Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11

Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11(sambent.com)

1046 points by h0ek 101 days ago | 758 comments

Macha 101 days ago |

It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.

I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.

Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice

nicoburns 101 days ago | |

> I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line.

I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour. Until we change that, the power will always be with these kind of companies.

Perhaps governments could levy punative fines in such situations. But that seems like a bandaid (and ripe for corruption). Ideally we'd have structural change that prevents this behaviour in the first place. Perhaps worker representation on company boards. Or progressive corporation taxation that more strongly encourages smaller companies and more competition.

rmah 100 days ago | | |

"Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behavior". This is true, but what people seem to fail to grasp is that rewarding such behavior == buying the product. If people simply didn't buy it, they wouldn't do it. It's really that simple. It may be hard to not buy, of course. The alternatives may be worse, there may be downsides to not buying, etc. But nothing else will really be effective.

deaux 101 days ago | | |

None of those. All we need is enforcing laws that are already on the books. Antitrust laws. Break up big tech.

KetoManx64 101 days ago | | |

The reason we are in such a position is because government contracts and government involvement with companies like Microsoft Amazon. They don't have to care about consumers when they have multi billion dollar Gov contracts.

tantalor 101 days ago | | |

> consumers have little power here

Don't buy their products, and tell your friends

observationist 100 days ago | | |

I'd love if everyone switched to Linux and the walled gardens just died, but the most realistic outcome would be Microsoft and Apple having to up their game and improve their respective products. Right now they're driving hellbent for leather into OSaaS monthly computer subscriptions, eliminating use agency to the greatest degree possible, and exploiting every possible intrusion and usurpation of consumer privacy, vacuuming up every last bit of data and monetizing it to the greatest degree possible, without any concurrent return in value to the consumer.

The only way that stops is by having enough people leave that they change their behavior, and it's not sufficient to switch to the competition that is operating under the same perverted incentives under the same system with the same failure modes. No Windows, no Mac, no Chromebooks, no enshittified corporate quagmire of awfulness and despair.

The solution is simple - use Linux. Set your family up with Linux.

It's the year of the Linux desktop; it's never been easier or better, and it's never been more important to make the leap.

halJordan 100 days ago | | |

Your are suffering from a fundamental misidentification. There are only people. There is no system doing anything. There are people doing things. Consumers have as much control as they want.

When you insist that the people comprising the system have no agency, you're the one perpetuating it

mlsu 100 days ago | | |

The best solution would be competition. But go ahead try to compete, you will be crushed.

maerF0x0 101 days ago | | |

> I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour.

Consumers have the final say, our economic system fundamentally is consumer spending. (Ok, save for most recent year(s) of mag7 AI buildout. But generally that's the case for USA economy).

We have to stop taking out our wallet and just accepting things like sheep. (nearly) Every one of the "scrapped" computers could have run a *nix OS and been a middle finger to microsoft.

jeppester 101 days ago | |

The only way this get better is if the user gets to choose between an OS with ads, lock-in, telemetry etc. and then one with none of that.

As it is now, buying a laptop in a store is a "pick your poison" situation.

Ranxer 101 days ago | | |

Better yet: don't pick any poison at all -- both System76 and Tuxedo Computers (as examples, sometimes you can buy a latop without an OS and save the money, same goes for PCs) offer laptops with Linux installed: no Microslop tax, and hardware that's guaranteed to work with OSS.

jacquesm 101 days ago | | |

What bugged me for years is that I ended up paying the microsoft or apple tax that way. In the end I figured out a more efficient way around that than any of the rebates/refunds: just buy second hand hardware. Someone else paid for and used the windows license, I just need the box.

jorvi 101 days ago | | |

I mean, this goes way beyond OSes.

Look at the mobile YouTube client. The bottom navigation bar has the "+" create button stuffed right in the middle of it, larger than any other button. What % of users creates YouTube content? Probably <1%. What pp of those do it in the mobile YouTube client? Probably 0.1%. Yet the button is there, with no way to disable it.

In general, why don't apps have a "creator" toggle, off-by-default, that optimized the entire UI for viewing / consuming? Just how apps like Uber have either an entire separate app for 'partners', or toggle.

I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders. And YouTube has no competitor, so they can go buckwild with anything that synthetically increases KPIs.

I think the only app in recent memory that I have seen right the ship is Spotify. The past year they have introduced a lot of toggles for things like the shuffle algorithm, the dumb looping album art videos, audio loudness normalization being split out into normalization and compression ('volume'), etc; About the only thing that's missing is a toggle to disable podcasts, just like YouTube needs a toggle to completely disable shorts.

Any PMs reading this, be our hero. Fight the good fight.

prox 101 days ago | | |

This.. give me the - option - to not be an ad infested hellhole of an OS and sell me a product.

geophile 101 days ago | | |

On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase in two kinds of posts: 1) That’s it, I’ve had it, windows is dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a distro. 2) I’d love to get off window and move to Linux but I can’t because it doesn’t have an app that works identically to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.

njovin 101 days ago | | |

I hate to sound like an apologist but it seems unfair to me to lump MS and Apple into the same bucket here.

Yes, Apple has a 'walled garden' to an extent, but I've never once worried about MacOS serving me an ad from a third party, and their privacy controls are top notch and seem to get better as advertisers attack methods get more sophisticated.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to jump through a few hoops to get an unsigned app installed, and each time it's been relatively painless.

baq 101 days ago | |

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.

this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).

lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.

Draiken 101 days ago | | |

I don't think "care" is the right word here at all. We simply don't have options.

This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition, but competition eventually leads to winners that then consolidate their positions and we end up with no real choices.

You're telling me people would pick a worse OS because they don't care even if they had real options? I don't believe that for a second.

surajrmal 100 days ago | | |

A single product meant for all the users will inevitably be a poor fit for most of them. We need more variety of products for the different segments of the market. Alternatively we need more knobs to tune things to user needs. One promise of AI is enabling folks to personalize product experiences, but so far it's all been surface level.

I think the desktop Linux ecosystem is an example of something healthier, but it goes too far in the other direction. There are too many options to choose from that it's hard to find the one for your needs.

awakeasleep 101 days ago | | |

If a regulator is effective at protecting the users, that regulator becomes a target for the industry

BloondAndDoom 101 days ago | | |

It’s an option issue, I use an extremely modified version of windows, and same one for the last 5 years I think with the updates, local accounts, no ads, no telemetry, tweaks etc. I still don’t like tons of things about windows but compared to Linux desktops it’s heaven (for me). Don’t even get me started on macOS desktop experience it’s a fucking miserable (again for my personal taste).

A lot of windows UI design decisions are pretty good. They mess it up now and then like windows 8 (tablet design mess) disaster, especially now with WSL 2.0, it delivers everything I need.

Do I still hate it , yes for the reasons explained in this article and other stupid designed features like search index, windows defender , mix of legacy and new dialogs, for the shitty design of powershell and then the mess of mixed shells, terminal etc.

List goes on, but comparatively I’ll pick windows desktop over anything out there at the moment. It’s a personal choice but I assume majority of windows user feel this way (or cannot afford macOS :))

Henchman21 100 days ago | | |

> lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.

