Windows 11: Just say no | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11: Just say no

computerworld.com

472 pointsCrankyBear528 comments

Windows 11 is half-baked.

But it isn't just half-baked because it was rushed out while ignoring all the feedback (although it absolutely was). It is also half-baked because Microsoft's management has no particular strategy or plan for what they want Windows to be.

So Windows 11 just feels like an "and kitchen sink" where someone picked up an iPad, noted down a bunch of random features without rhyme or reason and then told the people below them to shove them into Windows for some reason.

Then you step back and realize that very "101" features on Windows are still incomplete like the migration to Settings, Windows Search being objectively worse than the Power Toys Run (let alone Google Desktop Search RIP or FileLocator Pro), and UI elements that haven't been updated since Windows 2K.

As cliché as this sounds, Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision. Regardless of what that vision is, at least then Windows would be a something, rather than a whole host of competing ideas and contradictions i.e. a mess.

PS - Ironically the "Windows 11 PC Health Check" app symbolizes Windows 11's problems: Released in a half-complete state, pulled, then re-released as a "Preview" also in a half-complete state. The app to check if you're ready for Windows 11 is a "preview" less than 30 days before the FULL retail release of Windows 11... It is almost too perfect.

and UI elements that haven't been updated since Windows 2K.

Also known as "the good part"... Everything else about Windows UI since then has only gotten less usable and more hostile.

Took the words out of my mouth. I'd prefer a UI element designed for Windows 2K over most anything designed later (with some, but few, exceptions).

I'm not sure I would characterize newer UI as more hostile. Some better adjective might be infantilizing, dumbed-down - for the most part; or there's a dichotomy between the UI for dummies part and arcane, not-well-documented, difficult-to-locate parts. This dichotomy was somewhat less pronounced in the past.

Quite frankly, the ONLY new UX element I like out of windows post 95 is the search bar. Everything else has been just annoying.

That 95 interface is STILL there, buried under 1000 clicks through an unnavagable interface..

the search bar in Windows 10 never finds anything either

I agree, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Windows is legitimately confusing for noobs, so I don't see a problem with making the noob learning curve less steep as long as all the "real" functionality that a power user, dev, or admin would regularly use is left alone on the same paths, with the same UX or syntax.

This is what drives me nuts. Why do they keep messing with the UI? Nobody wants that! Even Apple and Google have both figured out that screwing around with UX every release is a recipe for making your customers HATE you.

What I, and probably non-power users want out of windows is for it to be faster and use less power. I'd honestly be happy to go back to a Win95 interface with the latest kernel.

Microsoft needs to fire the idiots that keep messing around with the UX. It's not broke, stop trying to fix it.

> Why do they keep messing with the UI?

UX folks don't get paid to leave things alone.

Nobody gets paid to leave things alone and maybe that's a big problem with the world.

Farmers can get paid to not grow crops.

Damn... the idea that maybe we should be banding together as a democracy and cutting deals to subsidize the engineering work of companies that are willing to "lay fallow" their design teams is fascinating.

Bonuses paid to design teams that are a direct function of the length between unprompted UI adjustments and redesigns?

Iteration on designs is of course permitted, but there’s more pressure on “get it right” rather than “dirty MVP”. Once launched, changes can’t go to prod-lest they lose their bonus-and emphasis is more on more in-depth and longer-term user research and refining the design.

This way design teams are still doing valuable work, and there’s no crunch to both design something and then get it out ASAP. The next time front-end teams come back to work on any kind of UI refresh everything is already sorted and ready to go.

Another one would be paying Wall Street bankers not to create innovative banking products, like synthetic CDO's

this is so true!

apple podcasts is a fine example, among others, of this conundrum. on every iteration an "improvement" makes the app less usable. on the last iteration they decided that i should now "follow" shows and not "subscribe" to them. what's worse is that some screens had the old and the new names resulting in extreme confusion. on that same iteration, someone decided that the way i was deleting episodes wasn't cool enough. so they replaced a working feature with a half-working one!

please leave the podcasts app alone.

Interesting. The Podcasts app was a disaster when it was released. I honestly can’t imagine how it could have gotten worse.

I’ve been using Podcruncher since 2010. Manual downloads, no hiding episodes, custom playlists. All in a straightforward interface. It is amazing that Apple with its resources can’t deliver anything comparable.

It's definitely a big problem with software. This "need to constantly pay developers" is part of the justification for moving towards subscription payment instead of one-time payment. The logic goes: One-time payment won't pay for future changes, and developers are always making changes, and they need to be paid for. But, what if I don't want future changes? For almost all software I've ever paid for, as a user, I just want the goddamn software exactly how it is today, forever. I'd maybe be willing to pay for security updates, but that's it.

But, noooooo, the company decides developers must perpetually change the software and designers need to perpetually change the UI, and therefore you must continue to pay for it, regardless of whether you want any of those changes.

Funny, I was just thinking to myself that maybe a paid subscription Windows could be a solution to undesired UI change. Because it would take away the lure of the upgrade sale licence. 64 bit w2k? Yeah, I'd totally pay for that.

If I were in charge of Windows product strategy I think I would create competing subdivisions that replicate the model of Linux distributions but on the NT kernel. Sworn to binary compatibility but inspired to try different monetization schemes.

Windows is not selling upgrades anymore, 8 to 10 was a free upgrade

8 too? I was going to write something about this, particularly in how that's the reason why I don't really disagree with GP despite pondering the exact opposite "what if". But the sudden appearance of an 11 that nobody asked for gives me the impression that the culture that was fostered on the paid upgrade is still very much alive.

Meanwhile my mind has taken a deeper dive into the rabbit hole fantasy of competing Windows distribution divisions. I'd expect it to seem like a total failure : the surface. E.g. with Steam users refusing to get lured into the "gamer Windows" (something with an X in the name), the "crippled version that is entirely ad-funded" (10, basically) drawing too much hate for the entire brand while still not being crippled enough to push people to paid options and the one you can get with the Office subscription being a little too incompatible for employee lockout reasons with the plethora of in-house essentials required to run at customers. But Microsoft could still come out stronger, having a well defined place for bad ideas to go to die. And who knows, one of the niche distributions might be essentially sysinternals with a kernel and a package manager.

Only for end-users with OEM licences, and only limited amount (10 licenses max? Or so).

For corporate and government, it was not free. And these are where the money is.

But aren't those usually on a subscription anyways? Could still be a factor, in theory: they might pull an Oracle pushing all their subscribers onto 11 unless they upgrade to the golden account tier that still receives updates. They actually did this, I think, with 7, but I assume not at a scale that could bring the pattern anywhere close to being a central motivation.

They are mostly on subscription; but what is the rationale for subscription? The right to upgrade, and the ability to have all machines running the same version. Remember, that in order for subscription license to be valid, it is usable only for machine that came with OEM license in the first place.

I once worked for a corp that didn't have subscription. The rationale was, that is was not important who was running which version at their computer, and the subscription was thus a cost on top of OEM license that didn't bring any value. Since the computers were refreshed every 4-5 years anyway, they always had a supported Windows version.

That is why consulting and outsourcing exist, you only pay for developers while you actually need them.

There are even companies outside software business, that pay contractors per tickets, basically a budget is assigned and the contractor does as much tickets as they are capable of for the given budget.

Now the quality of the code is not for the faint of heart.

This ignores the changing nature of consumer demand and competitive pressure. Often time, implementations should be treated as a product that needs nurturing rather than a one off project where you get to the finish line and you're done.

That is why I explicitly made the point that selling software isn't these companies main business, for them it is just a cost center.

>designers need to perpetually change the UI

That's a bit unfair. The iPhone 13 just came out and one of the memes and jokes going around is that it looks the same as the previous phone and users are just buying the same thing again. Even tech people I know are joking about it.

So the UI people are always going to be busy because even people in the industry equate looks to changes. If the looks don't change they will all be scratching their heads confused why this is Windows 11 when it looks identical to 10.

I think the main reason for memes is because Apple always markets everything they do as some kind of massive innovation despite either bringing something from the past or just copying what competitors already had long ago. They at least used to pretend they make something different with design changes, but now even this facade fell down.

> But, what if I don't want future changes? For almost all software I've ever paid for, as a user, I just want the goddamn software exactly how it is today, forever. I'd maybe be willing to pay for security updates, but that's it.

Problem is, most software doesn't exist in a vacuum; it is part of an ecosystem. Security updates that you might pay for are not enough, because the ecosystem is constantly changing around the program you bought.

