they're doing the world a favor by listing them. Just look at the top comment, which starts (rather boldly) with: "Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform". But, I don't care, and probably many others don't care. Maybe Windows will get worse for people with my set of priorities if you get your way?

TheBlight• 4 years ago

Windows has always been (mostly) pretty rad to code for. Best library documentation you'll ever find and, as the author points out, exceptional backwards compatibility. That said, I don't like to use it. Much prefer macOS. But I "get" and appreciate Windows. It's pretty good.

TedShiller• 4 years ago

Or, just don’t use it.

graycat2• 4 years ago

Except for some details, I really REALLY like Windows. Really what I'm liking is computing, and Windows is a big part of that because I selected Windows instead of Linux.

Over the years there have been some changes: So, we have new hardware, some HUGELY important new communications standards, a huge effort on computer security, etc., and it is crucial that Windows has kept up with the changes. I like that. And I like that I can still run my favorite old programs: Since I do all I can with plain text, my most heavily used program is my favorite text editor KEDIT. And I really like hierarchical file systems so really REALLY like Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system) and do a lot of tree walking, searching, copying, deleting, etc.

But Microsoft went for an unstated philosophy of a graphical user interface (GUI) where (a) there is a metaphor of direct manipulation of desktop objects and (b) commands and operations are to be learned by experimentation without documentation. I can see some utility there, otherwise I still like command lines because the documentation tends to be better, it is more clear just what is going on, and I can script, automate some of the operations.

And I get to write software, e.g., in .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET for my Web site startup and whatever else seems worthwhile. So far, I like .NET. I do wish Microsoft had explained, just explained in simple text, just what the heck .NET CORE was. By now I've come to a guess that .NET CORE is irrelevant to me and I should f'get about it -- would have been nice to have had some EXPLANATION.

For the future of GUIs, that seems to be just Web pages, i.e., HTML.

For me, the above is the view of Windows I find most important. For the future, I hope that Microsoft does not mess up that view. To have me a happier customer, Microsoft should concentrate on one word, DOCUMENTATION.

I can understand that Microsoft has some middle managers who want to add things to Windows or change Windows to improve it. Now, for changes such as I mentioned above, SURE. Otherwise, please sit down: Each new version of Windows I find to be, in one word, a pain. The changes are not improvements but PAINS. E.g., with the old version of Windows, after hundreds of hours of work I finally learned and documented for myself how to get routine things done. Then with the changes, I have to invest many more hours just to be able to continue to get routine things done and for no gains at all. Sorry Microsoft middle manager: To me you are like TV producers, what they try for, I don't like; what I like, they don't try for.

E.g., as far as I can tell from a command line window

Examples:

runas /noprofile /user:mymachine\administrator cmd

is wrong. Just wrong. It doesn't work. First, set aside that from this "example" can't tell what is a constant and what is a variable. So, try all possible combinations. Second, still, nothing works. Nothing. Go for 1, 2, 3 hours trying everything. Did I mention, nothing works? This is grotesquely bad computing. Just awful. Want to make things better, fix things like that.

But it's worse: Go out on the Internet and can find lots of documentation of that command. Some of the documentation has lots of double quote marks. Nothing worked. Hours; nothing worked. We're talking mud wrestling here. Eventually I got the software to request my administrator password, but that was as far as it went.

This isn't my work. Yet my time, effort, energy are soaked up, repeatedly, over and over, by such system management mud wrestling documentation problems.

Eventually I guessed some of what was going on and found another path that did work. It's not fully clear just why that worked, but it did.

Documentation? I took some good notes, and apparently they are better than anything from Microsoft or readily available on the Internet.

The main bottleneck in my startup is the bad documentation that leads to wasted effort in this mud wrestling. What fraction of my effort goes to such stuff? Essentially 100% -- I can't get back to my real work due to a continuing list of such disasters. They are taking up ALL my time, just mud wrestling from bad documentation.

For Windows, Firefox, Acrobat, etc., sure, important security updates and otherwise I'll consider updates in functionality maybe twice a year, maybe once a year, or once each 2nd year. Except for security, bluntly and quite broadly I don't want your updates but will consider some, say, occasionally. As you force updates on me, I get TORQUED, become a VERY unhappy customer.

E.g., Adobe went too far, essentially taking over my PC, at startup, with updates I don't want, with popups, with "Do you want to ...", and yesterday I deleted everything from Adobe now "Dead to me.". Firefox will read a PDF (portable document format) file, at least the ones I want read, a little better than Acrobat. Adobe, with me, you went too far and BLEW IT.

I have big hopes for the future of computing for myself, Microsoft, the computer industry, the economy, and civilization, but I want do to my part, get on with it, and there is no room in that work for me to click "NO" tens of thousands of times to popup windows stopping my work until I answer some "Do you want to ...", and there is no excuse for the system management mud wrestling from bad documentation.

At one time Microsoft was very interested in "developers, developers, developers!!!". Well, I'm trying to be one. Then I hope to be a good customer for Windows Server and SQL Server. And on Windows XP and Windows 7 I got 100,000 lines of .NET code running apparently as intended. But now I've lost YEARS of time in system management mud wrestling from bad documentation.

I can't be a good customer of Windows Server if you have me stuck in a mud hole wasting time.

sylens3• 4 years ago

So far, I like .NET. I do wish Microsoft had explained, just explained in simple text, just what the heck .NET CORE was. By now I've come to a guess that .NET CORE is irrelevant to me and I should f'get about it -- would have been nice to have had some EXPLANATION.

I would say that .NET Core is certainly relevant to you and shouldn’t be ignored.

As for a simple explanation, another user on this site wrote this which I found extremely helpful. https://dusted.codes/dotnet-basics

graycat2• 4 years ago

MANY THANKS for the link

  https://dusted.codes/dotnet-basics

with

  .NET Basics

Just read it all. EXCELLENT information. Kept a copy. Indexed it in the appropriate place in my .NET documentation. That information will be a big help in my software writing for my startup.

Microsoft, this document is HELPING you a LOT with me. Did I mention, my view is that the biggest problem in my software writing, startup, Microsoft, the US economy, the future of computing, and progress in civilization now is in just one word, DOCUMENTATION that is missing for Microsoft's software. This is not funny or a joke but very serious.

Okay, .NET Foundation, through version 4.x, was for writing software only on Windows, and CORE was for writing software on nearly any operating system. Now at .NET version 5, Foundation and CORE have become the same thing.

Okay. I suspect that with CORE/.NET version 5, my old code written using .NET 2.x and 4.x and ASP.NET and ADO.NET will still run as before, mostly or entirely except maybe a lot faster. Okay.

I would make some suggestions about

  .NET Basics

(1) It's possible to use .NET to write a program that compiles to a file with extension EXE and not just DLL. I did that many times. E.g., part of the software I wrote was a key-value store that runs as a server, console application, is an EXE, and provides its service via TCP/IP.

(2) Say that jargon is a word used with a meaning not in a standard dictionary and used with a narrow meaning in a narrow field. Well, the document would be better defining more of its jargon. Same for acronyms.

(3) Apparently software can run "on" a platform or "under" the CLI or CLR. Using both on and under makes no sense -- stick with one or the other. Since software stack is so common, maybe stick with on and drop under.