How can this be your takeaway when there is no channel for communication with the users? There is no signal at all so you assume what is convenient for you. But this has no bearing on actual user sentiment, its just convenience for you.

Part and parcel of the “problem” with tech people is they assume they can just fill in the gaps with their preferences and pretend they’re actually user preferences. In the rest of life this is called “bullshit”.

mihaaly 101 days ago | | |

Things forced on you is not market. You are not talking about market rules at all. This is not it!

GolfPopper 101 days ago | |

Speaking only for myself, this sort of behavior is a great way to break the Trust Thermocline [1]. The point where I am so frustrated, so fed up, so expectant that said company will abuse me again, that I refuse to do business with them at all, under any circumstances, no matter if it is inconvenient to avoid them or not.

1. https://x.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904

willis936 101 days ago | | |

Exactly. This behavior is blindly driving to "line go up" without realizing they just dug their own grave. 2025 was a series of existential missteps for Microsoft. This is a historic moment. These suits would rather die than try to build trust.

dude250711 101 days ago | |

I think managers were promoted for infecting their features with Copilot, and developers for infecting them with React, and here we are.

OneDrive managers on the other hand are one step away from inventing some way of adding a gacha mechanic.

esafak 101 days ago | | |

It is worth pointing out that it is the Recommended section in the menu that uses React Native. See also https://devblogs.microsoft.com/react-native/rnw-settings-win...

I ditched Windows long ago so I'm mentioning this only in the interest of accuracy.

severak_cz 101 days ago | | |

Infecting with React can be easily explained by pathetic state of desktop application development environment.

See https://domenic.me/windows-native-dev/

mexicocitinluez 101 days ago | | |

Blaming React is absurd. Its like blaming the screwdriver instead of the person using it.

goalieca 101 days ago | | |

So you’re saying that the people (HR) team is responsible and that their retention and growth policies are to blame.

h1fra 101 days ago | |

That's how the world works for everything: software, politics, social stuff (good or bad), war, etc. People are bad at judging gradual/slow changes but when you push a bit too far, you have already gained so much that you can usually just say sorry and move on

justonceokay 100 days ago | |

I think about how a successful and robust ecosystem is one in which there are many parasites at every level of the food chain. If your ecosystem doesn’t have parasites then it’s not operating with nearly the amount of interconnectedness or efficiency that it could be otherwise.

It’s similar to that idea that floats around where $0 lost to fraud is not the optimal amount. If you over index on removing fraud from your system eventually you will spend more on monitoring and removing it than you save on the fraud itself. That is time you could have spent building more things that make money.

The ecosystem is a beast of its own and the optimal state of the ecosystem is /not/the optimal state for any actor within it

raxxorraxor 99 days ago | |

That is power the user loses if he chooses SaaS for the most part. An OS is still a different case, but that part is covered with restrictive update policies.

I do believe that Microsoft does bleed users though. This is an effect that isn't easily observed, but users tend to follow developers at some point when the software repertoire begins to get more attractive on other operating systems. The industry still employs a lot of native Windows apps, but more and more get replaced through alternatives and here Windows will be less relevant at some point as well.

kivle 100 days ago | |

I've noticed recently that my Windows 11 start menu isn't a 50% gray empty blob anymore. I always disable "recommended apps" (eg. ad supported app suggestions), so 50% of the space in my start menu was unused, yet it was still there of course. Kind of refreshing to have a somewhat normal looking start menu again with something as revolutionary as a list of apps right when you open it. Let's see how long it takes before they mess it up again.

yfw 101 days ago | |

Like that windows recall feature which they keep pushing

Gigachad 101 days ago | | |

Because Microsoft makes far more money on enterprise and ai products than they do selling windows licenses to consumers.

m463 100 days ago | |

The answer to all of this has traditionally been robust competition.

A framework of just and fair laws and regulations should support this, backed up by open enforcement.

but, yeah.

SilverElfin 101 days ago | |

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.

Yes, when there isn’t real competition. And that’s in part due to a long history of anti competitive practices but also simply because Microsoft is too big and should be broken up.

HexPhantom 101 days ago | |

The rollback only ever applies to the thing people noticed. Everything else quietly becomes the new normal.

nineteen999 100 days ago | |

This wasn't even the first time for MS .. Win98SE was a similar disaster stuffed full of junk, most people don't remember Vista fondly either. In each case they redeemed themselves temporarily .. XP following 89SE and Windows 7/8 after Vista. History repeats I guess.

omoikane 100 days ago | |

The underlying philosophy for these companies seem to be "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Some of us are done forgiving, but I am not sure there are enough of us to reverse this cultural trend.

kiicia 101 days ago | |

Too late now. Multiple people having anything to say when choosing hardware and software, including me, will no longer advise or approve buying windows machine or using windows in general.

coffeemug 100 days ago | |

A view from my small corner on the inside: taste isn't merely not incentivized, it's actively disincentivized. It's not selected for during the interview process, if you demonstrate a little of it nobody cares, if you demonstrate too much of it you clash with everyone else's priorities which quickly becomes career limiting. So people willing to fight for taste never advance.

This isn't some nefarious plot to screw over users. Taste is not prioritized because nobody has it and thus can't recognize it. Can't value something you don't even recognize. This is orthogonal to talent btw. Lots of people there who are insanely good at what they do, who produce the most hideous API specs you've ever seen, as one example.

A much more mundane (and almost certainly true) explanation is that people who put all that crap in legitimately thought it's a good idea. Taste is its own thing and it's just not in Microsoft's DNA.

deaux 101 days ago | |

>It’s quite common for companies

It's quite common for megacorps, FAANG and friends, NASDAQ bigwigs.

It's rare for small companies, and extremely rare for independent developers.

jayd16 100 days ago | |

You'll note that those are both B2B fumbles. The savvy end user usually doesn't have the needed weight.

ruszki 101 days ago | |

> It’s quite common for companies

This is not general. This is true only on markets which are full regarding available customers, and there is no foreseeable growth.

What we can see in IT in the past 10-15 years (especially after around 2015) is the slow progress towards this state from a rich and competitive (and personally I think a way more fun) one.

I worked for dying companies (e.g. Ericsson), for slowly moving ones (e.g. Santander), and for several now dead startups, and what happened with Google, Microsoft, etc is that they slowly moving from the "startup" market - there is still available non conquered market segments - to the dying, slowly moving one - where there are a few large players, and it's not possible to grow in any meaningful way with your own skills. The only difference now compared to the decades until the 90s is that antitrust checks and balances are dead, and they can artificially inflate their own power, which haven't happened in this scale for at least 100 years. And it caused world shattering problems back then, and it will now too.

I would leave this field happily, even when I'm exceptionally good in it, because it's more and more disgusting. Only if there would be any good alternatives, which wouldn't require me to loose at least a decade of my life. But unfortunately, the balance is way more fucked up to easily change my lifestyle at this point. And it will be just worse than this.

dmos62 101 days ago | |

I think private interests should not run what is effectively public infrastructure, like Windows. Or, put another way, infrastructure of national importance should be publicly controlled and governed with transparency and public interests in mind. Either that, or true capitalist competition has to be reenabled aggressively: forbid walled gardens, split up the Googles, etc. This centralization of public utility and power in the hands of private individuals, coupled with an uncompetitive market, is nonsensical. Competition or nationalization.

apetresc 101 days ago | | |

Windows is not public infrastructure. If the government's reliance on it has reached the level of "national importance", then that's the problem that needs to be addressed, not Windows' ownership.