I'm author of HashBackup. It uses remote object storage services so if there are incompatible changes made on the storage side, the software has to adapt. What if IP4 is no longer supported? Adapt. A library like Boto2 gets rewritten and the old version loses support. Adapt. Google Sites decides to force you to migrate to a new version that looks like shit. This just happened to me, and it's so bad I'm having to do a whole new documentation site.

Just keeping software working has become a big challenge because of ecosystem changes.

Great point! It's an ecosystem-wide problem. I'd go even further to argue it's a problem baked into the very psyches of software developers. Your remote storage service should not be changing, particularly in ways that break backward compatibility. Nobody should be dropping IPv4. Nobody should be rewriting a library in such a way the new one is incompatible unless the old one retains support. Nobody should be forcing you to migrate to some crappier version that looks like shit.

Stop changing things just to change them. But if you're actually changing for a good reason, consider the downstream effects of your changes.

I can take a bash script from 20, maybe 30 years ago, and know that it will still do what it's supposed to do, and all the standard commands it calls, like sed, awk, and grep will also do what they are supposed to do. Bits don't rot by themselves. Careless developers in the ecosystem make changes and don't consider backward compatibility, and we euphemistically call it "bit rot."

What if meaningless busy-work is qualified professionals getting paid to leave meaningful problems alone because solving them is bad for the racket?

Yeah, it is seriously worth thinking about.

I’ve been doing UI for 20+ years and most of what I’ve worked on is determined by marketing & engineering. I understand & totally sympathize with not liking the results, but in my experience the designers rarely choose what (ui) problems need to get solved. Also I have never worked in an org that shipped “the design”, it’s inevitably compromised by high level management’s personal feelings or lack of engineering attention to detail (I don’t blame eng’s for this, anytime the project schedule gets tight, they immediately cut resources to UI/UX). Anyway, I agree most updated UI’s fail to deliver improvements to end users and let me tell you how shitty it feels to take the blame for stuff you didn’t like either.

Whilst apple also have its share of this ui change (like keyboard butterfly or no hole in portable etc.), I still think their design team actually work to solve sone user problem. Not just marketing or engineering… I cannot be sure. Just that I thought.

Hence not all in the dark side.

There is plenty of other UI things to be touched.

Cough spotify

Heh. I used uBlock origin to hide all the podcast elements in Spotify web for a clean desktop web-based Spotify. Every time I open up the app on my phone, I die a little.

Spotify was pretty snappy in the early days, I guess a decade ago now. Current iteration boots up in 3 minutes and is unnavigable. Went back to Winamp and occasional usage of the web player.

There’s a solution, a client software called Psst https://github.com/jpochyla/psst

I largely believe the Spotify folks keep making changes in their apps solely to break the experiences of those who're running cracked (ad-blocked) builds.

They seem to be happy breaking everyone else’s experience too though. Even basic functionality fails quite often for me.

The absolute worst is the macOS Music app, which doesn’t seem to allow basic things such as dragging from search results to playlists.

Ux is snake oil nonsense and has no place in software design. They create change for the sake of change and dumb everything down as if complexity were a sin.

I feel like this takes it too far. Complexity may not be a sin, but it is possible to make things much more cohesive.

"Modern" UX does involve a lot of dumb antipatterns and things that break usability, but I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater here.

Needless complexity is a sin. But easy/difficult is an orthogonal axis to simple/complex.

Should inherent complexity be simplified?

> It's not broke, stop trying to fix it.

There could have been better ways to keep it modern, but just leaving everything alone because “it works” isn’t really an option. First comes Unicode, then 4K/High-dpi scaling, then touch support and so on.

Once high DPI screens arrived, UIs that scaled poorly literally don’t work.

NT 3.1 (that is, the _first_ release of Windows NT in 1993) supported Unicode, at least as far as the UI elements were concerned (that it was UTF-16, well, ...)

Nope, UCS-2. Which is UTF-16, but just the BMP, so only the first 65k codepoints and all characters are fixed-length 16bits. Only later windows versions at some point learned UTF-16.

The Win32 widgets are scalable, actually. They support device-independent units out of the box, even in Windows 95.

The only people that say Win32 apps are scalable are the ones that haven't dealt with legacy code. There is jut too much legacy code that either doesn't work, or doesn't work correctly with HiDPI screens.

At a minimum, for a Win32 application to work correctly with HiDPI it needs to tell the OS it is DPI aware.

This is done by marking the application DPI aware using the settings found in the manifest file.

The manifest file is then embedded into the resource section of the application, which then lets the OS know the application will be handling it's own DPI.

So the reason many of those 'legacy apps' don't work with HiDPI is they don't have those required manifest changes in place.

That then means the OS does the DPI scaling on behalf of the application and that results in poor scaling outcomes.

How do you patch these executables? I know 7zip can open .exe but there must be a better way.

It is not a trivial change to make the application DPI ware as it is a coding exercise (starting with that manifest change).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d...

Marking the app DPI aware just stops Windows doing any application scaling as it leaves that scaling up to the application.

But the real issue is most legacy apps were written before DPI scaling was an issue so they don't have this built in scaling.

To fix this Windows will do a 'one size fits all' scaling on their behalf.

It is this default Windows scaling that makes these legacy apps look so bad at higher DPI settings.

So you enable it by editing the manifest file and embedding the manifest file, but with legacy applications the HiDPI scaling might not be calculated correctly, or something assumes Pixels or DIP incorrectly. It might be something in a custom control in MFC, or a library or DLL where the source is long gone and no one can update, or even worst something doing something via COM and VB6.

That is correct. You enable it with the manifest and then you handle the scaling in the application code.

> something assumes Pixels or DIP incorrectly.

These are exactly the types of problems legacy applications run into.

They will contain hard coded assumption in their code and many of those will be 'pixel based' assumptions.

Applications also have to listen for messages that indicate a dpi change (moving between screens) and recalculate and redraw everything for the new dpi. The legacy codebases which are easily retrofitted to do that are the stuff of myths and legends.

So the solution is to push a completely new UI framework as though that won't require any code to be touched?

> Applications also have to listen for messages that indicate a dpi change

That is how a well behaved 'DPI Aware' application should work.

However, even for those badly written DPI applications that don't listen for those changes, the work around is to first make the required DPI changes and then restart those badly written DPI applications, as they will then pick up those DPI changes on startup.

The UI did scale, but lots of apps were poorly coded.

> Marlett is a TrueType font that has been used in Microsoft Windows since Windows 95. The operating system uses this font to create user interface icons that are used in the menus and windows.

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

Apple managed to support high-dpi without turning the whole thing upside down.

Because they had aquired a solid foundation that had fixed this problem already 30 years ago (NextStep with Display PostScript).

Apple doesn't run 20 years old binaries. On the contrary, they break ABIs faster than Linux distros, so they can move faster.

What did they break in order to support high-dpi?

Google has not yet learned.

I mean Android 12... Some project manager wanted a promotion this desperately.

> Why do they keep messing with the UI?

The UI that remains unchanged in a few years is perceived as old and obsolete, hence the purely marketing driven need to change it even when it works. And then there are new courses and new support contracts. Governments are a significant part of MS customer base; every time MS changes something, it's new money pouring in. As someone once said, Windows is not an operating system, it's a business platform.

I think I've seen an old article by a Microsoft employee saying "if you didn't change the UI, you changed nothing".

They used the calculator as an example, saying that it saw several improvements but since it always looked the same, people thought nothing had changed. Improvements included things like better arithmetics, so that (10/3-3)*3=1.

Dream job: full time engineer on Windows Calculator team.

Developing a calculator that one could be proud of would be a pretty sweet job. By that I mean producing a product that consistently produced correct results, offered useful features, and had a user interface that is more pleasant to use than a four function calculator.

Did that at an earlier point in my career, and it absolutely was, but calculators pretty quickly reach a point where "less is more", and at that point it's just better to leave it alone.

I just use Python as my desktop calculator, it works pretty well.

I also use Python or bc as a desktop, but that really isn't the point.

People sometimes criticize the Windows calculator for perceived errors in the results even though it is a superficially simple program. What they fail to account for are the edge cases, those quirks of computation that manifest themselves for various reasons (e.g. the precision of floating point, simplifications that appear simple to a person yet are non-trivial to implement in a program). A shipping product is not the same thing as a simple calculator tutorial a novice programmer may follow.

Emacs Calc. Mind blowing in features and power. As for the UI . . . well, it's Emacs.