(4) The description of interpreted software is nothing like what I have long understood. The document seems to claim that interpreted software is much the same as just in time complied software; here there is a new sequence of machine instructions generated (the instructions are not new but the sequence is). In total contrast, my understanding is that interpreted software is having a program, the interpreter, run the user's software simply by directly doing what that software says. It is like a human reading the software and doing what it says -- no new sequence of machine instructions generated. A good example of interpreted software is the scripting language Rexx. I'm fairly sure, and due to computer security certainly hope, that JavaScript software is executed interpretively.

(5) It seems that the document is claiming that for writing programs with .NET it necessary to use Visual Studio. Gads, I HOPE NOT! I just checked and see that I wrote 11 million bytes of .NET software, and I never used Visual Studio. I fully intend never to use Visual Studio. Instead, all my software source code is just simple plain text I type in with my favorite plain text text editor KEDIT -- ALL of it.

NO WAY do I want any usage of Visual Studio. I tried it once: There was a LOT to learn just to consider writing the standard "Hello World". And for the initial project to write Hello World, I got some huge file system tree with maybe 50 million bytes of I don't know what the heck. And when something went wrong, I'd have to work through 50+ million bytes of undocumented I don't know what. I see writing the software for my startup on Visual Studio a threat like my being lashed to a railroad track with freight train at 80 MPH 100 yards away coming right for me. NO WAY.

I just checked: The way I got my .NET code compiled was just run as a command line the .NET VB compiler EXE program

Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\vbc.exe

Worked fine. Got to "Hello World" right away. Worked fine for 300+ .VB programs. Used TCP/IP, ADO.NET, etc. -- just fine. The compiling on a very cheap AMD processor with a 1.8 GHz clock was really fast. I was a super happy camper, thrilled, and NO Visual Studio in sight.

Debugging? Didn't have any problems a little print tracing didn't easily solve.

Documentation for using .NET objects? Put the tree name on my disk of the relevant Web page I'd downloaded from MSDN in my source code, and with one key stroke my editor would run a macro that did a little parsing and displayed the MSDN Web page. Worked great. No problems.

Now, however, that macro won't work: Somehow Firefox now floods me with popups about "safe mode", "Do you want to ..." and refuses just to display the Web page. So, will have to revise my editor macro to use the old version of Google's Web browser Chrome to display the pages. Firefox messed up, big time, and is no longer qualified to be my "default browser".

A lot of people with famous software have convinced themselves that it is really good NOT to do the work the user is requesting but, instead, to stop the work of the user, refuse to do the work, and put up various windows, popups, video clips, etc., lots and lots of stuff other than the actual work involved. Of course I avoid such software as much as I can. Adobe did that with Acrobat, and now there is NOTHING by Adobe on my computer. Firefox did some of that, and now Firefox is no long my default browser. This popup and "Do you want to ..." stuff is a really good way to get OFF my computers.

THANKS again for the reference. Remarks (1)-(5) aside, the good stuff in

  .NET Basics

is TERRIFIC information!

bstar77• 4 years ago

Windows doesn't need to change a single thing, it's just doing it's thing and it's been doing it for ages. There are actually viable alternatives these days if you don't like it.

Windows has always been an inferior OS, but I don't worry or complain about it. It hasn't been on my radar for over 15 years. I've spent that time learning *nix patterns instead of dealing with Windows quirks. That choice has paid massive dividends.

kjellsbells• 4 years ago

Often in these conversations the response is around gaming as the last bastion that needs Windows. Im here to claim that its Office, specifically reliable desktop implementations of 365 and SharePoint/onedrive, not the (admittedly rather cool, but not nearly powerful enough) web versions. I am simultaneously encouraged and disturbed by the idea that, say, 365 desktop native Outlook might be rewritten as a cross platform Electron app. Encouraged because if I could have 365 on Linux I would transition overnight, and disturbed because of the thought of grindingly slow Office on Windows (Teams already showed this tendency).

gorgoiler• 4 years ago

Very tangential, but the free and open source code (“Linux”) counterpoint to software longevity is version control.

You don’t need to care about old binary compatibility because you don’t have old binaries, only old source code. If your modern compiler doesn’t like it, just build the old compiler instead.

Good luck finding a matching libxyz though, for your git checkout —before 10.years.ago. Friendly reminder to vendor in your third party dependencies alongside your source code.

ki7• 4 years ago

People should really look into using the LTSC version instead the pre-installed windows 10. lTSC has no crap apps and bare minimal footprint in terms of shit preloaded. Also there are tools like privatezilla on GitHub to tweak some privacy settings and wpd.app which can block telemetry on firewall level.

homerhomer• 4 years ago

Windows IS shareware. You just haven't realized it yet.

emptysongglass9• 4 years ago

I read through the nearly 400 comments and no one brought up using the LTSC edition of Windows, which actually gets out of your way or that you don't own the OS when you use a proprietary operating system.

I'm not really sure what to make of this as it seems people prefer to complain as if they were hostages to the whims of others.

I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaints of Linux "still not working" in 2022 effortlessly glide over the obvious: you're already making it an unfair fight when you adopt an OS to a non-native machine.

If you don't own the OS what's the point of complaining? MacOS and Windows will never have the best interests of the user at heart because that's not where the capital incentives are. It's really as simple as that. Are you going to develop a patch for Windows that makes Windows do as you want? If you do, who at Microsoft is going to take your PR? No one?

This behavior should be blindingly obvious to anyone who thinks for a second where the incentives are. If the incentives are not aligned with yours, it's time to a. consider paying for a volume license for LTSC so you can get the experience you want that you pay for and vote with your dollars or b. use an OS that isn't abusive.

C. moan and complain isn't actually a productive strategy because the money bundled into your OS cost is neglible to the value of your metrics and pushing a subscription to Office that actually makes Microsoft money. People keep smashing this button in the vain hope something will change. Stop and think. Follow the money. Do something about your situation that doesn't enrage you so often.

pjmlp8• 4 years ago

I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines. All those complaints of Linux "still not working" in 2022 effortlessly glide over the obvious: you're already making it an unfair fight when you adopt an OS to a non-native machine

I did as well, an Asus 1215B netbook, remember those?

The wlan still has issues to work properly to this day, the graphics card should be able to do OpenGL 4.1/DirectX 11, yet the AMD driver only does OpenGL 3.3.

Good that it was shipped with official Linux support.

emptysongglass9• 4 years ago

I think that's a cherry-picked example of a very old machine. I've had a bug-free experience with the XPS 13 Developer Edition and Purism's line of laptops (I won't comment on the hardware quality of Purism's laptops here because that's a separate issue).

I'm expecting a Framework soon, which touts official support for Fedora so looking forward to yet another bug-free experience there.

DoingIsLearning• 4 years ago

Windows knows full well LTSC is pain free but also less profitable. Sales will act really difficult, to sell it to a business unless they complain they are doing something mission critical. Also as far as I know it's difficult to buy LTSC as a private costumer.

emptysongglass9• 4 years ago

Anyone can buy a volume license. You'll need to pay 200ish dollars or so but for an OS you use every day and provided the 400 comments here are indicative of a real desire to use a non-abusive edition of Windows, it's a bargain!

To buy one you'll need to go through a Microsoft Partner as detailed here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/how-to-buy/how-to-...

Searching the web for "buy ltsc license" is also fruitful.

tomerv• 4 years ago

consider paying for a volume license for LTSC

And if I just want a single Windows machine and not 5?

emptysongglass9• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, this is the price you pay to let Microsoft know the OS you want respects you as a user.

deadbeeves3• 4 years ago

I don't think even the LTSC edition avoids the UX problems discussed here. All the LTSC does is freeze the features Windows had at release and give you security updates. You're still stuck with whatever was there at launch.