Public infrastructure should be built on open-source, period.

fsflover 101 days ago | |

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.

It's called "enshittification": https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

naikrovek 100 days ago | |

The old “two steps backward, one step forward” routine.

dreamcompiler 100 days ago | |

I call this odious practice "profit maximization titration" and almost all companies do it now. They continually enshittify the product a little at a time until they notice a dip in profits and then they dial back the shittiness a bit. Or if they're really sophisticated they will enshittify the product by a large amount and then do a binary search to restore product functionality in logarithmically smaller steps until the balance between profits and customer dissatisfaction re-stabilizes. They 'git bisect' the product's shittiness, as it were.

cratermoon 100 days ago | |

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate

I get the impression that many companies are working through this with AI-assisted coding. How bad can the product get before the revenue loss is greater than money saved by firing programmers and deploying AI slop? For products like Windows and Office, the subscription model and enterprise account revenue provides a huge cushion for decreasing quality before they even have to apologize and roll back.

mschild 101 days ago | |

The other thing is availability of alternatives.

Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.

chii 101 days ago | | |

> good luck getting the average person through the setup process.

an enterprising hardware manufacturer can take on the mantle, and be the trail blazer with a no-setup machine that works.

Personally, i would imagine something like framework laptop, and steam machine, are the best candidates.

ineedasername 101 days ago | | |

Good luck getting the average person through the setup process

AI is part of the problem with what MS has shoved in to things but it may be part of what can help with the underlying issue of this behavior by corporations.

The average user increasingly will not need to be walked through in certain ways, they’ll only have to be aware something, some way, is possible. Because we are most of usthe average, meaning outsider to knowledge and understanding of things their functioning on a computer. I can strip out tired windows behavior to some extent and certainly stand up a Linux desktop. But I didn’t know how to easily manage retrieval of data from an old disc image that refused to mount. But I knew it was there and not impossible so I asked Claude. A one shot prompt that a few minutes later had Claude reading raw bytes in someway and finding the location of a few files I needed.

So there is potential for AI to fill some gaps in this way and make some things easier and more in reach of average users. It’s potential only though, so continuing to work and ensure open models remain a thing, it’s important. Just like the Internet enabled a lot of things previously out of reach of people. And yeah, that was not an un mixed blessing with the rest, so all the more reason to move forward thoughtfully.

htx80nerd 100 days ago | |

>"It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate."

developer delusion. devs who barely use their own apps. who dont understand the day-to-day user experience.

samrus 100 days ago | | |

No this is product and finance. Product wants more features because that looks better to leadership. And finance likes ads

runjake 100 days ago |

One point that wasn't mentioned is that we've been through this cycle many times before with Microsoft, and we will again.

It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft went "all in" on Windows for developers and power users. WSL was drastically improved, developer tools were revamped and open sourced. The press adored the "new" Microsoft. Many developers moved over to Windows because they "got the best of both worlds".

And then, they just went back to the same old shit. The thing is, the shit phase of this cycle lasts longer than the non-shit phases.

This next phase is just words, so far. But, mind you, even if Microsoft does produce releases to back up those words, they'll be back to their same old shit within a year or two, once again.

And the whole process will repeat.

PS: And regardless of this supposed change of direction, if you listen to recent statements from Satya and other senior leadership, they are still spewing the same platitudes about agentic computing and software. So what's really going to change long-term?

elboru 100 days ago | |

I remember being excited about Edge, I even started using it because it was fast and had a couple of built-in features I liked. It was a big improvement over the old IE, it felt like Microsoft was going the right direction, but then they kept using dark patterns to change my default search engine to Bing.

buccal 100 days ago | | |

Now you have "rounded edges" in Edge that add a content area limiting margins to all sides. Also, they took an open source browser and do not provide the source for Edge. So much for love of open source.

robotnikman 100 days ago | | |

And now Edge is just another one of many chromium based browsers.

alex43578 100 days ago | |

Unfortunately that’s not unique to Microsoft. It’s a fundamental tug of war between the pushback from consumers and the worst ideas and misaligned incentives in an organization

MacOS has had the same ping-pong between good and bad releases, with the latest being particularly poor. Same with video games: one patch brings great fixes, the next introduces absurd cosmetics or a P2W mechanic.

rendaw 100 days ago | | |

When was the last time Linux pingponged between quality and trash?

ptero 101 days ago |

Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.

But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.

Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.

ccppurcell 101 days ago |

I believe they are abusing their customers but I think it's in poor taste to compare this to domestic violence.

BitwiseFool 100 days ago |

While I have many grievances with Windows 11, I am particularly upset about the taskbar. Back in Windows 10, I used a double-height taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. I forget the name of the specific setting, but all windows would appear as their own item, and, the taskbar would ensure that all items retained the same width.

The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get past not being able to at least make a double height taskbar. But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10 also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would resize all existing items to the same dimension.

This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running Windows 10.

neves 101 days ago |

For me the worst is Microsoft Start news. I've already turned it off multiple times and it always come back.

To add insult to injury, it always displays terrible gossip, sports or far right news.

If any developer that works in MS news service is reading this message, please know that I hate you.

i_cannot_hack 101 days ago |

Pulling the emergency break promising to improve a situation will in general not build any trust unless the mea culpa also includes:

1. An analysis of what allowed the situation to get out of control to begin with

2. Systematic changes to prevent it from happening again

Otherwise you will just be in the same situation again in 3 years. And neither is included in Microsoft's messaging here.

Wobbles42 101 days ago | |

I don't really see that happening here.

Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be gaining any by this move.

That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their public image is as bad as it can get.

raddan 101 days ago | | |

> they won't be gaining any by this move.

Then why even do it?

itopaloglu83 101 days ago | |

Microslop is saying “I’m sorry that you’re offended” and will continue to abuse their users. All of this is a PR campaign to fix their image so that they can raise more money.

gentleman11 99 days ago | |

I think this "emergency break" is just going to get eye rolls from most people

c0l0 101 days ago |

Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.

sgbeal 101 days ago | |

The reason, i opine, that so few people switch from Windows to any Unix flavor is that Windows users are waiting for the two productivity suites which make Windows at least marginally usable (cygwin and msys) to be ported to any of the Unix flavors.

;)

SV_BubbleTime 101 days ago | | |

It’s just office.

Make office work and people will happily leave in droves.

trynumber9 101 days ago |

Unfortunately Apple is learning to be as annoying too. I don't want to upgrade to Tahoe which is inscrutable to me. Maybe remind me next year. But they pop up every week reminding me to "upgrade" even though most the problems are unfixed. They have pushed iCloud in the settings application as if it is an adboard.