The Graphing Calculator Story

https://www.pacifict.com/Story/

For the non-reader:

NPR Radio Piece

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/284/should-i-stay-or-should...

Google Tech Talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMyg5ohTsVY

Apple does not have this figured out, and if they do, they don’t care.

Yup

Taskbar can no longer be moved.

That single "improvement" will keep me away for as long as possible. It's the first thing I change when setting up a new Windows environment, and have done it for over a decade. I'm enough not alone that I've seen in mentioned in multiple articles.

MS makes all kinds of noise about "reworking the UI from the ground up for true usability" or some such. Yet I have no idea what could possibly be the benefit to removing such functionality. MS says they listen, but obviously not.

Unless a developer has a massive and utterly revolutionary improvement in the way we interact with the machine, and it yields 10X productivity improvements (or even 3X) for 90% of the user base - fkn leave it alone!!

Marginal improvements are the worst - the time spent relearning, or fumbling while using a different machine is never recovered, and it just makes people annoyed at you. Even if the improvements are "free" the price is too high.

I have the taskbar on the left on Mac, Linux, and Windows. Removing this customization makes me wonder who the hell makes these decisions. Do Windows developers not dogfood their own OS? Apparently the person making these decisions only uses the taskbar on the bottom and it must be good enough to disrupt the workstations of millions I'm sure.

I'm enraged by the new UI where you can't have multiple instances of the same application side-by-side in the taskbar. It's one of the things I hate in chromebooks, which Windows decided to adopt as their only (non hidden) option.

Yeah you're not alone there, the stupid idea that windows now needs to be fully tablet capable without a keyboard to the detriment of everyone else using it normally. Literally making the interface less informative and adding clicks, waiting and gestures to achieve actions that should've been a single point and click.

I call it the "BIG BATAN" ideology, as everything needs to be a clean oversized button without any extra options or functionality. Stupid mobile OS features creeping into desktop for no good reason.

I swear if MS eventually removes the don't group fallback I'm finally ditching Win for KDE and never coming back.

This is especially ridiculous when seeing how few tablets are sold by Microsoft, despite them try harding for a decacde or so.

I have used/owned old HP Tablet PCs that ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, and one of the bigger Surfaces. The HP with XP was a better experience. Windows 10 on the surface closes the on-screen keyboard after every change of focus from one input field to another. It doesn't open the keyboard automatically. And the Surface's battery swelled up and popped the case open.

I'd actually like a modern pen-enabled PC, but they seem to be getting worse at software (and batteries!) over time. And when I'm at a desk with a keyboard, mouse, and large monitor, nothing else from MS beats the classic 2K/XP (7's okay too) UI.

  > I swear if MS eventually removes the don't group fallback
  > I'm finally ditching Win for KDE and never coming back.

Exactly the switch that I did - get this - in 2005. And I never went back. Even in multiple software development roles, having to interact with Word- and Excel- using colleagues, and having "UX experts" sending me Photoshop files, KDE has pulled me through.

I have been using KDE on-and-off since 2001 before switching fully in 2005, and in all that time KDE has had a single disruptive UI switch, going from KDE 3 to KDE 4. The upgrade to KDE 5 went all but unnoticed.

Yeah, I hated this too. I've been using the 7+ Taskbar Tweaker program[0] to change this behaviour and I honestly couldn't imagine using Windows without it at this point.

[0] - https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker

I think it might be application specific behavior? Because I can for example have multiple instances of the modern calculator app and they show up side by side in the taskbar. But I cannot have multiple instances of the modern alarm app, it just focuses on the already open instance.

How do you notice new control panel elements, if not looking for damned “them appliances for interchange connectivity” or whatever bullshit they came up with this time for networking cpl?

fire the idiots that keep messing around with the UX

Don’t push on them too hard, maybe they are bound by some evil contract. Legend has it, one guy sold his soul to make the new PATH= editing dialog after 666 weeks (~13 years) of negotiations.

> new PATH= editing dialog

But that one in Win 10 at least seems like an improvement

Exactly, and a price for that was one developer soul, according to the legend mentioned above.

It is broke - badly. But because they no clue what they're doing they just keep making it worse.

There's surely a management book to be written documenting the dysfunctional processes that result in disaster after disaster.

The weird thing is they don’t redesign the old UI as much as put new “simpler” UI over it with the option to use either. I’m pretty sure there are like 3 levels of UI between Windows 10 and the classic Device Manager.

Yeah, it's part of the identity crisis that emerged after someone decided the desktop UI should feel like a tablet or mobile UI.

"It's easy. Just add a cog icon for settings!"

Then, there's the whole free/ad supported model wherein you need an MS account, etc. I don't want to be integrated into your cloud metaverse. I don't want OneNote. I don't want Teams. I don't want to go through a whole phony tablet-like experience to get to the stuff I need.

I just want to use my machine as the productivity/dev tool I purchased.

I think they fundamentally no longer understand what the product is or should be.

I think they fundamentally no longer understand what the product is or should be.

On the contrary, I think they know what the product is quite well: it's you. All the ads they're shoving into everything are evidence that even if you're paying for it, you are still the product being sold.

Well, sure. That part's pretty clear.

But, in terms of delivery, form-factor, packaging, etc., they have no idea how to pull it off with any coherence.

I wish this was at least quantified. If they want $100 for "Ad-supported Windows", what would they charge for a system without (basically LTSB but intentionally sold as a quantity of one consumer product, I guess)

I've always assumed the "let's profile and sell the data" was a either a bubble waiting to pop in the face of something GDPR-alike, or a tail-wag-the-dog scenario where they're gradually killing $100-per-sale products for 30-cents-per-user-per-month of new revenue. Would be fascinating for both consumers and investors to see what dollar figures they're using.

yeah, most things though, if you know the name you can just hit the windows key and type the name and skip all the crap in between

Dunno about that, at least as far as Google is concerned. I was initially put off by the changes to Android (moving from 9ish to 11) because they took away the bottom control bar, but I've used it for a week and am completely comfortable with it now. The gestures are intuitive and easy to use.

> This is what drives me nuts. Why do they keep messing with the UI?

This is a general problem with corporate developed commercial software. Nobody ever got promoted by saying, "this is great, let's not change it."

> Even Apple and Google have both figured out that screwing around with UX every release is a recipe for making your customers HATE you.

No they haven't. I hate Windows and love my Mac, but being forced into an upgrade from High Sierra to Big Sur sucks... a ton of the features I used all the time got buried behind click-and-hold etc.

> Even Apple and Google have both figured out that screwing around with UX every release is a recipe for making your customers HATE you.

...are we talking about the same Apple and Google? Big Sur? Material You?

Sure, maybe it’s not “every” release, but only because they have a faster release cadence than Windows.

I don’t know about Google but I would say that the majority of Apple’s design refreshes are iterative in such a way that someone coming from the previous release is very unlikely to get “lost” when presented with the latest UI.

And this is the key. UI refreshes are fine as long as they don’t add unnecessary friction to the user experience.

Apple’s refreshes are also generally complete, cohesive and coherent. Yes they have the odd inconsistency here and there but largely the design system feels fully thought out at a high level. (I would perhaps put built-in apps like Podcasts and Music to one side here as I have far less charitable opinions around some of those UI updates - I’m mainly talking about the core OS experience).

I’m an experienced user of macOS and Windows and I cannot remember the last time I upgraded a macOS version and couldn’t just immediately carry on with my work without any major reorientation needed. Likewise with iOS. And Apple is iterating on their UI at a much faster pace than Microsoft.

And yet I have Windows VMs and Servers that I’ve used for years now and I still cannot fathom where they have moved setting X because it’s literally all over the place. Their UI updates are mostly incoherent, incomplete and just plain baffling.

The hash they’ve made of settings is just incredible. I have no idea how normal users navigate that crap. Even if you can stay in the top-level “dumbed down” layer of the settings UI it’s completely unintuitive in many places.

I’ve not seen an improvement to the start menu that has benefited my usability in any way since Windows 2000. I’m constantly confused with the various different start menus across servers running different Windows versions. Contrast that to the dock in macOS which has basically been the same simple and usable design paradigm for over 20 years with gentle refinement over that time. The only consistent thing Microsoft seem to keep doing to the start menu is they make more space for ads. FFS.

I’m not even going to get into the aggressive, seemingly-can’t-be-stopped forced updates…

I’m bullish on Microsoft’s .NET developer ecosystem and mainly positive about their Cloud strategy - the company has made some impressive changes over the last decade, but my god, Windows is a total car crash at the moment.