Suggesting switching to an entirely different OS to someone who's complaining that their habitual OS no longer behaves as it used to isn't very useful.

I'm not really sure what to make of this as it seems people prefer to complain as if they were hostages to the whims of others. I buy my computers with Linux pre-installed on supported machines.

You don't understand because you're failing to empathize with what people are saying, because it's not a problem you personally experience. Let's see if this works: suppose you find a shoe manufacturer that makes these really neat shoes that you love. You love them so much that every time they wear out, you buy the next model from that manufacturer. Each model is slightly different from the last, but you like all of them better than the competition. As you've gotten used to them, you've started to develop certain habits with these shoes, such as a technique to tie the laces that makes you do it very fast. But over time, the manufacturer has started to change the way it makes the shoes, such that they're not as comfortable as they used to be, or some of your habits no longer work with them. Now, you don't want to buy from a different manufacturer. At this point your feet are accustomed to the way these shoes fit, and other shoes feel completely different, even if in some ways they're objectively better. You don't want shoes from a different brand, you want the shoes this one used to make, which used to be so much better than this.

TL;DR: Something can be worse than it used to be, and still be better than the alternatives.

emptysongglass9• 4 years ago

You don't understand because you're failing to empathize with what people are saying, because it's not a problem you personally experience.

To be clear I support my wife's LTSC install and use Windows 11 with WSL and WSLg for work.

I don't think even the LTSC edition avoids the UX problems discussed here.

I think it does but please highlight which problems it doesnt avoid.

suppose you find a shoe manufacturer that makes these really neat shoes that you love.

Do they respect me as a user? What are their capital incentives? If not aligned with mine why do I love them? Can I change my purchasing habits so their capital incentives align? If not, I should probably do something less rage-inducing for my own health.

bcatanzaro• 4 years ago

For a website that is all about user interface design, I was surprised I couldn’t get the Ukrainian profanity to go away at the bottom of the page.

(I do support Ukraine but this user interface is bad.)

Shadonototra• 4 years ago

It needs a complete rewrite, just like google is doing with Fuschia, betting on the future involve making new choices that are not backward compatible due to security and performance concerns

Backward compatible is not what people want, they want ways to move forward just like how Apple did with Roseta2

We are moving in a world where energy consumption needs to be optimized due to climate change

tlhighbaugh• 4 years ago

Why is anyone surprised, Microsoft can do whatever it wants and people still spend hundreds on its OS offering that has been awful for over a decade, so of course they are going to get more abusive to lower costs and raise revenues since people still buy the thing. This is at the heart of Meta (I hate that name) and Alphabet too, the most simplistic understanding of market dynamics should illuminate how this is working. What's weird is the government not trustbusting them and letting Germany cut them down here and there (not because they care about privacy but to make room for their domestic firms) while the once called conspiracy theory NSA are still amassing a monster to make Big Brother look like Little Whimpy Cousin, does no one else see the writing on the wall here?

You really can't even blame any of them for being that way, the public could have a multitude of free alternatives with a bit of effort and yet they rather spend 200 on an upfront abusive and honestly highly flawed OS, pay google to store their photos (and scan them with emerging AI technology) and use Facebook for whatever reason people even use that for. Why shouldn't they find the edge of what the public will now accept, since its changed so much. Such is the nature of organizations interacting with a market or the public (in the case of government agencies which operate the same way just less efficiently). As my dearly departed great grandmother said about this sort of thing between drags from her Lucky Strike unfiltered cigarette while tending her rose garden, "Ya gotta get it while the gettin is good!"

0dayz• 4 years ago

This article resonates really well with my frustration with Windows and oh how I wish I could just switch to Linux, sadly the lack of hardware customization on Linux is still a deal breaker for me.

It's strange to me tat the company during the xp-7 years had very solid and firm understanding of conservative UX design and seemed to take pride in it (essentially enterprise quality even for the end user), that ship seems to have sailed and instead acts like a hybrid of Facebook, Google and Apple worst practices.

bigbluedots• 4 years ago

There is no reason for ms to care about any of these issues while users keep paying for Windows, either through new PC builds or directly. It doesn't help that in many cases there is no viable alternative for users.

spiderfarmer• 4 years ago

It put me off Windows years ago. Though it was the constant battle with alert boxes, popups and other windows that stole focus that put me over the edge. If my computer doesn't let me type text undisturbed, why do even use that tool?

sebow• 4 years ago

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

To this end, I find it somewhat funny how people still believe Microsoft has a redemption arc.

mszcz• 4 years ago

For me Windows is starting to resemble consumer routers. I mean, some serious resources and engineering talent had to have been spent on the internals, the kernel, networking, drivers. But the thing that the users, the people paying and using the OS end up interacting with ends up getting the least resources and even less focus.

My theory as to why that is is kinda like The Color of the Bikeshed Theory. New management hires want to make a name for themselves and want to work on something that's visible, that they have an illusion they know something about and something that they can use to climb up the corp ladder. So with each iteration some new idiot comes along and wants to start over. Two years later, when the thing's half finished, they move on and a new person comes along...

apatheticonion3• 4 years ago

Kinda at a loss for OS/DE at the moment.

Lived on Windows for over 2 decades (completed work via a Linux VM). Windows 8 was horrid and Windows 10/11 is hostile towards user experience (etc, etc privacy, but mostly user experience).

Used MacOS for half a decade after that and loved the Unix terminal and tight desktop experience but underpowered and overpriced hardware had me running a hackintosh for over half of that time. The move to M1 (and general difficulty maintaining a Hackintosh) means that MacOS is off the table for me.

I am currently daily driving Gnome 4 on Fedora and loving it. It has some user application UX issues (like Google Chrome mouse scrolls slowly) and some questionable desktop environment design decisions - but overall a nice place to land.

Not quite as nice as MacOS but it gets the job done.

It's sad that after 30 years on computers, my user experience has gotten worse - Gnome 4 came along at the perfect time to catch a bunch of MacOS and Windows refugees and I pray the developers push it in a direction where it becomes the most ergonomic desktop environment available on the Desktop - at least for engineers.

nikodunk• 4 years ago

Same story for me. Landed on Gnome 4x series Fedora after ditching macOS for engineering after a decade. iCloud, iMessage, appleTV etc etc hooks just got too intrusive and made things too unresponsive in my case.

mulmen5• 4 years ago

Messages is basically unusable after Big Sur. The new windows are a huge step backwards. Notifications are mind bogglingly broken. Reminder sync with iCloud… doesn’t. Spotlight indexes Time Machine directories, which create more deltas for Time Machine to index, sending the Spotlight service into a feedback loop. Etc, etc, etc.

I’m hopeful the next MacOS shakeup is similar to the recent return to sanity in hardware.

Apple hardware is finally recovering from Ives’ fever dream. The OS needs saving next.

mulmen5• 4 years ago

The current MacOS desktop environment is, generously, a dumpster fire. But it’s also miles ahead of anything else on the market.

The last decade of desktop environments feels like a march backwards, or perhaps even vertical, into some kind of alternate reality where the UI is designed to get in the way instead of enable.

Modern desktop environments are a painful death by a thousand cuts.

This is a rant but a desktop environment is my hammer. It is the tool I use more than anything else. The experience is sacred. And yet it is defiled annually.

I never feel more helpless than the first moments after a MacOS upgrade. Like all my power has been stripped. It hurts.