Hopefully they stop but I recognize these steps from Windows slippery slope.

pier25 101 days ago | |

This sucks. Sometimes they even disguise the update to Tahoe notification as "Pending updates to install later tonight".

gib444 100 days ago | |

Yup this is the sneakiest they've ever been in trying to trick people to upgrade. They try to trick you when installing Sequoia updates - they preselect Tahoe instead of the Sequoia updates

nicbou 101 days ago | |

I haven't upgraded, and the notifications are fairly rare and unintrusive.

pier25 101 days ago | | |

I get it at least once a day. Sometimes as "Update to Tahoe" and sometimes as "Install pending updates tonight".

major505 100 days ago |

As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows platform today.

- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;

- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.

- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.

- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements. But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.

Its the curse of the power user.

smukherjee19 100 days ago |

Just a guess, with Macbook Neo releasing, M$ likely got scared of mass exodus to MacOS (the average PC user can now consider a Macbook and it likely wipes the floor with all Windows laptops out there) and decided to throw in a damage control piece.

guestbest 100 days ago | |

Hilariously, the MacBook neo has the same taskbar issues since it was what Microsoft copied. No one is getting replaced so I’ll guess they’ll just add some customizations to make it more Mac-like to win users back.

lizknope 101 days ago |

I bought my first x86 PC in 1994 to install Linux on. I wanted a Sun workstation but couldn't afford it.

I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like they have Stockholm Syndrome.

My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac.

Silhouette 101 days ago |

In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.

Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.

For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.

Havoc 101 days ago |

Their office subscriptions are also going up in price at. Crazy rates. Giving Stiff competition to food price inflation

All because it has some AI stuff on it that I don’t want.

throwa356262 101 days ago | |

Yes the price hike is almost 2x

If anyone knows how to revert to non-AI version of the subscription let me know

Scoring6931 101 days ago | | |

It's called 365 Classic and it's hidden in the Subscriptions section of your Microsoft account.

BLKNSLVR 101 days ago | |

Funny thing: I wanted to try out Copilot to help with creating a starting point for a diagram in Visio.

Copilot isn't in Visio (at least in the subscription my work pays for).

I used Copilot's chat interface instead, and it is unable to generate a diagram in the Visio .vsdx format; it tried, failed, tried to fix it, failed.

Sigh.

CrimsonRain 101 days ago | | |

I opened a blank document and pasted a fairly large markdown text. Converting it to word (or html) formatting is easy, there are online tools and/or any other LLM can do it. This one time I opened the Copilot willingly and was excited about getting it done with a few keystrokes: "convert to word formatting".

It generates a formatted response but cant edit the document. How stupid you have to be to integrate copilot and not allow it to update text in a text editor??!

SturgeonsLaw 101 days ago | | |

Copilot's glaring limitations when interacting with Office are insane considering that's its main value prop

seebeen 101 days ago |

When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.

pharrington 101 days ago |

Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better product. People who know they need Windows will always have the option to install it themselves.

throwa356262 101 days ago | |

I actually belive that is what triggered this.

There was a rumour 1-2 months ago about Lenovo and Asus meeting Microsoft execs and warning them that if win11 issues continued to cost them support hours and devicw returns they would be forced to find an alternative.

jacquesm 101 days ago | | |

Now there's an idea I can get behind.

hedora 101 days ago | |

I've installed Win 11 in VMs and linux on bare metal quite a few times this years.

If you count "time to unobstructed desktop + working hardware drivers", Debian beats windows by a large margin. (10 minutes vs. 1-2 hours). Also, with windows, you need to type weird crap like this into a terminal:

   & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://debloat.raphi.re/")))

Debian mostly lets you avoid such stuff.

pixeldash928 100 days ago | |

Highly doubt it's good for the mass consumers and non-power users in the long term. Most consumers would prefer household OS name like Windows or MacOS over Linux as a pre-installed OS. OEMs will always prefer Windows because of the profits they make whenever there's a Windows Refresh, no matter how bad the version is.

projektfu 101 days ago |

Recently I got tired of having random changes occur to a Windows installation I use for one purpose: running X-plane. I took the drastic measure of disabling both inbound and outbound network access in Windows firewall by default and turning off most of the pre-installed rules. Then, I allowed outbound access from the things that really need it. Spurious network traffic dropped to zero and surprises are gone. If I cared more, I'd explore profiles for enabling only useful network activity in more situations, but this has been really good for my use case.

X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.

Helmut10001 101 days ago | |

I think nowadays the only safe and sane way is running Windows isolated as a VM (e.g. QEMU on proxmox). I did this with my gaming server. The VM sits on ZFS which I can snapshot before any Microsoft stuff happens, to revert any action. I can cut off the network card virtually and shutdown the guest whenever I get tired of it. I could even disguise the CPU/QEMU config, so that the anti-cheat from Star Citizen didn't recognize it was running in a virtualized environment. Pair this with Moonlight+Sunshine and you can game without issues on any remote client. Why I prefer Windows for gaming? It is just (still) the default and provides the least barrier and setup effort for most games.

nicbou 101 days ago | |

I used to dual boot Windows to play a single game too, and every few months something drastic would change with no input on my part.

haolez 100 days ago |

Kinda off-topic, but I wonder if a hypothetical OS that reimplements the Windows APIs (like ReactOS[0], but with perfect modern hardware support) would be better for end users than a Linux distro with a modern DE.

In the past, this hypothetical OS would be a revolution. But I feel that, in recent years, this gap is not as big anymore and Linux supports way more apps than in the past. Such an OS might even not be relevant anymore, even if it exists.

Do I have a blind spot on this? Is there value in having a "working ReactOS" as of 2026?

[0] https://reactos.org/

whatsupdog 101 days ago |

Don't care about windows. Haven't used a windows computer in over 20 years. Happy Ubuntu user here. What bothers me is the upcoming Android restrictions. I distribute an app that none of the app stores want to touch with a 10 foot pole. That's fine -their store, their choice. But now, to distribute the app from my website I have to jump through hoops and pay their stupid fees through a credit card (at a time when I'm trying to stay anonymous because of the nature of the app). I don't know what to do.

willis936 100 days ago | |

I like Ubuntu. My only regret is having an nvidia GPU and not getting an AMD one before computing components became unaffordable. Nvidia on wayland is 100% busted and juggling DEs for gaming vs productivity work is inelegant.

DarkmSparks 101 days ago |

Replaced all our windows machines with mac silicon and linux 6 months ago. No one is going back no matter what they do now.

seu 100 days ago |

I was dual booting Linux Mint (work) and Windows 11 (games). A month ago, Windows started trying to push an update, which I resisted. A week ago, they just force fed it to my computer. I deleted the partitions without a second thought, tried CachyOS, realized that the games I play worked perfectly out of the box, and now I'm using it as my main OS. I'm never again installing windows on a computer I own.

HexPhantom 101 days ago |

The pattern is pretty familiar at this point:

1. Ship something user-hostile 2. Wait for backlash 3. Roll it back partially 4. Get credit for "listening"

kalavan 101 days ago | |

Also called the door-in-the-face method.

mexicocitinluez 101 days ago |

Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.

They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.

Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!

They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.

It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.

M95D 101 days ago | |

Yeah, but...

Did they increase profits and/or stock price or not? That's the only relevant question. Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.

Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.

anthonylevine 101 days ago | | |

> Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.