Why did they rearrange everything in System Preferences on Big Sur? Years and years of the same layout and then musical chairs and can’t find anything quickly anymore.

To this day, when doing Material design based stuff you are left to your own devices, because Google UI/UX team announced it to the world, and then left to each single developer out there to customize their Android widgets to achieve their design documents.

There are a couple of Google IO sessions where the presenter goes through how to custom write Android views to match Material.

Then a couple of years of comunity complaints they released a Material custom theme for Android that still doesn't implement 1:1 their UI/UX specification.

When this framework was finally catching up with Material documentation, they release Material You.

Those have been a relatively long time ago. Both of them stopped doing that. If it's a temporary stop or a definitive one, is an open question, but they did stop (at least for a while).

Big Sur came out in 2020 and Material You was announced in May of this year.

The sad reality is that UX groups don't want to fix existing UIs, they want to design new ones. That's the whole issue here. MS wants to hire and retain the best UI people, but those people don't want to fix a UI that was created 20 years ago.

>> UX groups don't want to fix existing UIs, they want to design new ones.

Maybe they need to check their ego at the door and do the job they're paid to do? There's a reason it's called work and not happy-fun-time.

Or they just work for the competition where they're allowed to design new things.

So the competition would have a problem with ever-changing UI and unsatisfied users?

Any rational company would sign-up for that immediately.

>be happy to go back to a Win95 interface with the latest kernel.

I would be happy to be even on Win3 interface with the latest kernel: themes and colors that worked almost on every f application! bonus: thick BORDERS! look now at the pathetic 1pixel borders they have (and NO F way to change that)

> It's not broke, stop trying to fix it.

I completely agree.

But look on even HN, if anyone mentions a library they're using you get the inevitable comment about how there's not been a PR in 3 months so the project must be dead. Do a search of HN for the word "Modern" and look how many projects assert themselves as such.

> Nobody wants that!

Apparently, they do. It's just you and I that don't and we aren't enough.

And SerenityOS is the proof an old Win9x GUI+OS can run smooth without taking all screen space & with little memory.

> and UI elements that haven't been updated since Windows 2K.

Windows 2K + cleartype would be perfect.

Plus individual screen dpi scaling from whenever that was. And the usb handling from win10. Oh and the audio device switcher is so much better in w10 than w7.

Actually people seem to focus a lot on UX but in terms of the core features (handling my hardware and managing processes) windows has improved a lot. I also fondly remember win2k but I think it would be absolutely awful to use now.

fair points, which i was going to mention, but was feeling too wistful. (it does happen)

The new win 10 audio swapping is a horrible abomination. The capstone being the removal of audio settings from the system tray. I feel like I could rant for an hour on the topic. The per app sound controller is good when it works, but frequently likes to jump to other devices with something resembling free will.

Personally I prefer non-antialised MS Sans Serif, and turning off antialiasing is one of the first things I do (but they seem to make it harder with each new version to eradicate it completely) because it physically hurts my eyes and makes me feel dizzy after looking at "smoothed" text for too long. But I think the gradual loss of customisability is definitely something we can all agree against. (For another one, I don't think I've ever put the taskbar anywhere other than the bottom, but I definitely think it would be better if people were free to put it where they wanted.)

Seriously. Windows Classic was perfect. Fast, functional, and extremely easy to learn.

Yeah if they gave me a high DPI Windows 11 classic theme without telemetry and some actual quality control I’d be all over it.

My mother also agrees with me on this. She’s been progressively hating Windows more every release too.

I like that driver management no longer sucks, I like search-to-launch, and I like the way you can send windows to the left or right half of the screen (decent tiling WMs or Spectacle on macOS are much better, but hey, Windows' thing is better than nothing).

... that's a fairly complete list of improvements to Windows since, I dunno, Win2k, that I care about. Most other changes have been neutral, or made it worse.

[EDIT] oh, and two of those three probably would have been at least as good as high-quality add-ons (like the Spectacle example is, on macOS), so as far as really vital stuff goes, making drivers suck a lot less is just about it.

If you think driver management doesn’t suck then try owning an HP wireless printer. Total shit show.

Looks like the “every odd release is terrible” tradition is still strong in Microsoft.

Not been on Win for a long time, but isn't Win 7 generally regarded as the best/most stable?

Odd like “every other release”, not “is the version number not divisible by 2”

I think they mean 'odd' as in 'every second one' rather than odd version number.

E.g: 11 - bad, 10 - good, 8 - bad, 7 - good, Vista - bad, XP - good, etc, etc.

Not native speaker, this is indeed what I meant :)

Windows ME - wretched...kernel faults every 1 of 3 boots on a fresh install!

I co-manage about 150 Windows machines at my org, I'm in no hurry to try Windows 11 ATM.

If you like Windows classic you'll love ReactOS: https://reactos.org/

I hate the UI after Win 7. For years all users that needed to dig into setting knew exactly where they were. Now they expose some through a clunky UI and you have to go digging for that that are, in fact, just the same old UI. Which has to create confusion for many users presented with their new UI only to be thrown into a totally different UI style.

The new UI should 1) actually expose all of the settings and 2) offer a toggle to default to the UI that sits behind everything anyway.

Otherwise, I just don't understand the need to tweak with UI design that roughly 20 years of Windows users have already learned.

Consistency would be good.

Also some of the old elements don't work well anymore. Like new menus that appear in certain folders, except you'd never know because the menu bar is hidden by default. Or forms that were never designed to resize.

I wouldn’t go that far. It is better than the new windows 10 settings for sure but count how many clicks it takes to get to the menu to change the IP of the machine, with non resizable windows, text that is non selectable/copyable, etc. I don’t care for the old battleship-grey look, but lots of the old parts are very clunky.

Including important features that are not accessible in UI. Like all scheduled tasks run as low priority, no UI to change that.

After installing Windows for the first time in easily 6 years, I was shocked that things like the device manager and disk management still look like they're from Win95. It's not better if it's not remotely consistent

Those control panels might look dated, but they are a lot more discoverable and feature complete than their modern replacements.

Perhaps more feature complete, but idk about discoverable. I wouldn't have found them if I didn't already know they existed, because I had to search for them.

The worse part is how new settings are pushed into the new UI layer under their own menus rather than being easily accessible from the control panel. I understand the need for backwards compatibility but I'd assume they would want to put together a proper replacement for the control panel that utilizes their newest technology while still being able to manage legacy application settings. But it seems you have to go through multiple screens until you find the right one that has the setting. It's really annoying.

> Windows Search being objectively worse than the Power Toys Run

Oh no, that's the one feature I was looking forward to, and only because I was hoping it would be better than Power Toys Run.

I was trying to check Disk Partitions on Windows 10, so typed this into the search.

It gave me a website with some freeware tool. I had to search around again until I found the actual system tool. I don't know what a regular user would have done.

I'm not really a Windows user.

My favorite is when I see the result I want flash by and then I accidentally type the next character -- correctly -- due to momentum, and the result disappears. Then I delete the last character in an attempt to bring back the result, and then I try retyping the whole thing, but the correct result never reappears. It is gone. Only useless web results remain.

This! It's infuriating.

I also find that at first it pulls up File Explorer when I type "exp", but in a flash it switches to Edge. Just wanted a file management window, please.

In case you're not aware: Windows Key + E for a file management window.

I live in other OSes most of the time, so thank you for this.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search] "BingSearchEnabled"=dword:00000000 "CortanaConsent"=dword:00000000

^ put this into a .reg file, run it, and never see those bullshit web search results again. Have been doing this first thing after a fresh install on every PC.

You need carriage returns.

  Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

  [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows Search]
  "ConnectedSearchUseWebOverMeteredConnections"=dword:00000000
  "AllowCortana"=dword:00000000
  "DisableWebSearch"=dword:00000001
  "ConnectedSearchUseWeb"=dword:00000000

  [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search]
  "CortanaConsent"=dword:00000000
  "BingSearchEnabled"=dword:00000000
  "AllowSearchToUseLocation"=dword:00000000

Much simpler is to just paste to a terminal:

    REG ADD HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v BingSearchEnabled /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
    REG ADD HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search /v CortanaConsent /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Yeah Windows Search is useless. I'd recommend Everything[0]. Though, it's more for general file searching than searching for programs. Can't remember if it learns your habits and pushes them to the top or not. Regardless it's instantaneous and I almost never use the Windows search since I discovered it

https://www.voidtools.com

Thanks "Everything" looks like something I will install and use.