YPPH2• 4 years ago

All I want is macOS with window snapping and a maximise button. Their absence makes shifting from Windows very difficult. I can't understand why these basic features have not been added, yet the OS receives changes that, as you rightly point out, tend to defile the user experience.

I can't understand why people would want to make windows full screen in ordinary situations. It seems to be something I would only want to do on rare occasions, given that you lose quick access to the menu bar.

Magnet/Rectangle are third-party fixes for the former. But it's a basic function that should be built into the OS.

1_player2• 4 years ago

It has some user application UX issues (like Google Chrome mouse scrolls slowly)

Try the "Chromium Wheel Scroll Smoother" extension. It's a hack, but I've managed to make scrolling as fast as Firefox is, which I much prefer.

modo_mario• 4 years ago

Similar story (tho a bit less than 2 decades)

KDE on manjaro here.

mavhc• 4 years ago

Windows is free as in adverts for beer

DeathArrow9• 4 years ago

There isn't much competition in the desktop space. It's either macOS with its downsides or Windows with its downsides.

Basically neither Microsoft nor Apple have any pressure to make life better for users.

tonyedgecombe4• 4 years ago

The incentives do seem slightly different although I do worry about Apple's forays into services.

DeathArrow9• 4 years ago

Some of the anti-user patterns aren't even pioneered by Microsoft, they simply fall in the anti-user direction many big companies are pushing.

Ads in apps? Pioneered in Android. Tricking the user to log in using Microsoft account? You can't make much use of an Android phone unless you sign in with your google account. Also, Apple requests having an Apple Id.

I wonder what if someone at Apple, Google, Microsoft decides at some point that you shouldn't be able to use your own device, bought with your own money? They can disable your account at one push of a button. Or maybe a state agency decides you are one of the bad guys.

Const-me3• 4 years ago

You can't make much use of an Android phone unless you sign in with your google account.

This depends on the phone. Samsung phones aren’t terribly bad, I’ve been using one without google account for a few months now. For instance, the built-in web browser has a command like “setup an ad blocker”.

theclansman2• 4 years ago

These companies all copy each other's bad practices, it's no surprise there, if one can get away with it the rest will follow.

DeathArrow9• 4 years ago

It seems Windows releases come in series of two, one good, one bad.

Windows XP, Windows Vista. Windows 7, Windows 8. Windows 10, Windows 11.

After each successful release Microsoft pull a bunch of crap. Users aren't happy and they rather use the older version than upgrade to the new one. Microsoft comes to its senses, release a better version and the cycle repeats.

So we should kind of wait for Windows 12.

m_mueller• 4 years ago

to me it seems more like the pile stuff on top of each other, trying to make bad stuff below the surface go away after it's sufficiently plastered over. but it never is 100% complete and you can still find components even from the Win3.x era. it's just that some releases they have plastered it a bit more completely (7) and others where it's most superficial (8, 11); Vista is a special one as it brought a major new kernel version, which afaik they are still using to this day.

robertlagrant4• 4 years ago

After all, what else are you going to do if you need to run Photoshop or Premiere for your work - switch to Linux? Good luck with that.

I now believe that you can't like Windows because of exactly this. Linux gives you choice, and if someone wants to create a competitor OS from the Linux kernel (or even from another OS) they can. That is incredibly healthy and sustainable.

Const-me3• 4 years ago

Good article, one remark, still.

breaking from the legacy is hard for the sake of backwards compatibility

Generally yes, but in case of Windows the hard part of the problem is already solved. I think it was just the wrong priorities. Specifically, Windows SDK could do following things to enable new styles/controls/behavior:

1. Require new apps to call an API to switch to new stuff, like InitCommonControlsEx

2. Require new apps to include an XML manifest with some flag or version number, like they did with high DPI support

3. A nuclear option — implement new userland, write new apps against that one; NT kernel supports multiple subsystems at the same time, Win32 is one of them.

jcelerier• 4 years ago

isn't all of this what they tried with UWP and WinRT ? It utterly failed. People want their useful win32 apps. Those are the only reason I boot on that OS once in a while.

Const-me3• 4 years ago

UWP/WinRT was close to the nuclear option. I think the main reason it failed is their app store. They should have allowed to publish these new apps with SetupSomething.exe and I think developers would eventually switch.

A good example of that option is the way they did Linux support in WSL1. Not exactly a new subsystem but technically pretty close. They could do something like that only with GUI, and not based on Linux.

BTW, I still use WSL1 every day. Too bad it’s deprecated, WSL2 is VM based, borderline useless for me.

ulzeraj• 4 years ago

I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues

I'm not really sure about this. Games like Vampire the Masquerade comes to mind.

Beltiras• 4 years ago

Maybe someone should make a file browser app for Windows so we can continue enjoying ad-less perusal of finding and opening a file in Windows.

lwkl• 4 years ago

Thank you. This is so true and annoying. Microsoft should treat their UI like their APIs and not break it with every major release. Changing a submenu is alright, changing how flat it is, is fine. But don't release a new settings app with every update. Microsoft settings is like Google chat apps as soon as you get used to it they throw it in the trash and release a new one to works completely differently.

I bought a MacBook recently after switching from Mac OS X to Windows and Linux 13 years ago. After booting for the first time I opened the settings app do do some changes and was expecting to google a lot and I didn't have to. The settings still have the same layout and it generally worked the same as on macOS 10.4. The same was true for the preinstalled system apps. They were in the same place, had the same names and generally functioned the same expect some UI changes. There are additions to the UI that replaced some old features like multiple desktops, the control center and the widgets but they didn't any of my usage patterns and it was pretty easy to integrate them into my regular workflow.

If you look at it from a normal users POV Apple has much better backwards compatibility than Microsoft, if my software is being maintained by a dev and I'm willing to update to the newer versions. If I want to keep using a program that was released 20 years ago not so much, but Microsoft has been breaking a lot of these programs in the last 5 years as well.

lbriner• 4 years ago

It definitely suffers from a number of problems in MS, probably mostly due from having a very large organisation with different priorities:

1) UX teams who have to change things to jutify their existence. None of the problems in Windows 10 imho were related to major UX problems, just things that should have been fixed like the stupid search function which can't find "Explorer" when you type in "Explore" 2) UX people who think that the world cares as much as they do about the fact the UI looks a bit "dated" and needs to be refreshed otherwise people will leave! Apple haven't massively changed MacOS and people still use that. 3) Strategic people who are trying to pre-empt or force a different way of interacting with the OS so that things like AI, blockchain, or whatever will work more naturally. 4) Development teams who have decided that the programming model is wrong again and therefore they will make a load more changes. If I was a Product Manager at MS I would be depressed and embarrassed by the number of inconsistencies in the platform. It would be understandable if "windows 10 apps will start to look different" but this is so random, it is annoying. 5) Finance people who can't accept that a paid-for product should have exactly zero adverts and the whole premise is obnoxious and stinks of greed when it's not like MS are struggling to make money. 6) Cloud everything even when those experiences e.g. Office365 are noticeably worse in the cloud. Also, they are charging you the same/more even though they can now manage everything centrally with no deployment costs. 7) The whole security accounts eco system is another disaster. "Log in with MS account", "Is it a work or personal account?". How should I know? It's your account. "Do you want to link all these devices?" "No", "Well we will anyway because we have assumed you want to and we were only asking to pretend it was your choice"

Microsoft, Microsoft, we love you but we need to talk!

zippergz• 4 years ago

As a Mac user, I can tell you that people on this side of the fence have been complaining about how Apple is changing the UI to make it “fresh” for the past few years too. Maybe the changes aren’t as drastic as they are in windows, but the same thing happens, unfortunately.