I don't understand this point. Are you suggesting that less people being happy with their product and thus less people buying it is not related to the valuation of the company and their stock?

> Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.

Huh?

I get you're trying to make a point about the bottom line, but that doesn't mean the bottom line is impervious to bad product decisions or that the people who are paying for their products are not in fact their customers.

zabzonk 101 days ago |

> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions

sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.

am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?

as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.

mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.

hendersoon 100 days ago |

The forced telemetry and blocking local user accounts is particularly egregious. I've been running Shutup10 for over a decade now, disabling their telemetry after every update. It's outrageous that they force mt to do this.

And local accounts, all the methods required following a guide, using a hidden hotkey like shift-F10 and typing in an obscure command. Nobody did this by accident, or was coerced into it. These were sophisticated users who did not want to login to a MS account. Microsoft not only didn't care about their users' preferences, they actively fought us. It's downright offensive.

And like a battered spouse, we lived with it, we took the hits, because we wanted to play videogames. Well, now Windows is no longer required, thanks to Valve's work on WINE. And suddenly they're apologetic and conciliatory. No thanks, Microsoft.

redml 100 days ago |

Even if they fix it, and that's a big if - It doesn't really mean anything when they have a ton of MBAs and product managers working internally to make it creep back in. It's going to take a decade to grow trust again and I don't think they're up to the task.

stndef 101 days ago |

I think we need to be a bit more careful and considerate around the use of language around physical abuse, or abuse in general, and using software.

Saying that here as someone that isn't fond of the Windows experience these days, but the two are not relatable.

nextlevelwizard 101 days ago | |

Beating is a normal English idiom. While I do sympathize with anyone suffering from abuse, I highly doubt anyone is actually suffering from use of the word.

afandian 101 days ago | | |

I agree with stndef. "Flowers after beating" is a very direct evocation of physical abuse in an intimate relationship. Whether or not you think it's appropriate.

stndef 101 days ago | | |

I'm willing to be wrong, but it's specifically mentioned as an analogy for abuse in the article itself.

Not trying to turn everything "woke", but phrasing of scenarios around this just takes away from the severity of what actual abuse is.

torcete 100 days ago |

Sometimes I wonder what Operating Systems do nowadays that they didn't do 15 years ago that requires so many resources.

saurik 99 days ago | |

Collect telemetry to send back to the mothership.

dsign 100 days ago |

The solution for "Windows" is to use the current US derangement to convince the EU, China and even the Russians that, as a matter of national security, it's in their best interest to come to the negotiation table and create an international organization that "adopts" WineHQ[^1] and any other projects that focus on a Win32 compatibility layer. It can be financed with increased sales taxes for any PC software distributor that doesn't natively support Linux.

[^1]: https://www.winehq.org/

mkup 101 days ago |

Shameless plug: My products (FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit) can filter all types of potentially unwanted traffic from your Windows PC to Microsoft cloud: namely, Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and many more — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools (e.g. various GitHub scripts) can’t achieve. https://www.prime-expert.com/

wackget 100 days ago | |

I admire your effort to increase user privacy but it's very difficult to argue that allowing a piece of proprietary closed-source software to make fundamental changes to your operating system is a good idea.

For starters, it doesn't explain what exactly it does. This is all I could see on the info page:

> Privacy Enablement Center: Politely ask already installed Windows 10/11 to phone home less, or add Privacy Enhancing DNS Proxy to already installed Windows, in order to block Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and other types of potentially unwanted Windows network activity — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools can’t achieve.

That sounds an awful lot like using the hosts file or a firewall such as Portmaster[1] to block known tracking domains, no?

[1] https://safing.io/

mkup 100 days ago | | |

Pure hosts file solution won't cut it for several reasons:

1) certain domains (the most offensive privacy infringers) are whitelisted by Microsoft's DNSAPI.DLL to always bypass hosts file lookup (DNSAPI.DLL is a place where hosts file parser lives on Windows, so this parser just ignores hosts file records which don't align well with data vaccuming purpose of modern Windows versions)

2) hosts file can't blacklist domain hierarchies (domain + all subdomains), it can blacklist only apex domains

3) some domains to block are not quite domains, rather domain names regexps (set of domain names to block is not finite)

So, I would say it's rather list of regexps to block than list of domains to block (in our product it's compiled to highly efficient finite state machine in C, plus a user-friendly list of categories to choose blocking preferences from); but in principle you are right: all of it currently boils down to DNS packet interception.

1vuio0pswjnm7 101 days ago |

Love the quiz at the end

It's remarkable that computer users are paying $139 to give data to Microsoft through an ad-supported "operating system"

Back in the day (generally) only OEMs paid

What is the $139 for

shevy-java 100 days ago |

"By October 2025, Microsoft had systematically hunted down and killed every single workaround for creating a local account, the `oobe\bypassnro` command, the BypassNRO registry toggle, the `ms-cxh:localonly` trick, even the old fake email method."

I don't know how it is for Windows 11, but for Win10, activating it is super-trivial, even without downloading some crack .exe. With that in mind, I never bought Microsoft's claim that it hates "pirates". In particular one work around that is even published on github - which is owned by Microsoft - so there is no way Microsoft does not know about it. Why does it not take that github site down?

Clearly Microsoft does not have anywhere near as much as a problem with pepole using Windows as such. I switched to Linux more than 20 years ago so I don't care much about Microsoft anymore. I do have a secondary computer run Win10. I don't see why I would want to switch to Win11 ever though - it only has drawbacks. And Win10 was already really bad. Microsoft used to be objectively better; all that trend to AI or ads, lowered the quality. It seems that corporation past a certain size, become super-lazy.

oldandboring 101 days ago |

Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years. Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them, but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm probably leaving some stuff out.

Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.

Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.

Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.

Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.

Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.

Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.

tjungblut 101 days ago |

Sorry Pavan, I'm happier with Fedora Atomic and Bazzite now.

luckys 101 days ago |

Maybe it would be a good idea for Microsoft to split Windows into a version for business that supports all the cruft that has accumulated and is needed, and another version where they start from scratch. Something that is lightweight and respects the user. A man can dream.

laylower 100 days ago |

Are we pushing sambent.com now?

zymhan 100 days ago | |

Yeah there is something suspicious about this site.

DoingFedTime 96 days ago | | |

Yeah? What? 0 facts or logic in your reply.

- sam bent

Jackevansevo 101 days ago |

Don't worry, they'll just destroy any goodwill they tried to claw back with these 'fixes' in following releases.

They absolutely can't help themselves but make their product more and more user hostile.

laxpri 100 days ago |

why no one is taking about the Stucking problem on windows ,Edge stucks , file explorer stucks even Note pad stucks , even their native apps are not working . Wifi selection is a disaster , it cant even remember the last hotspots it was in , and even if I manually connect it will automatically switch bad network or another one even the hotpots is on . Is this only with me because I am using laptop , why people are not talking about it .

pedrohlc 101 days ago |

Thanks for the curated and well described list!

freediddy 100 days ago |

i am never switching off windows 10, even when it goes off completely support. if i have to i'll switch to mac instead.

oopsiremembered 100 days ago | |

Microsoft is effectively a malware company now.

wewewedxfgdf 101 days ago |

Windows 11 should run on ANY PC.