I previously used a manually-triggered disk search indexer called Cathy.exe which works well [1]

For "real time (i.e. without the pre-cached index) live searches of filenames and/or contents by keyword/grep I like "Agent Ransack" [2]

It's one of the few things I always use on every windows machine I login to

[1] https://cathy.en.lo4d.com/windows

[2] https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

Everything is pretty much the only thing I miss from Windows. Maybe paint.net too. I haven't found a suitable Linux equivalent for either.

fsearch replaces "Everything" for me

fsearch is fantastic. Bind it, or various configured states of it, to keystrokes and never look back...

I quite like pinta as a paint.net replacement. Don't think it's as feature complete, but hits that ease of use sweet spot for really quick crops or adding text, etc.

I absolutely love "Anything", use it constantly.

Has saved my neck many, many times.

Unrelated, but that last part of your comment tingled my Litany Against Fear sense. At least I know with which mindset I should encounter Windows 11 now.

This happens on Spotlight as well.

A regular user would have said, "What's a disk partition?"

I've needed it enough time that I won't ever forget "diskmgmt.msc" command, and AFAIK it works since Windows XP.

I'm not really sure what's so problematic with searching settings, but other platforms I use (macOS, iOS) are not really much better in this regard.

mmc.exe and you can snap-in diskmgmt, and it will save that in the menu for next time.

Since diskmgmt is mmc with that snap in already snapped in.

Disk Management is also in the Power User Menu, just right click the Start Menu orb or Win+X.

It's diskmgmt.msc, you can just run it the unix way.

By editing a text file?

Use a terminal, or just Win+R

Just because it's CLI doesn't make it *nix. The 'everything is a text file' is the 'nix.

You don't run something by editing a text file

cron would like to have a word with you as would init.d

So you use cron whenever you want to launch an executable? This "UNIX way" seems terribly convoluted.

So you use cron whenever you want to launch an executable on a scheduled basis.

Edit: Arguing that running executables via CLI is what makes things *nix is just missing the point. In case your unfamiliar with the 'everything is a file concept:

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

Unix way isn't running via CLI, but knowing what to type to run what you want, because it's faster than GUI, while GUI provides you contextual information to help you discover what you can do.

>In case your unfamiliar with the 'everything is a file concept

But then Linus gives a rant how he hates polymorphism and overloading.

Unix way is when you just know what command to type without searching.

It is still available by right-clicking on the start button. This will almost certainly go away in 11, because MS hates us.

It is currently available via right click on the start button in Windows 11.

>UI elements that haven't been updated since Windows 2K.

This is good.

mmc.exe and its apps is used for actual work in IT.

I get it but mmc and services still lack basic features like filter/search, which is a daily pain point for me.

Is the service named "Microsoft [thing]" "Windows [Thing]" or just plain old "[Thing]" (e.g. "Microsoft Defender Antivirus Service," "Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection Service," or "Security Center")?

They should make it DPI-aware, though...

As I commented in another parts of this thread, you see that quite clearly in the mess of multiple teams, each advocating their own UI framework as the future of WIndows UI, as if they were the only team doing it.

It is like management let them all roam free and let the best one win.

That might have worked, if they had let the best one win. Instead, they treated the teams like a buffet - I'll take this app from this team, and that app from that team... and the result is, as you say, a mess.

> Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm,

Is it possible for a project to be abused for long enough that it becomes irrecoverable from any financially sensible perspective?

I mean this seriously: I've heard the codebase for Windows is really, really ancient and making updates is a nightmare. It's almost like trying to revive a lost language.

What if Windows has passed the threshold where the cost to fix it is beyond its potential for revenue? What if it's slowly approaching the threshold where simply maintaining it is beyond its potential for revenue?

Whoever you heard that from is wrong. The codebase has evolved over time and has been actively maintained and refactored. Making updates is not a "nightmare".

Very few code bases that old are easily maintained. It's not really much of an insult to say so.

And given how long it takes to roll out basic features and improvements to long standing issues, my hope is that the code is a nightmare. The other options are terrible leadership, or incompetent developers. Or some mix of all three.

Definitely not. I heard the NT kernel codebase is actually beautiful to work with.

There's definitely code rot in Windows, but that's probably due to compatibility reasons with third party code rather than actual bad design.

Metro was fucked up on many levels, but Steve Sinofsky had a really good vision for Windows that I just don't think he had enough time to see executed.

> The app to check if you're ready for Windows 11 is a "preview" less than 30 days before the FULL retail release of Windows 11

Unless something has changed recently, I believe the release of Windows 11 will only be for newly purchased devices. The update from Windows 10 to 11 won't be until sometime next year.

Why does this sound eerily familiar to Vista?

> and UI elements that haven't been updated since Windows 2K.

I use WindowBlinds to skin my Windows 10 to look like Windows 98. >.>

It doesn't work for programs that create their own title bars or remove them entirely (like Chrome, Firefox, and Discord), but I love having 3D buttons on my task bar and windows.

can you provide a screenshot (or link to a theme) so I can see how it looks like? All of the windows classic themes I've seen for windows 8.1+ have been pretty meh.

I just found this... https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/windowblinds/9233/

> ... someone picked up an iPad...

Love the burn.

> Google Desktop Search RIP or FileLocator Pro

I don't use such apps, not because I don't like them, but because these days I just don't trust them to not surreptitiously send an index of my system to them.

I wrote my own file search programs. It's not hard, just a few lines of code. I use them every day.

Make sure to turn off the tracking and sending built in to windows if you're concerned.

https://www.wired.com/story/windows-10-privacy-settings/

I don't even trust the "turn off" buttons.

I just write my own utilities. They're simple to write, they work, and I port them around as needed.

P.S. I have file indexing turned off on my drives.

This sounds good in theory, but when Microsoft did just that in 2011 with Windows 8, it ended up backfiring on them big time.

It's pretty clear Windows has organizational and structural problems. Mainly because every product they release is always only 80% there. For some reason, whatever it is, it gets mostly finished, shipped and then abandoned and moved into maintenance mode.

Yet, it works for them. They usually always win in whatever market they go after. So I can't say they are incentivized to fix those structural problems.

>This sounds good in theory, but when Microsoft did just that in 2011 with Windows 8, it ended up backfiring on them big time.

the problem was that while windows 8 had *somebody* with a vision behind it, the vision never really made it through to the product. windows 8 was obviously the product of a dysfunctional system that was pulling in two completely opposite directions - the consumer devices side who wanted modern touch-friendly designs to compete with iPad, and the business customers who wanted the windows they were familiar with and didn't want to have to re-train their employees. and what we ended up with was a half-assed implementation in the middle.

"we want to do the best possible job of supporting the huge number of existing applications and users on our platform" is a perfectly valid vision for the future of windows. vision doesn't have to mean change. The problem with there being no vision is you get both the change and the hesitance to change.

The craziest part was how Windows Server 2012 included Windows 8 UI. The worst of both worlds.

The funniest part is, that Windows Server 2012 had a "desktop experience" feature, which basically brought it on par with Windows 8, UI-wise.

It was much more usable if you didn't install it.

At least some business users love leaving greasy fingerprints all over their surfaces.

First pre used surface I got I practically had to sterilise.

On windows search, I never understood why it was so bloody slow, particularly on network drives. If I traverse the same folders programmatically I get a result in seconds or less. The search function will takes an order of magnitude that, and I don’t believe it is searching anything else than file names. And don’t even dare changing the sorting order of the search result, because of course it must trigger a new search from scratch.

Which leads me to the same conclusion than many other flaws in Windows. I don’t think the windows team at Microsoft uses windows themselves. They must all have macs at home or perhaps don’t care much about computers. But clearly those obvious UX failures do not seen to annoy them.

I think that like many places nowadays, development of Windows is done by developers according to an entirely business-driven backlog, where details are first broken down into prioritizable bits before being implemented. As long as features are delivered on time in predictable increments, nobody dares to openly question the actual usefulness or quality of the resulting software for fear of impeding that smooth rollout which would make the team look bad and reduce chances of promotion and / or bonuses.

How can you say it is half-baked when it's still in beta? I am not saying it will be perfect when released, but we cannot judge something that's not generally available yet.