Pooge• 4 years ago

I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues

This is not my experience with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Worked flawlessly with Proton but it didn't even launch correctly on Windows 10. It's a hit-or-miss and not a silver bullet.

yeetard• 4 years ago

This is why I don't think the world makes any sense anymore. How is this a product the worlds 2nd biggest tech conglomerate in the year 2022 thinks is acceptable to be released to the public? How...how are people just accepting this? It's comically bad. Remember when Vista came out and there was this massive hate storm going on because...reasons I guess (yeah, poorly optimized aero on shitty hardware might have sucked but come on...) and now 15 years later THIS is what Windows looks like and ... nobody bats an eye? Hello?! Is anybody still paying attention?

People always talk about google dying. Yeah, how about Microsoft goes dying, how are they even still in business I just don't get it..

DeathArrow9• 4 years ago

I would be nice if ReactOS team would be funded to finish development of the OS. You would run any Windows software without the annoying bits that Windows has.

avsteele• 4 years ago

Article is 90% spot-on. Win11 is the first time I do not want to upgrade, because it turns the actual bad parts of Win 10 up to...11!

MS is annihilating the good will they get from me via VSCode, Terminal, VStudio etc...

1) The ads, my god, the ads! Even normal, non-tech, people see this stuff and make a sour face.

2) "Lets finish setting up your PC" : Excuse me sir, its been set up for 4 years. Stop trying to get me to link my phone! I don't want O365 at home! I don't want to switch to Edge (it is not terrible but have made another choice.) I better be careful ant not mis-click or god knows what settings will be changed.

The UI stuff i really don't care a wit about.

Suggestion: Whatever, fine leave this garbage in 'Home' edition but let 'Pro' mean PRO and stop fighting me.

httpsterio• 4 years ago

One of the most annoying things I've had to experience is Onedrive moving your documents folder inside onedrive. I've done some tech support in a music production forum and you wouldn't believe how many problems it'll cause.

ho_schi• 4 years ago

There is Windows Forms, WPF, MAUI, UWP, WTL, WinUI, MFC, and I am sure others that I am missing.

The list is missing the old Win32 API? Microsoft never cared about continuation between UI libraries and HIG. Neither application programmers. They just add another UI when they feel the need. While Gtk is puting a lot effort in compatibility and consistency and they're blamed anyway. Usually for theming which Gtk actually doesn't appreciate. And for Qt compatibility is a business model.

keithalewis• 4 years ago

Y U h8 capitalism? A bit dated, but http://www.proudlyserving.com/ is still a worthwhile read to understand the Microsoft mindset.

phkahler2• 4 years ago

Windows users need a change in priorities. FTFY.

The OS has gone to shit, but people keep right on using it and complaining about how bad it's getting. What is your lame priority for sticking with it? Don't tell me gaming - get a console or VR headset, or steam on Linux. If you're that hung up on one game that doesn't run anywhere else then again you need to change your priorities. If it's using Excel or Word with a bunch of customizations that won't work in LibreOffice, again you need to change your priorities or approach to solving the problems you did that to solve.

canbus• 4 years ago

Maybe I use it for work? Or because WINE isn't perfect for everything that I need to use, and I don't want to spend hours trying to configure it?

What about basic users? They don't care whether they should be using KDE Plasma or a Gnome-based window manager etc - maybe they want something that 'just works'

phkahler2• 4 years ago

> What about basic users? They don't care whether they should be using KDE Plasma or a Gnome-based window manager etc - maybe they want something that 'just works'

There are Linux distributions and MacOS that "just work" a LOT better than Windows these days.

Sohcahtoa82• 4 years ago

What is your lame priority for sticking with it? Don't tell me gaming - get a console or VR headset, or steam on Linux.

Tell me you're not a gamer without telling me you're not a gamer.

The desire to play with mouse + keyboard is reason enough to stick with a PC. Wanting to play in 1440p @ 144 fps is another. First-class support for Discord. Steam sales. I could go on and on about reasons to play on PC.

Steam on Linux is getting better, and the success of the Steam Deck might convince developers to offer greater Linux support, but it's still not at the level it needs to be. Not to mention this argument completely ignores non-Steam games like League of Legends. It kind of works on Linux...sometimes...and with a lot of configuration and work.

Also, the suggestion to just get a VR headset is absurd.

mattrick• 4 years ago

Installing League via Lutris is not that difficult. It's certainly not as idiot-proof as it needs to be, but the average Linux user should be capable of following the relatively simple instructions provided by communities like /r/leagueoflinux. It also runs pretty well, at least for me.

0xffff2• 4 years ago

What is your lame priority for sticking with it?

Adobe and Autodesk products.

If it's using Excel or Word with a bunch of customizations that won't work in LibreOffice, again you need to change your priorities or approach to solving the problems you did that to solve.

Only because MS is hell-bent on destroying their ecosystem. As long as Windows 10 is still receiving security updates, I can keep getting actual work done instead of investing a ton of time into things I care nothing about. I have no interest in developing office/photo/cad software, only in using those things.

efdee• 4 years ago

Unpopular opinion: I use Windows because it does what I want it to do. Not for lack of knowing alternatives - I've been using Linux on desktops and servers for well over two decades now.

I don't really care about the telemetry. For some reason, I don't see the in-UI ads people are complaining about. Yes, sometimes I'm annoyed by it. I'm even more annoyed when I run Linux on desktops. So what?

And don't get me started on just how condescending it is for you to be telling people their priorities are wrong because they are not yours. There's nothing wrong with sticking to Windows because that one game you're hung up on doesn't run on Windows. There's nothing wrong with using Excel or Word because that one extension you're using doesn't work or doesn't exist on LibreOffice. Telling people to "get a console or VR headset" for gaming instead of their Windows rig with the latest AAA-games that won't run on Linux (yet)? That's just obnoxiously ignorant.

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

Nope, not interested in defending my choice in OS to some rando on the internet. Sorry pal, I don't care what you think. I have the right to use whatever OS I choose.

zcombynator• 4 years ago

Happy that Microsoft lost the mobile wars. So just wait 10 years and Windows will be gone anyway.

ultra_nick• 4 years ago

Gaming was the only thing keeping me on windows. Windows 11 ads have given me a reason to finally move to Linux.

bayindirh4• 4 years ago

Talking about wonderful backwards compatibility, and then talking inconsistent UI design is kinda ironic though. Because all these older themed windows are using the exact feature you told you love in the opening paragraphs of the piece: "Backwards compatibility".

So, why Microsoft shouldn't use the exact feature they have built so painstakingly? Also, forcing these older UI toolkits to render the same as the latest iteration would break many many things.

We're talking about an OS which includes almost complete copies of its older versions and some patched installations of InstallShield to begin with.

I have no words for ads though. This is really very bad.

croes• 4 years ago

It's one thing to keep old the old API for backwards compatibility it's another to lack a new API for the new UI.

The API to render a Windows 11 native context menu does not exist.

bayindirh4• 4 years ago

My comment was not about that. That lack of API situation is unacceptable from my point of view, but I'm not terribly surprised about that when we're talking about Microsoft.