I am customer and I absolutely hate it that they have restricted the machine that Windows can run on.

If they don't fix this sort of anti customer garbage then all their words are pure horseshit.

SloppyDrive 101 days ago | |

This is one of the areas that annoy me due to how limp microsoft is with the requirements...

Either give a solid set of requirements that let a dev assume things about a windows 11 system (good hardware security, in particular), or fuck off entirely.

alex_duf 101 days ago | |

have you thought about switching to another OS?

mkl 101 days ago | | |

Unfortunately Linux doesn't run well on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (which is perfectly functional other than the lack of Windows security updates). I'm very unlikely to buy or recommend a Microsoft computer again, even though I liked the hardware.

fuzzfactor 100 days ago |

I don't think I'm going to have much faith in a fix while the opposite type of thing is still going on simultaneously:

>Windows 11's free video editor Clipchamp now requires OneDrive

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47515936

pier25 101 days ago |

Microsoft should be scared about the Macbook Neo. They're going to lose a good chunk of the market because of it.

smt88 101 days ago | |

No they're not. They're going to continue making enormous amounts of money from corporate IT lock-in, Azure, and AI.

Windows' biggest competitor is iOS, and many people have stopped using Windows entirely and just rely on their phones. Microsoft has had record profits since that started happening.

exhilaration 100 days ago | | |

Funny you mention iOS - my MegaCorp-issued iPhone has Microsoft entune for device management and Active Directory membership, Microsoft Authenticator for single sign-on, and really high quality versions of Microsoft office apps - Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel. Microsoft is all-in when comes to iOS.

Over Peak I had to update a shared Excel file on SharePoint each night - because as we all know, Excel is the finest multi-user database in existence. I had no problems doing that from my iPhone.

pixeldash928 100 days ago | |

You'd be surprised to know that though this might be a possibility, MS Office Suite or whatever it's called now will still be some of the top installed/grossing apps on the App store. Windows is just one of Microsoft's gateways to get you on the office suite.

p_ing 100 days ago | |

Apple isn't capable of manufacturing the amount of volume necessary to displace x86/Windows.

Apple shipped 25.6 million Macs in 2025. Lenovo shipped 19.3 million PCs in the 4th quarter alone.

mock-possum 100 days ago | |

But what PC user is going to be like “oh now that the NEO is out, I’m finally willing to switch to a completely different operating system”

pier25 100 days ago | | |

What about new users that don't have a laptop yet?

Or users that have a very crappy Windows laptop and would like to improve to something good hardware wise?

Or what about Windows users that have other Apple devices and don't have strong hardware requirements?

Let's not forget about RAM and SSD prices increasing PC prices through the roof.

admax88qqq 101 days ago |

This follows the standard windows pattern of every release alternating between bad/good.

98 good

ME bad

XP good

Vista bad

7 good

8 bad

10 good

11 bad

When 12 comes windows will be tolerable again.

oybng 100 days ago | |

Really highlights the plummet in quality and massive shift in user tolerance that w10 is considered "good" now

admax88qqq 100 days ago | | |

The conspiracy version of this is each bad windows release is purposefully extra bad so the next "good" version is perceived as artifically well.

It's a shame too, I feel like the underlying OS has some really good engineering in it, but the layers of cruft and anti-features on top make for a poor overall product.

senfiaj 100 days ago | |

Windows 10 was not as good as Windows 7 for its time (and even now). After 8/8.1 things started to go downhill. Windows 7 was a really good polished OS with beautiful and consistent UI. Windows 10 UI looks like a Frankenstein, and MS fired a lot of QA folks, now the testing is primarily done on the insiders and regular users. Also these privacy / telemetry / ad problems started from Windows 10.

mock-possum 100 days ago | |

Inshallah. This is the first ‘bad’ version I’ve caved on updating to, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next ‘good’ one looks like.

snozolli 101 days ago |

Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely unhelpful logs, but gave up.

I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.

jpfromlondon 101 days ago |

'Microsoft was entering a mode called "swarming",'

Swarming, as in locusts, or else flies on shit.

windex 100 days ago |

With the Mac neo, some of us will not have to tolerate Win 11. They were forcing us to upgrade, well, they made people upgrade to the Mac neo. An all metal Apple notebook that isn't actively user hostil is a massive quality upgrade for most people.

codeulike 101 days ago |

I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).

I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.

natas 100 days ago |

My company is now removing all microsoft products, all of it. Laptops are moving to OSX. Office365->Gmail+G-suite. Zoom->Google meet. Fortunately we don't use Azure or Github, so that will make the transition easier.

pixeldash928 100 days ago | |

This is still bad, but maybe less bad.

g947o 101 days ago |

I had enough of Windows 11's ads that I bought a Mac mini for personal use and requested a Macbook to replace my Windows laptop.

I will have to use Teams and Outlook at work because I don't have a choice. But that's it Microsoft.

ape4 101 days ago |

So will I be able to upgrade my old computer without a Trusted Platform Module 2?

Vektorceraptor 100 days ago |

Still getting MSN widget displayed, even though I turned it off. The best was - the unremovable desktop icon for the desktop wallpapers! That's what people who love a clean desktop always wanted for.

LetsGetTechnicl 101 days ago |

I wish there was a better alternative for average users. It's easy to say, especially on HN, that using Linux or Windows LTSC is a way to avoid these issues (and I do.)

Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?

dryarzeg 101 days ago | |

> Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?

Buyers of PCs, laptops and other devices with Windows pre-installed. I guess that the cost of the Windows licence is included in the price of each device.

LetsGetTechnicl 101 days ago | | |

That's true, I meant that as a reference to the article where they mentioned people paying $139 at retail for Windows. Which seems bonkers. Why would you do that.

steveharing1 101 days ago |

Finally they realizing the power of linux is cannot be taken for granted

luxuryballs 101 days ago |

Wait the local user account workarounds are totally gone now? I assume that means the only reason why it still works for me is because my iso is still on a previous version, good to remember…

senfiaj 101 days ago |

If MS brings back normal local accounts, I'll switch back. This is insane, imagine I have bought a kitchen stove or a washing machine which requires to setup an account on some website.

ConceptJunkie 100 days ago |

I have to be honest. The idea that Microsoft is even admitting that their products are less than perfect is a step in the right direction.

A step on a thousand-mile journey, perhaps, but it's a step.

senfiaj 100 days ago | |

One major thing is the mandatory MS account. And it's (or more precisely its laxing / removal) not listed in the improvement list. Optional online account is fine and I might even use it. But mandatory online account is a big NO. This is disrespectful and an invasion of my privacy and control over my computer. I bought a PC / laptop and I want to use it the way I want, without any permission from some fucking server.

maevyn11 100 days ago |

No idea why anyone would buy a Windows machine over a mac unless in this day and age unless they can't afford one, Microsoft's OS dev philosophy has been trash for years.

tombert 100 days ago | |

For that matter, Linux has been better than Windows for decades.

Yes, Linux has some jankiness, I don't dispute that, but when people say that they're often smuggling in an assumption that Windows doesn't have jankiness, which is decidedly not true. People are more used to Windows and its shittiness and they forget how much bullshit they actually put up with for it.