For me with windows 10... I spent about 2 hours trying to get it to install on my new machine while it continued to fail due an issue with it recognizing my nvme drive complaining i did not have any sada drive... in about 20 minutes after being very frustrated i downloaded ubuntu and installed... I spent the next 20 minutes installing lutris and the sims4 so my girls could play... so about 4 hours later... 40 minutes of which was to get linux installed with wine and playing video games with a then pretty nice nvidia 1080 ti graphics card... and bonus i can play sc2... i guess i don't see why people still use windows?

> Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision. Regardless of what that vision is

That sounds a lot like how Windows 8 went.

My personal opinion: they should have frozen the UI at Win7. The kernel improvements since that time are fine. Iterative, under the hood improvements over UI revolution.

Was about to say the same. That is exactly how Windows 8 was made. Really wish we had gotten more of a continuation of the design of Win 7 instead of everything else that’s happened since.

>Windows Search being objectively worse than the Power Toys Run

'Everything' is a freeware tool that should be installed by every Windows user.

https://www.voidtools.com/

Those are completely different products. Run and Everything search for file names only. Windows Search searches in file's content too, and understand a lot of file formats.

"Just say no."

For home computers, I said no many years ago and never looked back.

However I sometimes wonder, since strides have been made in booting Windows from USB and with introduction of WinPE, could we have a smaller, limited purpose Windows, bootable from USB drive. We could boot into this to edit Word documents or Excel spreadsheets or some other Office task, then power off.^1 It could boot to RAM so the HDD is never touched. Portable Windows. Normally, WinPE and Windows "boot disks" are used by Windows sysadmins, but there is nothing to limit usage to only Windows sysadmin stuff. A hypothetical Windows sysadmin and/or full-blown Windows-loving reader, who has succumbed to Redmond's propaganda, might think, "What could you even do with that. It would be useless." Yet Microsoft itself anticipates that someone might see the utility and they actively try to prevent such persons from using a fast, unbloated, telemetry and ad-free Windows.^2 Its one thing to require enterprise customers who pay annual fees to use bloated Windows N+1 but what about non-enterprise users. (Perhaps they dont count. They are just sources of data collection.)

Personally, I dont need Microsoft to tell me what is and what is not a "general purpose operating system". I will make that call and I will decide how I want to use it. This brazen disrespect for free-thinking users is why I dont use Windows (at home).

https://www.hirensbootcd.org/

"Windows PE is not a general-purpose operating system. It may not be used for any purpose other than deployment and recovery. It should not be used as a thin client or an embedded operating system. There are other Microsoft products, such as Windows Embedded CE, which may be used for these purposes.

To prevent its use as a production operating system, Windows PE automatically stops running the shell and restarts after 72 hours of continuous use. This period is not configurable."

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

It continues a decades-long tradition where every other Windows version is borderline unusable and universally hated. As long as I remember:

* Windows 3.0 was perceived as buggy

* Windows 3.1/3.11 was a major improvement

* Windows 95 was extremely unreliable

* Windows 98 sort of addressed most of the issues

* Windows 2000 was a weird amalgamation of the NT kernel and 98/ME look'n'feel that wasn't received well

* Windows XP fixed that

* Windows Vista was universally hated

* Windows 7 addressed most of its issues

* Windows 8 was a nonsense with phone-style UI on desktops, tablets and servers

* Windows 10 fixed it

Now it's time for another crappy release to get people really excited about upgrading to Windows 12 in a year or two.

Where's Windows ME?

Probably a repressed memory.

It should be in Windows 2000's place. ME was a Windows 9x system, 2000 was part of the NT family.

It is too long ago to properly remember, but during this time when building my desktops I always insisted on getting NT and then Windows 2000 in place of the consumer versions. Had some funny discussions with shops when buying licenses.

I also remember using NT 4.0 (with the "hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to login" quirk) and then 2000 at home as a kid. Dad, being a sysop/dev/IT manager/"tech guy", really liked the stability of NTs. It took the first Service Pack for XP to really start catching on. Good times!

Yeah. Windows 2000 was rock solid compared to 95 and 98 and became the underpinnings for future consumer releases of windows...

We do not speak of Windows ME

Didn't fit the narrative.

It's crashing. Seriosly is a good thing that they did not mention it although some people claimed it was stable on their computer.

Vista was fine, no idea what's all the hate about.

by the end of its life it was fine, but it took waaaayyy too long to come out, the 64bit support was ahead of its time with no alternative, it was buggy, new access control model was too restrictive (bombarding users with escalation prompts for mundane things), and a bunch of other things that the sands of time caused me to forget.

it was not a great launch. usuable by the end.

Not if you had limited RAM. Less than 4GB was unusable.

Vista SP1 was fine. Vista before that wasn't, really.

It was a performance and memory hog, which wasn't helped by Microsoft underselling its minimal hardware requirements to an extreme. I still have a laptop from that time lying around with a Vista Capable label, Aero never worked on it and it ended up stuck in an eternal update loop because the hard drive did not have enough space for an up to date Vista.

Microsoft had to extend the life of Windows XP one last time when Netbooks became more common because Vista barely ran on a high end laptop.

> * Windows 10 fixed it

Windows 10 is biggest garbage fire POS Windows version yet, because of their new update model. For the last several months, I've been unable to install the mandatory (for non-enterprise users) feature update patches. They fail to install with a cryptic error code and get rolled back. If I don't get this figured out soon, I'm not going to be able to get security patches anymore.

I should be able to get a version that's stable (enterprise licensees get access to LTSC versions that never are required to install feature updates), but they've denied everyone else. The best I could do was buy professional, which let me delay the patches for up to a year (instead of only a week or two). My understanding is MS laid off most of their Windows QA team, and replaced it with home users drafted to become guinea pigs plus telemetry, and the lack of it shows.

Meanwhile, updates work for me but don't ask for user consent after downloading them.

I just come back to find my PC randomly rebooted overnight.

Better that than the Internet being attacked by botnets full of machines that users never patch because they're constantly "doing important things overnight".

> Better that than the Internet being attacked by botnets full of machines that users never patch because they're constantly "doing important things overnight".

Force updates are debatable for security patches, but they're entirely unacceptable for new features.

In case you weren't joking, no, that's not "better" at all. Even when it's about your own life at stake, and therefore an argument for overriding your decisions may have a better standing, you are still allowed to refuse treatment even if it comes from professional people that even took the (Hippocratic) oath to make your well-being a priority. Now let's get back to the personal computing and what's happening here with these forced updates, which is more akin to breaking and entering, when are not being authorized by the owner. How the hell did it come to this?

Is a fresh install not an option for the system you're describing? I'm not suggesting that it's a sane thing to have to do, but after a couple of hours of resesrching the problem with no leads it seems like the best choice.

A fresh install is the solution to every windows problem. The issue is that we are not young anymore and we don't have the time to do it. Windows 10 being a quality disaster does not help either.

> Is a fresh install not an option for the system you're describing? I'm not suggesting that it's a sane thing to have to do, but after a couple of hours of resesrching the problem with no leads it seems like the best choice.

A fresh install with my original media failed in the same way during updates.

A fresh install (on a spare HD) with the media creation tool worked once, but crashed and burned after the first time I ran Windows update. I might try again, but I'm a little worn out.

I actually wasted hours with MS chat support, but they offered no insight except running me through a fresh install script. Once I hit the end they started talking about BIOS updates. However that's an entirely different wall, because apparently my MB shipped with an update that's not recommended for my CPU, but I cannot downgrade. I'm now debating whether to shell out $$$ for CPU upgrade (not even to current gen), but the ones I want are out of stock and only being sold by iffy sellers.

Yeah. I had the same issue and could not stand the update nagging anymore.

Thankfully, a buddy of mine pointed me to SetupDiag, which parses the logs to get you more info. In the end, the update was failing due to an accelerometer driver (!!).

Paying for MSDN to get LTSC is worth it.

Yes - Windows update is one of the most unreliable pieces of software I've had the misfortune to use. On one of my machines checking for updates hangs indefinitely. The whole update service is stuck and can't be stopped. I can do some hacks involving deleting the update catalogue in safe mode, but it just breaks again a few weeks later.

I had loads of non-UI issues with 8, 8.1 and even more with 10. For example suspend was completely broken on a Surface Pro on 10, while on my desktop it would mess up the filesystem on a drive every few days. They fixed most of them eventually but it took a long while. I’ll prolly upgrade somewhere just to get the free license (I assume there’s gonna be a cutoff date again) and then go back to 10 right after

> Windows 10 fixed it

Good joke. There is nothing I can do in Windows 10 that Windows 7 didn't do better.