My comment was about the paragraph starting with:

There’s a meme about how there are at least ten different design conventions in Windows 11 and it’s very much “in your face” once you start using Windows 11 on the daily.

jazzfool• 4 years ago

No, this is a non-problem. If Microsoft stuck with Win32, just like how Apple stuck with Cocoa, this wouldn't be an issue.

bayindirh4• 4 years ago

It's a problem according to the author. Both the lack of an official API for the latest iteration of context menus and existence of older UI artifacts are presented as "paper cuts" and disorienting.

I'm not stating whether it's a problem or not, just iterating/expanding on what the author have said.

nla2• 4 years ago

What would people rather have? A new OS that doesn't vacuum up your privacy or social media that doesn't partisan censor? Which is more important?

amai• 4 years ago

Windows needs a good stackexchange forum where one can find all kinds of workarounds for its shortcomings. Otherwise it will stay unusable.

a-dub• 4 years ago

confused software encourages confused habits of mind.

ditched windows (and its apparent organizational brain damage) 18 years ago and have only ever looked back when forced to in employment situations.

strongly believe that if you normalize broken computing by forcing developers to use broken platforms, then they'll produce broken software.

aftergibson• 4 years ago

If users were willing to put up with all the dark patterns, ads and tracking in Windows 10, they'll suffer through this too and the next iteration. People using computers as appliances won't care, and the rest technical enough to be annoyed are boiling frogs.

trey-jones2• 4 years ago

Of course I agree with these confounding decisions, and I've written about it before. I must, however, point out that yes, you do in fact need an Apple account to log into your Mac device on recent versions of macOS. Not only that, but you won't be able to download any apps (free or not) without adding a credit card to your account.

I found the mac setup experience to be even worse than Windows 10 (both of these done in the last 6 months). I haven't even tried Windows 11 and have no intention of doing so. In both cases I made choices during the setup process that were not the default, and I believe that it broke some things, at least in the case of Mac, where most of the users do have another Apple device to use for 2FA, or do want to use iCloud for backups (or OneDrive - I'm sure some people use these services but I have absolutely no desire!)

Anyway, it's very frustrating to watch the user experience getting worse and worse from organizations that have an amount of resources to work with that we can't even fathom.

Edit: to say I'm not hugely invested in either Windows or Mac's longterm success. There are no personal or professional computing needs that I have (or predict) that can't be satisfied in Linux, and my usage patterns reflect that.

amarshall• 4 years ago

I must, however, point out that yes, you do in fact need an Apple account to log into your Mac device on recent versions of macOS.

This is false, at least as of macOS 12.3. However, the install process does encourage signing-in. Unlike Windows, though, it doesn’t require non-obvious shenanigans—like disconnecting from the Internet—to bypass it during the installer. Reportedly, the latest Windows 11 Insider builds do not provide any means to create a local account in the installer.

Not only that, but you won't be able to download any apps (free or not) without adding a credit card to your account.

This is also false, I presently have an Apple account with no CC and have downloaded (free) Mac App Store applications using it.

trey-jones2• 4 years ago

I guess I should be more specific about what I could and could not do. I could not download XCode without adding a credit card. I've already mentioned that it seemed broken, which it did. I spent time with support trying to figure it out. Ultimately, once I added a credit card I was able to download. Perhaps I was already acknowledging that I would have an AppleID, since the machine was expressly for iOS development.

pie_flavor• 4 years ago

I am the most ardent Windows evangelist I know. I have spent so much time learning Windows's APIs and idiosyncrasies because they're just so cool. I love the APIs, I love the system, I love the software and I love the way everything Just Works.

And I'm not installing this shit. It's a skin. It's Windows 10, but retvrned to rounded corners, and with a tenth of the customizability. It's an attempt to put Mac in Windows by people who don't understand either and, if previous HN threads are true, who don't dogfood the result. It has no serious improvements at any level, and every change they have made at first glance is a step backwards. WinUI 3 is already in Win10 and the Android emulator will be ported when it actually comes out. And most damning, I hear report after report after report of backcompat issues with games, which is supposed to be Windows's flagship feature. So what's the point of upgrading? Why would I ever? It's like Windows 8 all over again, but this time they're not even replacing old stuff with new stuff, they're just fucking up the old stuff.

tonguez• 4 years ago

“I love [Windows]… I love the way everything Just Works.”

Stopped reading here.

baal80spam• 4 years ago

It IS true, though.

piyush_soni2• 4 years ago

It might be fashionable to say that about Apple products etc., but using a macbook pro for 8 months now (long term user of Windows), I can say, Windows machine DOES actually just work MUCH more than macs. I can't even connect to an external 4K monitor to this stupid silver box without it completely throttling everything meaningful that I can do on it. On top of that there are so many stupid UI/UX decisions that it has taken that make no sense. I would want my company to at least allow people to work on Windows machine too, but they are so much invested in macs that they don't want to.

s3micolon0• 4 years ago

Hi pie_flavor, I am interested in learning more about windows myself, since I am using it on a daily basis. I have found it quite difficult to learn deeper about windows (unlike linux) and look into the "power user" features since I find most of the information/blogs on windows is usually surface level and things being described as a blackbox. Seeing that you quite like the windows API and are familiar with windows quite intimately, would you please be interested in chatting with me for windows resources which I can use to dive deeper into and learn more ?

Would really appreciate if I can get in touch with you on some other chat based social platform. Thank you in advance!

snambi• 4 years ago

The best way to make windows better, is, "stop using windows". That is the only way.

stuffbyspencer2• 4 years ago

Hot Take that no doubt will meet a lot of doubt: I would make a prediction that Window's next OS, is going to be semi-Linux based.

Imagine Windows doing to their OS the way they did with their browser, forking opensource code and rebranding it as their own. I could see them deciding to take some flavor of Linux (or maybe even something esoteric like Google's Fuchsia), and just slapping on their bloat & spyware.

I don't think this would damage Microsoft's marketshare as much as some people think. Sure, they no longer have "their own codebase", but I don't see the benefit in that. Hell, they could go lower & build off the actual Linux kernel and then build there own distro off of that. That way they can still enforce certain structures at a low level.

I would deeply enjoy this, although I would not use it (sticking with Linux). But imagine Microsoft embracing & advocating for AppImages/Flatpaks/Snap packages, Vulken, WINE/Steam Proton, etc. Imagine building for only 2 platforms to get your app running on (nearly) all devices. Imagine having Linux on the desktop get the same treatment it got with Linux on mobile.

Again, I understand this sounds like I'm predicting pigs will fly, or it'll rain cats & dogs, or the government will be efficient, but I'm serious, I can see this happening. Maybe not soon, but the next decade could be very interesting to see how this fabled "new" Microsoft moves & behaves.

phendrenad23• 4 years ago

Hot Take that no doubt will meet a lot of doubt

That's neither a hot take nor a new one. People have been predicting it since the 1900s. If anything, more people believe it than doubt it.

But sadly, after making these predictions, and being proven wrong, year after year, no one sits down and asks why it didn't happen.

But I did. So let me try to explain.

The short version is: "The Linux kernel licensing model is hostile to the Windows hardware ecosystem".

What does that mean? Well, the Linux kernel licensing model is GPLv2. But it's more than that. It's actually "GPLv2 plus the interpretation of the kernel developers". And the kernel developers have tried to enforce their interpretation using technical means. Specifically, if you want to compile closed-source drivers into the MAINLINE Linux kernel, they make it difficult for you. Only one company fights this difficulty. That company is Nvidia. How hard does Nividia have it? Nvidia has to ship their kernel driver as two parts. A GPL-compatible stub (which is compiled into the kernel), and a closed-source blob (which connects to this stub).