Windows Update, for example, is awful software and if anyone who works on it is reading this, you should consider getting out of the software game because you are not good at your job and considering how consistently bad Windows Update has been for its entire existence I don't think you'd be good at other software jobs either.

Windows Update bricked my mom's laptop doing an automatic update to Windows 11, I believe because they broke some boot keys, and since Microsoft's restore and repair tools don't actually work, my parents called me in a panic because there were of course tons of irreplaceable files that they couldn't access. I had to walk them through flashing a Linux USB, walk my dad through booting off that USB, walk my dad through setting up tmate, and then I had to mount the NTFS drive and rsync the files to my personal server. Just to reiterate: I had to use Linux to save Windows because Windows' tools do not work.

If Microsoft used a filesystem that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, I could have set them up with recurring filesystem snapshots and this could have been fixed at the filesystem level. You know, like what has been readily available on Linux since like 2010 with btrfs and other Copy on Write filesystems.

To be clear, before I get a lecture, I'm aware that updates are a hard problem when you have a diverse set of hardware, but I should point out that it's not like my mom installed the OS on some arcane custom built rig, this was an OEM install on her laptop, so they don't have that excuse. Additionally, I update every Linux computer in my house literally every day, and I have never had it so thoroughly brick the boot process as I had with my mom's computer.

My elaborate point here is that Windows has lots of jank, more than Linux, but people just act like that's part of the deal, but don't extend anywhere near that same level of courtesy to Linux.

daft_pink 101 days ago |

I would just like to add forcing users to use bing online to search their local files to one of their cards. I think that’s the main one they missed, but it’s a good article.

profsummergig 100 days ago |

We are not far away from an era where AI will code up a Windows clone.

If MS doesn't protect the user-experience of Windows users, it's over for them.

AnonyMD 100 days ago |

Simplicity is best. They should return to that fundamental principle. Current Windows has far too many unnecessary features.

hkon 100 days ago |

I hear about people in my extended circle moving to linux every week now. Windows users of 10-25 years++ have had enough.

zejn 101 days ago |

Don't you ever complain about that regulation which will require [x] on window corner to cancel-close.

kwar13 100 days ago |

Once windows started bundling with cortana and candy crush, I vowed to never return

drumttocs8 100 days ago |

Would be really interesting to know what % of Microsoft devs use MacOS at home.

cute_boi 100 days ago |

microslop isn't going to fix anything. Action matters more than talks.

jovial_cavalier 101 days ago |

Until they talk about being able to remove Edge, they aren't serious.

greatgib 101 days ago |

I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well. It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.

But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.

sitzkrieg 100 days ago |

the only fix for windows 11 is installing windows 10 LTSC

ThePowerOfFuet 100 days ago |

What an incredibly well-written article.

mdrzn 101 days ago |

Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.

alberto-m 101 days ago | |

Reading the article without Firefox's reader mode is a pain. Maybe it's a secret plan of Mozilla to promote their browser.

baal80spam 101 days ago | | |

Don't all browsers have it nowadays? I feel like it's been in my Brave forever.

RankingMember 100 days ago | |

Whenever I see stuff like that I ask myself "who is this for", like who wants to see those elements animated for no good reason?

adabyron 100 days ago |

Has it always been a case of incentives with Microsoft?

Builders - let's build awesome stuff with great experience.

Execs - need to meet next earnings reports goals. Let's sneak a few features to help M$FT stock price at expense to our users.

Product suffers... Execs then allow builders to make the products better. Then execs step in again because they need some quick wins. Visual Studio and .NET really seemed to exemplify this a few years ago as Code was eating into Visual Studio's user base.

I for one hope ending quarterly earnings reduces patterns like this in companies.

nurettin 100 days ago |

If it starts to get better after it absolutely cannot get any worse and users start to parade their experience switching to other platforms like badges of honor, is that really a win? After so many got their time and money wasted?

I mean I guess there is no reason to care, since their main products work in a browser, powerbi users and gamers can endure anything and old people will just get their grandchildren to fix their windows.

johnnydoe9 101 days ago |

Side note but is this page not optimised for mobile at all or is it just me?

Either way, it's too little too late for me. I'll be trying to get into Linux again after Windows 8 times cause I've had it with Win11.

tantalor 101 days ago |

Thus begins the next phase of their neverending cycle. They do this same shit every 10 years or so. This has to be what, the third or fourth time?

dirasieb 101 days ago |

the funniest thing in this whole "fixing windows" campaign is that you can download "fixed" (read: not enshittified) windows TODAY instead of waiting for microsoft to deliver on these promises

reduces focus on AI, better performance, more stable updates, etc are all already here with windows 11 LTSC, why the hell would i move back to the GA release and deal with their crap?

bbstats 101 days ago |

I mean...this is a huge company. For them to do something even mildly consumer-focused I'll take as a win.

xdkyx 101 days ago |

Did they really fix the taskbar? I still cannot change it to either side of the screen, am i missing something?

dahcryn 101 days ago | |

no, the big news is that finally they have the intention to do it

mkl 101 days ago | |

I don't think the fix is released yet, except for possibly Insider builds.

yungporko 100 days ago |

there is literally nothing microsoft could possibly do or change now or ever to make me even consider going back to using windows on a personal machine. i don't care if they turn windows into the greatest OS in the world and make it free, microsoft can fuck right off forever

canticleforllm 100 days ago |

Would rather seed 9front torrents at this point than use Windows 11 after seeing how they shoved slopware into everything immediately. Just fuck off with that noise.

And these apologies they’ve been rolling out - to whom? For what? Gabecube is going to eat their gaming market share, servers are already predominantly Linux. I’m sure they’ve got tons of enterprise customers. Fuck ‘em, they can keep them.

twilo 101 days ago |

Am I the only one who’s been using 11 on multiple machines for years without any issues?

journal 101 days ago |

Microsoft is on track to be judged for digital genocide.

conartist6 101 days ago |

Holy shit they crossed the line to "actually fucking evil"

no_shadowban_3 101 days ago |

These flowers smell like shit.

If you don't use Linux or MacOS yet, why?

bob1029 101 days ago | |

I use a blend of Windows, MacOS, iOS and Linux.

Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.

I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.

red369 101 days ago | | |

I agree completely about each being good for its own thing. I quite like iOS as a phone OS. The limitations often bother me, but since it's tiny screen that needs to fit in my pocket, I'm creating my own limitations anyway so I'll use it less (1).

I switch around enough that I try not to do crazy amounts of personalisation in my desktop OS. Probably this evens out the OSs and there are aspects I like and dislike about each. I guess I prefer KDE Plasma to Windows or MacOS. I choose that for my own computer, but I spend far more time in Windows. I'm not sure I agree it it much worse from a UX perspective. It allows keyboard only usage very easily, which is something I struggled with in MacOS.

1) I'm only focusing on the UI - there are some things I struggle to forgive, like not being able to set add my own ringtone or alarm tone, or not being able to have the volume of a ringtone increase as the phone rings like on every ancient feature phone.

Mashimo 101 days ago | |

I used linux on Desktop 15 years ago, tried it once in a while every few years. But there was always something. Often video driver, tearing, hardware video decoding, or a specific game that I played a lot. And now it would be that my DJ software does not run on it.