From start bar search to window decorations. Windows 10 has actively gotten in the way of what was a great practical experience.

Windows 11 makes the window decorations a little better (still inconsistent with poor design choices), but adding a bunch of crap that I can't opt out of on install (like teams, skype and whatever other bloatware is installed).

I have to use an actual debloating script on fresh Win 10 installs, the script only gets bigger with Windows 11.

Come on Microsoft...

> There is nothing I can do in Windows 10 that Windows 7 didn't do better.

For devs, WinRT as COM evolution, using .NET Native and C++/CX.

Basically what .NET 1.0 should have been all along, a better way to write COM with AOT compiled language, following up on what VB 6 was already capable of.

And Delphi / C++ Builder have been offering since they exist.

Unfortunately internal politic games, and messed up execution kind of killed that.

Maybe, but just really maybe, gaming? I'm genuinely asking

VPN handling.

L2PT in Win 7 either auto-guesses your routes, or you have to add your own - after each connection, as a local admin, with ever changing interface name. You don't have scoped DNS either.

Windows 8 (!) fixes both these things: you can set up routes together with the connection for once and all, you can have scoped DNS, and you have complete control over cipher suites. As a bonus, you have Powershell API to that.

Windows 10 inherited this from Windows 8.

So this is one datapoint, what Windows 10 does way, way better than Windows 7.

Windows 2000 was an excellent OS. Clean, frugal and and rock-solid.

XP was bloated in comparison.

IFIR Windows 2000 was extremely well received by professionals (which at that time still was the target market). Windows XP was just the "consumer relesase" of Win2k and didn't actually add all that much except a new weird-looking UI theme.

Very true, I also preferred Windows 2000 and ran it until XP SP3 appeared, or so.

> Regardless of what that vision is, at least then Windows would be a something, rather than a whole host of competing ideas and contradictions i.e. a mess.

the big problem is, and this is primarily why i dislike everything windows, is that humans are mimicry machines. if you give them tooling that's an inconsistent mess, it's going to normalize the idea of inconsistent messes, and then they will create inconsistent messes.

windows ultimately normalizes inconsistency and mediocrity- as such, it encourages these habits of mind in those who are forced to use it. if those who are forced to use it are in any sort of creative positions, they ultimately create and propagate chaos that matches the cage which they are forced to reside within.

Well said! I've long maintained that Visual Basic set back the state-of-the-art in graphical user interfaces by (at least) a decade. The original intent and purpose of graphical UIs was direct manipulation of objects on screen. VB turned it into "filling in forms with buttons to click". And that mediocrity lives with us still, the original promise/premise sadly unfulfilled.

> windows ultimately normalizes inconsistency and mediocrity

Windows 95-7 design did not, quite to the contrary. Unfortunately I can't find it again, but usually the link appears on any HN discussion about classic Windows design sooner or later... anyway, the point is that the classic Win95 design was consistent across the whole OS (for apps that used the standard OS controls). UI elements had clear shadows, borders and margins separating elements visually, color schemes by default assisted that visual separation and they were customizable (e.g. for those with accessibility needs). Additionally, menus and hotkeys were consistent across Microsoft apps with (IIRC) clear guidelines on how third party apps should use menus, so that end users didn't have to learn much.

sure, the "chicago" ui was indeed a huge step forward... but until nt4, it was still only skin deep.

even after nt4, abominations such as mfc and heritage from ms lan manager lived on. the network protocols were so poorly designed that entire companies (riverbed, et al) sprung up to rewrite them as less latency sensitive alternatives that would actually function over wans.

Honestly I hope they keep UI elements from Windows 2000, because they are functional and informative. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. But at least it allows you to administrate the system.

MacOS is nice to use, but that is also restricted to daily use cases. If you want to administrate the system, you have an UI from the 70s, mainly the terminal. If you remove older UI elements from Windows, you are left with a useless toy box.

There is no single instance where the new setting perform better than the old ones, on the contrary it is a complete unstructured mess. They should remove it and try again in my opinion.

> As cliché as this sounds, Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision.

Completeley agree and I want to add: they need a product owner, someone who has used multiple operating systems in different form factors like OSX, iOS, Android, and Linux and can see the pros and cons of them instead of taking sides.

This page says the Health Check is "coming soon"..

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11

>Microsoft needs someone with a vision for Windows at the helm, someone they trust enough to go hands off and let them materialize that vision.

Do they, though? No one's buying Windows because they think it's swell. They're buying it because it's the default choice that comes with a computer, and because it's the default platform for commercial software. To most consumers, Windows is just what "computers" run, along with a vague notion that "Macs" might be a bit different.

As long as Microsoft continues to enjoy its monopoly position in the desktop OS space, they couldn't give a crap if Windows is "something" or not. All they have to do is not screw it up by breaking compatibility too badly, and fart out some sort of named release every few years so people don't think Windows is "old" (the nuances of rolling release being beyond the ken of the average consumer).

This seems to happen to nearly every company after the founder leaves.

I have to agree, even though I have plenty of pro-Windows comments.

To me Windows 11 feels like Vista, and to everyone that got burned with the rewrites on the WinRT side, just using plain Win32/MFC/Forms/WPF feels liberating.

Multiple teams are fighting UI politics over WinUI, MAUI on top of WinUI, React Native with WinUI, and classical UWP is not going away (Windows 11 Store is written in it), then ASP.NET team is pushing Blazor everywhere including on Web Widgets.

I will just wait for Windows 12, whenever it comes up, the UI war will be settled by then.

I migrated from Win32 to Qt two years ago. Never looked back. Much easier to program dialogs & UI. Qt gives you macOS as well. (And UWP if you insist).

WinRT is the OS/2 of the 21st century.

I have some concerns with Qt. Not the functionality, but the implementation of some of it. My primary concern is that it doesn't respect the OS's anti-aliasing settings. It defaults to making fonts anti-aliased, even if you don't want them to be. Because of this, last year I stopped updating an app using Qt.

The higher resolution a display is, the less and less you need anti-aliasing so it's unnecessary in the 4K and up era. Also while I am not on a 4K display, I find AA fonts blurry compared to nice crisp hinted non-AA fonts.

As you get higher in resolution, I'd expect the difference between AA and non-AA to get less noticeable. Is that not the case?

What OS and DPI are you on?

Have you tried Ultimate++, by any chance?

WinRT looked great, finally .NET being like Delphi and a C++ stack that looked like C++ Builder, for those moments that .NET alone won't do it.

On one side .NET Native is left to stagnate in C# 7, and C++/CX got replaced with C++/WinRT, which to this day (4 years later) still doesn't offer any kind of IDL tooling on VS (lets forget for a second that IDL exists since OLE 1.0), and requires manually merging generated files.

Then to top that, we get MAUI on top of WinUI, but with the XAML format used by Xamarin.

Anyone following the now 2100+ issues on Github, community calls, change of roadmap of what WinUI 3.0, Reunion and XAML Islands were supposed to be originally, and where they are going after Windows 11 announcement, can only be dismayed.

They don't seem to either get the complaints, or most likely, are stuck in a position where they cannot publicly acknowledge them.

OS/2 was actually much better than this with CSet++, while SOM had metaclasses and implementation inheritance, with Smalltalk and C++ support.

Still, I can equally well rant about other platforms, it is all a matter of which flaws we are willing to put up with.

I think there's a degree of denial. I remember walking up to an engineer on the WinUI team at Build (can't remember if 2018 or 2019) and they were _shocked_ that I had complaints about UWP. They seemed to think it was a revelation. It was honestly offensive how out of touch she was. I think at least the PMs on that team do not understand the human suffering they cause by releasing such a bad product.

Anyway, after a particularly awful project involving UWP and Forms UWP, I'm taking my vacation days and using them to learn Typescript, React, and Electron.

Edit: if you find yourself working at Microsoft on the WinUI or UWP teams, quitting is an option. There are many good products that could use your skills and programmer labor is in high demand.

I guess you have put it quite well.

Winforms will never die. If I was looking to make an investment into a skillset that will still be really useful in thirty years, I would go deep on WinForms.

Hum, my last winform app is from 2009, after that all projects ordered from customers where in web ui instead (same customers)

All of my real products are web-based.

But WinForms is immensely useful in building tools, and configuration utilities, and little one-off GUI things for various reasons. Anything that would take less time to slam together soup-to-nuts than just getting webpack working for a new project would take.

My last one is from 2016, now I am mostly doing other stuff, but there are plenty of places that still are quite into this kind of frameworks.