"That's not so bad" you say. Well there's more. The GPL stub only works for one kernel version. You know, 5.17, 5.18, etc. When the user updates their kernel (which they MUST do in order to get security fixes!), the GPL stub may stop working. Why is that? Because while Linus Torvalds mandates a stable _userland_ API, the internals of the kernel, including drivers and other kernel modules, changes ALL THE TIME. Seriously, stuff is changed and refactored all the time. So, Nvidia must release a new driver each time the kernel updates. That's more work. That means more employees for every hardware vendor. That means every hardware vendor would need to push those costs on to consumers or accept lower profits. That means every hardware vendor would scream bloody murder at Microsoft to not do this.

Not so bad now? But there's more. How do you install the new driver version? When you update the kernel, hopefully your distro is smart enough to grab the new version of the nvidia driver and install it for you also. If that somehow gets out of step, you get a kernel panic. That's an ugly error for Sam Sixpack or Deb McBusinesshuman to deal with. They're certainly going to call their IT department, who is going to call Microsoft and complain. But that's not so bad...

But there's more. Antivirus. Once Linux is underlying the most popular OS in the world, it'll need antivirus. But, antivirus companies will need to release a new kernel module each time there's a new Linux kernel update. Or, they can rely on eBPF. Maybe. eBPF is still untested for that purpose.

"So why can't hardware vendors just release their drivers as GPLv2 and upstream them into the kernel?" Well, that's a possible solution. But companies are generally averse to giving their code away for free, and it's not the default, so the legal departments will have to check it over, and MBA types will have to grok the idea of open-source. Many will push back on Microsoft and ask them to not do this.

"So why can't Microsoft just fork Linux and remove all of the restrictions, give it a stable closed-source driver API and/or make it capable of running Windows 11 drivers natively, and just give the bird to upstream/Torvalds?" Yeah that's very possible. But at that point, is it really using "Linux" or a kernel based on Linux? Why wouldn't they just use BSD instead and avoid 90% of this trouble?

stuffbyspencer2• 4 years ago

I'm not familiar with how Google does it with Android & Chromebooks, do you have a similar level of understanding there? Your explanation was very good, thank you for that information. I'm now wondering if Google is just small enough (with their OS operations) that they don't face these issues, or if they do something different.

gxt• 4 years ago

I don't understand the surprise expressed by many in this thread. There's 47k engineers all working very hard to justify their job at MS, there's no incentive on making a good product, it just has to sell, keep your boss happy and that's it. Why would you expect that many people working fulltime to output anything consistent? There's only so many real requirements to get a product that works, and as soon as someone gets his hands on them it inevitably threatens an other team. So new requirements are created and you end up with this.

fleddr• 4 years ago

As a lifelong Windows user (since 3.11), Microsoft has always sucked at Windows. It started as a single user, non-networked OS with an OK UI, followed by 25 years of duct tape.

They've never had "taste". Even their attempts at modern flat design are a total disaster.

Security for the longest of time was an afterthought, an entire industry was created to fill this fundamental gap. Even "internet" was an afterthought.

Another issue is that Microsoft does not see things through. They start various seemingly random initiatives and then just give up halfway through. They suck at execution. It's been 10 years since Windows 8, and the UI is messier than ever. Same for their various attempts at a "light" or mobile version of Windows.

I could go on, but the way I see it, Windows is the "people's OS". The use case for it is...all of them. It runs the combined use cases of billions of people, every niche you can think of. Most of these users do not see Windows as particularly enjoyable, nor do they enjoy Microsoft's mismanagement, they suffer in silence because it still somewhat works, and there's no realistic alternative.

Windows is not cool and not high growth, which is why I think Microsoft is doing an "Adobe". It's a platform to sell cloud products and soon will be a cloud platform/subscription in itself. Windows as a service. The writing is on the wall.

alecmg• 4 years ago

Its ironic and scary how 3.11 was the last Windows with consistent

a) UI design. It was either a DOS box or a Win 3.11 style window

b) file sharing, simple and intuitive

c) integration with browsers. Browser was standalone. There was no integration.

logbiscuitswave• 4 years ago

I couldn't agree with many of the things stated in this article more. I really disliked Windows 8. Windows 10 was what made me move to a Mac for my next personal computer acquisition (I'm still stuck with Windows at work), but at least it grew on me after a while. I mean, I'm still not a huge fan of it but many of the rough edges got ironed out and I've gotten used to many of its quirks. Windows 11 on the other hand -- it's just so aggressively terrible that I actively dread using it. Just simple things like changing the volume, or changing the power settings on a laptop have become excruciatingly slow or require much more effort than before. In so many places text has been removed for the sake of "cleanliness" -- like in File Explorer, the Ribbon is now just a set of largely indistinguishable buttons with no labels that I'll never use. The Explorer context menu has been reduced to mostly things I don't care about and a more indistinguishable buttons I'll never use while burying the context menu things I really want behind another mouse click. (Thankfully there's a magic registry key that restores the old-style context menus.)

It's easy to point out the consistency issues -- and yeah, they are really bad, and everywhere making Windows 11 feel like an early beta, not a full fledged release. More than anything even basic stuff that's worked well for years or decades has regressed to a point where so many things are barely functional or even recognizable anymore. It's like some designer had MacOS described to them verbally and decided to redesign Windows to look similar. Unfortunately, the latest versions of MacOS aren't all that awesome either when it comes to consistency or usability. In so many ways the design decisions in Windows 11 feel like solutions in search of problems -- they certainly don't make my experience using it any better -- all they do is make me appreciate Windows 10 more than ever (never thought I'd have that sentiment). I keep hoping Windows 11 will get better but even on the latest Insider builds I see very little in the way of improvements to things I really care about so it gives me little confidence.

The article brings up a some great points about how there's no "one" UI framework and the difficulties for developers to make their applications look consistent -- and this is totally true. There's so many different UI frameworks from Microsoft with different levels of maturity, abandonment, usefulness, usability, and use. I'm a big fan of WPF and I think it's one of the best desktop UI frameworks out there -- and sadly it's largely been left to rot which is a real shame and it doesn't support many of the newer aspects of Windows without a lot of hacks. UWP is simply awful -- I swore it off after using it for one project. WinUI and MAUI have huge problems of their own and still feel beta. It makes you wonder what are you supposed to use for new projects when you're stuck with either a great framework that seems dead , or a bunch of new ones that don't feel production ready. This nearly 20 year old blog post from Joel Spolsky is just as relevant and prescient as ever: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

bastardoperator2• 4 years ago

I just want a barebones version of windows with none of the fluff. It would also be nice if they could hire someone that understood fonts and icons and worked on those too. At this point all I see is an old OS that keeps getting garbage bolted on to it.

flembat• 4 years ago

Anyone else expect this to be about the Windows scheduler?

It is a godawful shame, as Windows has the potential to be quite a good operating system for PCs, with just a bit more engineering effort and a bit less filthy gunk it could be great.

aorth• 4 years ago

I'm on mobile. How do I close that "Support Ukraine" banner taking up 1/3 of the screen?

makecheck• 4 years ago

I feel like the industry is really struggling with shipping “boring utilitarian things”. Rather than let software remain boring and just-plain-useful, it is forced to slowly transform into a nightmare of ads, pop-ups and other crap that is clearly NOT required for core functionality and ultimately the whole thing becomes awful to use.