Still use it on my server though.

I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.

alexb_ 101 days ago | | |

The last time I tried to use Linux, I said "fuck this" when I had to open up a text editor for something so basic as making a shortcut with command line arguments. This is the easiest menu in the world on Windows, but it took me looking up a bunch of things to get it to not work on Linux.

The real crime, by a lot, it middle click. I did not realize how often I use middle click scroll until I switched to Linux and it didn't work anymore.

hu3 101 days ago | |

macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and customizations to make it sane for basic things like window management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount of tweaking needed for power users.

And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...

And it sucks at gaming.

Linux on the other hand is great for power users!

alex_duf 101 days ago | | |

I've installed linux (debian LTS with XFCE) on my mom's computer and she recently called me to thank me. She says her computer is much quieter now (meaning fewer notifications). She only needs a web browser and a text editor.

So you're right, it's great for power users, it's also great for other users.

g947o 101 days ago | | |

Window management: only if you are the kind of power user who needs complex layout. I have used Windows for decades and have used Mac on and off, and have even bought one of those window management app on MacOS, but never needed to use them. In rare occasions where I need several windows open, side-by-side on each of dual screens is usually good enough, if not I probably am working in a terminal where I use tmux.

Gaming: that's a fact but again doesn't matter to most people. Most people play video games on phones/tablets/consoles if they play games at all. PC gaming is a relative minority, and (regular) Windows laptops can only do lightweight gaming anyway. The amount of people who decides what "everyday computer" they should buy based on whether they are going to play games on it is very small. Plus, you get much better ROI by buying a PS5+Macbook Air than spending the same amount of money on a gaming laptop.

dahcryn 101 days ago | | |

you need a ton of third party tools to make it behave like Windows, that's what you mean.

I'm perfectly happy with my "vanilla" macbook. Runs Baldurs Gate 3 and my final fantasy ps2 emulator just fine, and even trackmania was quite easy to get installed and runs well.

Can't comment on that hash thing, but I don't see why that would be a problem? It's not linked to your name or something. Windows does a ton of things too that I find inexcusable, such as changing settings or permissions after updates, those have an actual impact on my daily experience with these things

skc 101 days ago | |

Because Windows works just fine for me.

I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.

Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your own.

nirava 101 days ago | | |

Depends on whether using someone else’s windows machine leaves you crazy annoyed.

My windows machine is also “fine” for the most part because i turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could not. Even so, every once in a while, typing “code” and being taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to shreds.

And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.

It isn’t that fine now that I think about it.

matltc 101 days ago | | |

Do you use powershell or run WSL

krige 101 days ago | |

Linux doesn't run the software I want to use, or runs it badly. MacOS... lmao.

troupo 101 days ago | |

Macs are circling down the same drain.

nextlevelwizard 101 days ago | | |

In what way?

conceptme 101 days ago | |

Games

eknkc 101 days ago | | |

I have a desktop computer that I use for gaming so it had windows forever. Lately it started running laggy. Occasional frame drops and stuff. Reinstall, bios update etc nothing helped.

For debugging I installed Bazzite (Linux gaming distro) assuming compatibility would be shit but I can at least test native linux builds of some games to see if there is a hardware issue. The thing runs perfectly. I've been playing propert windows games on Proton with higher / more consistent FPS. It is kind of funny at this point. Granted I do not play any competitive / multiplayer games.

I guess Valve did a great job on the Steam Deck sw.

wildrhythms 101 days ago | | |

I've been running Fedora (or a flavor) on my gaming PC for two years. All my games work. I understand some competitive games with intrusive anti cheat are incompatible, but with the success of the steam deck I don't think the gaming argument is holding much water these days.

mschild 101 days ago | | |

Fair. Depends on the game to be honest.

I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora recently. Most of the games I play work without issue but I know there are some which categorically refuse to work (mainly some specific anti-cheating software reasons).

JollySharp0 100 days ago | | |

I was playing RE9 at 4K on my Debian 13 last weekend. The vast majority of games work, even some live service games. 5 years ago you would face significant issues, today that simply isn't the case.

no_shadowban_3 101 days ago | | |

Do you play fortnite? Steam's linux support is really good but I kept a Windows install for a couple of years so I could keep playing fortnite.

whobre 101 days ago | |

I do use Linux at work and for programming at home, but for general office work Windows is just better, sorry.

As for MacOS, I just hate it.

dude250711 101 days ago | |

Because they suck.

scrollop 101 days ago | | |

I moved to ultramarine linux and it's great - fast, has a nifty desktop management system, a few bugs but more than happy compared to using microsoft.

"It sucks"

Ha!

jacooper 101 days ago | |

Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram, and Linux still can't run proper creative software.

maxnoe 101 days ago | | |

"Most companies still do not publish Linux builds for creative software"

There, fixed it for you.

It's not like Linux is the blocker here.

yourusername 101 days ago | | |

This used to be the case but looking at Macbooks now they are not much more expensive than a Windows laptop you would actually want to buy. And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now i think it's about even.

nunodonato 101 days ago | | |

are you a creative professional? because I see that argument quite often as if people use Adobe CS daily, and then its mostly people who do basic stuff (that photopea or gimp can handle fine), but they like to feel "pro" by launching their pirated version of photoshop.

troupo 101 days ago | | |

> Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram

This hasn't been true for at least a decade. And it's especially not true for the M* series Macs.

Even Macbook Neo can handle editing several layers of 4k video files in several apps while running everything else https://youtu.be/Mo6o8RKn7jE?is=opeCYMDbt7bUAdvS Try that on "the same performance/ram" Windows Machine

dirasieb 101 days ago | | |

feel free to link a windows computer (pre-built or parts, whatever you want) that outperforms the m4 mac mini while costing either the same or less

codeulike 101 days ago |

I've never seen any adverts in Windows. Just saying.

How many of the people pearl-clutching in this thread actually use Windows?

dpkirchner 101 days ago | |

I think it's more likely that what you consider ads and what we consider ads don't quite line up.

codeulike 101 days ago | | |

No, I just havent seen anything in Windows that could be described as an advert. Where are all these adverts supposed to be showing up exactly?

selectively 101 days ago |

Domestic violence analogies for computing....really gross. I wouldn't hire or work with 'Sam Bent'.

bigstrat2003 100 days ago | |

There's nothing "gross" about it. You are making a mountain out of a molehill, and honestly the kind of behavior you're displaying here would be absolutely miserable to deal with at any job. Nobody likes someone who complains about trivial non-issues like this.

DoingFedTime 96 days ago | |

Good think I work for myself.

Noticed you didn't push back on any actual facts, just emotional 'outrage'.

xfz 100 days ago | |

Completely agree, we can be edgy without being insensitive.

selectively 100 days ago | | |

Or, even better: let's not be edgy, because we are not tweens circa 2002.

kbelder 100 days ago | |

>I wouldn't hire or work with 'Sam Bent'

Saying something like that is far grosser and more inappropriate than a using a metaphor.

WithinReason 101 days ago |

Heartbreaking: The Worst Company You Know Just Made A Great Point

halflife 101 days ago | |

Enough with the memes.