Even when the intrusion is small, it is ridiculous because it is not required for the software to work (e.g. in the iPhone SETTINGS app, nothing about tweaking settings ever requires the user to view a stupid ad, and yet there they are, crappifying the UI).

And as I get older I am telling myself “this isn’t what I signed up for”: I want useful software that is free of garbage, especially when money is exchanged, and most certainly when a LOT of money is exchanged.

So tell these bean-counters to get the hell out, and let us make computers “only” useful instead of ad-spewing machines.

xtracto• 4 years ago

I blame "Product Managers" or "Product Owners". In my 20 years of being at different technology companies, I´ve realized that people in this position must come up with new "features", bells and whistles to keep justifying their job.

Think about say, Microsoft Word (only word, not office). Word has been feature complete since maybe the 2000 version. But, where would all the "product development" arm of the Word application go if they declared it as such? The only required people would be "project managers" to manage bug fixes projects, and the development chain (programmers, QAs, etc)...

But these people have to eat, so they keep adding crap to an otherwise good product, they keep shuffling things around and "experimenting" to maintain their job.

piyush_soni2• 4 years ago

_Word has been feature complete since maybe the 2000 version_ I am not sure, say for example the browser / Office 365 release version of Microsoft Word was very useful, and I'm sure they had to make _many_ changes in the desktop Word too in order to sync everything with the online word. That's pretty important I would say and it works great. The requirement of 'Feature completeness' keeps changing with times.

notyourNMI• 4 years ago

It's almost cute that people still think Windows as a product team cares what individual users want/need/buy. Individual opinions/license purchases don't seem to move Microsoft a millimeter in any direction. As others pointed out, examples abound with the horrible UI intrusions/dumb things that users have to work around just to get work done. My personal pet peeve is this persistent Windows 10 screen dimming/darkening that happens whenever I pull up a terminal no matter the settings changed via UI or registry. Also, having volunteers doing the (not always helpful or even right) troubleshooting for frustrated users isolates the devs from the stupid decisions they or their managers make. (speaking as a software developer myself: devs should be required to work support briefly in the section they'll be developing on so they understand user frustrations).

I believe the reason users still pay is so the price can justifiably be multiplied in bulk corporate purchases, otherwise they'd give it away for free to get more of that sweet, sweet data. So they can copy Google, poorly.

arendtio• 4 years ago

I mean, I can literally run a game written for Windows 95 on Windows 11 without major issues (no, I am not going to open the SafeDisc can of worms this time). I can’t do that on macOS or Linux boxes reliably, and yet Windows is doing a-OK with this task.

While I get the point, that is not as true as it sounds. E.g. AFAIK running Tomb Raider 2 is easier on Linux via Proton/Wine than it is on Windows.

pjettter2• 4 years ago

This focuses on some aesthetic "features" and it doesn't even touch a large portion of all other problems. I won't even attempt but I'll mention one thing.

The part about Windows that bothers me most is that I have no control regarding how windows behave. I am typing and suddenly I am typing in another window! And there is no way to know what just happened. I could be pressing the ESC key while a window for another application just came in focus. Gone! The window and my text. WTF? Or it could be a window with a default button and I just pressed ENTER. Gone! What just happened? Impossible to know. DO NOT INTERFERE WITH MY FOCUS! If I am typing in a window, DO NOT EVER DISTURB ME. I am operating in a context. MY CONTEXT. Not Cortana. Not some app that wants to do something on a schedule because of some enterprise policy. I am working!

matiasmolinari• 4 years ago

For anyone curious why these inconsistencies happen:

https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY https://www.melconway.com/Home/pdf/committees.pdf

roryokane• 4 years ago

The context menu in File Explorer now gates some of the most useful options behind another extra click […] What’s the point of these changes?

For that specific change, the Windows Developer Blog post “Extending the Context Menu and Share Dialog in Windows 11” (https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/07/19/extend...) hints at the designers’ reasons.

I haven’t switched to Windows 11 due to the many other complaints I’ve heard, but based on various statements in that post I can imagine good reasons for changing the context menu:

# Saving menu navigation time

Having a long menu that contains every option is not free: it requires more time and effort from the user when they locate and click on the common items they use. Depending on how often the prioritized items are clicked and how big the penalty is for, the tradeoff could be worth it.

I don’t have the data on how much menu navigation time a smaller menu saves in the long term, but since Microsoft forces telemetry on users, hopefully they did at least collect such data while they evaluated the new design.

# Encouraging API upgrades

This change also encourages app developers to upgrade their context menu extensions to the latest API by “punishing” them if they don’t, by making their context menu items slower to access. While it’s understandable that developers of such apps would feel annoyed at this increased pressure to upgrade, such a policy might be an effective way to helping end users by solving the last two Windows 10 context menu problems listed by the blog post. That is, this increased pressure to use a newer API might:

• increase the numbers of apps the user uses whose commands are attributable to that app

• increase the number of apps the user uses whose extensions of the context menu have a lower risk of performance and reliability issues

However, I do see the potential for this backfiring if developers of Windows apps think that Windows is requiring too much upkeep for maintaining their software on Windows to be worth it.

Donckele• 4 years ago

Some weeks ago I resolved issues, for a friend, with searching for files or emails within outlook.

The results for searches firstly did not make sense, some files/emails found but most not.

I resolved the indexing of files by finally finding the right settings page after some time. The only feedback that I had done the right thing was seeing the “number of files indexed” incrementing.

For outlook, I was expecting some settings page within the app that would explain why emails were not being found. After some more time I found that the settings page was outside of outlook! I cannot remember where or how I fixed the issue but it was complete bullshit.

Every once in a while I have these experiences and and wonder how most people live with their computers and the amount of stress and time wasted on stuff that you would expect not to have to deal with in 2022.

Even though I have a soft spot for Microsoft, I abandoned their flagship product, the operating system, many years ago and was probably one of my wisest choices.

Just like I don’t use Google’s flagship product - I just hate it when companies ruin something near perfect by adding shit to please everyone or to milk it so much for profit that it becomes just a pile of trash.

nmlt• 4 years ago

This made me feel a lot of schadenfreude and also made me feel better about the “Upgrade to MacOS Monterey” notification on my incompatible Mac.

erichalelund• 4 years ago

Yeah, ads are annoying, sort of like someone taking a feather and tickling the back of your neck every few minutes. As for the inconsistencies, haven't really noticed and don't really care. If enough people make noise, someone may get a bug up their xxx and do something about it. The main game I play is on Windows, so windows it is. I get enough programming at work that I don't really want to do it at home anymore (and I'm on Linux / UNIX at work).

A lot of what we are seeing is most likely due to Microsoft's eventual transition to Windows as a subscription. I suspect that's inevitable. As long as I can play my games and read my gmail ... meh.

sadsteve• 4 years ago

Yeah, I switch to Linux as my main OS about a month after Windows 8.0 was released. I definitely didn't like the direction Microsoft seemed to be taking. I now run MX Linux and have a Windows 10 VM (with GPU pass through)for the games that won't run under Linux and for the occasional photo editing session (I really dislike Gimp!). Linux has had way fewer issues for me than the recent chain of Windows releases.

minroot• 4 years ago

What is wrong with you?

dam_broke_it• 4 years ago

Find me a linux distro that can play ANY/ALL steam games.....

aagha• 4 years ago

I highly recommend using 'autoruns' [0].

0 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/auto...

Windows needs a change in priorities

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