Just as example, companies that buy this kind of software,

https://perkinelmerinformatics.com/

At this point, WPF won't die, either.

And has lots of features that WinUI or UWP will never get.

Doing a 3D visualization for a LOB application? WPF can handle it.

Doing the same in UWP/WinUI? Ah the pour soul needs to go learn C++, C++/WinRT and DirectX then make use of SwapChainPanel, or trying to fit a third party .NET game engine into the application.

Then the team acts surprised that WPF has 3D capabilities when asked about this.

Apparently doing requirement analysis for what a replacement framework should cover wasn't part of the deal.

WinForms or COBOL. You'll be set for life :-)

I wonder if ReactOS will hit 1.0 by the time that Windows 10 goes out of support in 2024.

It would be interesting to see older systems retasked to a free clone OS, potentially running most/all of the same software.

https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-in-2020/

They won't let it happen. For now they decided to just ignore the project and not give it any publicity, but the moment it gains popularity, they will definitely react. Until now they attacked it indirectly through their kernel developer saying ReactOS stole his code - in spite of the fact they took all necessary measures not to and underwent an audit. This is the same old strategy Microsoft supported during the SCO trial.

i thought reactos contained portions of windows NT code?

No. Imagine you are a ReactOS (or Wine etc.) developer. The main thing you can't do is to use any code you are trying to reimplement. It literally contradicts the very aim of your project: to create a legal viable alternative to a proprietary system.

Moreover, you know it is the biggest danger and the main avenue Microsoft will attack you in the future, so you are extremely careful never to do anything even remotely illegal. When someone sends you links to fragments of Windows source code, you politely but firmly answer you are not allowed to look at this code. Because you know that if you look at it even once, an evidence of that could be used against you in court - and you are competing against the most important product of one of the richest corporations in the world, so you can't let yourself to be sloppy.

This is part of what I read on HN:

The first thing we observe is that the directory structure is basically identical. Yes, NT kernel subsystems are identified with short codes like "Ke" or "Ex". It's plausible that someone with a lot of NT knowledge would end up creating top level directories with these exact names, as is true of the WRK. But it seems kind of unlikely: the Wine sources do not show this pattern.

If we look at the Kernel Executive (Ke) subtree, we can see that there is a thing called a "Balance Set Manager". Both source trees define it in a file called balmgr.c - not only the location of the file but also the file name is identical.

https://github.com/Zer0Mem0ry/ntoskrnl/blob/master/Ke/balmgr... https://github.com/reactos/reactos/blob/master/ntoskrnl/ke/b...

It appears from the module description that the "balance set manager" is an optimisation of some sort related to reducing memory usage. Is this really something that needs a reimplementation with identical function prototypes?

Looking at the code of the identically named KeBalanceSetManager function, we can see that not only is the function prototype identical, but the order in which it does things is also identical. First it changes a thread priority, then it schedules a periodic timer callback.

Some of the local variables in these functions have identical names: PeriodTimer, DueTime, WaitObjects. Yes, these are obvious names. It's not a smoking gun. But it's not looking good.

Finally we discover that the ReactOS Balance Manager does .... nothing. It enters a loop which starts out by doing a wait for an event (fine, it's inherent to the task), and then switches on the result. But the code in the arms of the switch are commented out (the commented out code does a subset of the stuff in the NT code). The loop does nothing, just sits blocking in a loop forever. Why does this code in ReactOS exist if it does nothing?

It's the same story for the other big function in this file, KiScanReadyQueues. The code is virtually identical, line for line, with minor formatting and occasional trivial naming differences. Even the assertions are identical.

I'm not alleging anything specific or illegal, just comparing a small part of both codebases. However given what I've just seen, I wouldn't touch ReactOS with a barge pole. The Microsoft guy's complaint is entirely understandable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20345645

Yes, I remember that discussion, it was very interesting, but it was quickly became obvious that the whole thing is very nuanced, and what may seem too much of a coincidence for an outsider (comparing the codebase of stolen or licensed source code of Windows with React OS), it could have a very rational explanation.

They took the huge effort of complete rewrite and clean room implementation just for that! So not only it would make no sense for them to cheat, it would mean actually harming the project and causing its demise. Nobody in their right mind would do so.

> It's plausible that someone with a lot of NT knowledge would end up creating top level directories with these exact names, as is true of the WRK. But it seems kind of unlikely: the Wine sources do not show this pattern.

Someone put namespaced functions into a folder named after that namespace? If it wasn't for that classic C style filename I would have suggested a call to the K&R police for the most heinous crime of all: the attempt to write maintainable C code.

Wine also isn't providing driver API compatibility.

I'd settle for being able to delete explorer.exe from my system and put the ReactOS shell in its place.

I want to play modern games but with the Windows 98 desktop experience.

Doesn't ReactOS use the libraries from wine? So you could just run Linux.

The point of ReactOS is driver-level compatibility with Windows. The project implements their own equivalent of things like the Windows HAL or Windows Driver Model, which ideally should mean ReactOS can be a drop-in replacement for old Windows machines used to run some piece of hardware that only has a Windows driver. There are still industrial machines being driven over parallel port by WinXP. The Win32 API program used for controlling the machine most likely works just fine with Wine, but the necessary driver definitely doesn't. The ultimate goal of ReactOS is that you could just install the driver on it and thus control the industrial machine exactly like WinXP did it.

It's an admirable project, though of course it's nowhere near ready for use. Currently ReactOS doesn't run on a lot of real hardware, and is still well behind WinXP in terms of hardware support (USB memory sticks don't work, USB keyboards have problems, Wifi has minimal support and only for open networks, etc), but the goals of ReactOS are very different from Wine.

> Multiple teams are fighting UI politics over WinUI, MAUI on top of WinUI, React Native with WinUI, and classical UWP is not going away (Windows 11 Store is written in it), then ASP.NET team is pushing Blazor everywhere including on Web Widgets.

Great point.

As a developer in the Windows sphere for decades, I'm used to change.

However, at this point I have no idea what I am supposed to be developing user interfaces in. Honestly, using VS Code daily as part of my stack I'm leaning towards just accepting that WebView2/Electron/etc is the future.

I have read the complaints, but VS Code is a solid piece of engineering and it "just works". If that's an example of what we can easily get cross-platform, so be it.

I would rather see them rewrite VSCode in React Native, given all the love it is getting from Office and XBox teams, but lets see if it ever happens.

React is slow for the perf targets of VSCode.

React Native != React.

Also do you consider that VSCode has higher performance requirements than XBox dashboard, or Office plugins?

No commenting on the React thing, but yes I do think that VSCode has much higher performance requirements than Xbox dashboard or Office plugins.

VSCode has a very technical user base that will complain a lot if there is any kind of sluggish performance when doing live debugging. It's not just to work on small JS projects anymore. I use it to debug CUDA kernels on several processes at the same time and a lot of people have similar push-it-to-the-limit use cases.

If the user base was that technical, with performance requirements, they wouldn't be using an Electron based product to start with, when there are plenty of other native alternatives, including for CUDA debugging from Nvidia themselves.

I have over 2 decades in this industry and have used almost every IDE that exists.

I work on very large and complex projects ... the current one I'm working with is a massive Angular 12 project.

The fact that it's Electron doesn't matter to me. I am not concerned with it "using much more memory than native" because that has no effect on me.

All I care about that it works, and that is is performant. It is both.

It's still React, and it's still too slow. The only difference is where the render is committed to (DOM vs Native UI)

Having a declarative rendering logic, a rendering runtime, the VDOM, diffing, re-rendering, update scheduling and everything else that React uses under the hood is always going to be slower than tailor-made imperative rendering.

And let's not even go down the rabbit hole which is concurrent mode and suspense, where React is going to be basically a black box more suited to quantum computing with the whole "render x times and settle on a result that it thinks is correct".

I'm not sure if it will take up more resources than the Xbox dashboard or office plugins, but I am willing to say "yes". The dashboard is quite simple compared to a full-fledged IDE which VScode is becoming, and I'm yet to see the whole Office suite, including the underlying logic, being ported to React Native.

Atom was ported to React at one point but they quickly abandoned it because of the bad performance. Microsoft followed suit and hasn't even bothered with React for VScode.

Ah, that is why Teams dropped Electron for React Native!

Microsoft Teams? No they didn't drop Electron for RN/RNW. They dropped Electron for Microsoft Edge WebView2. I might be missing some sarcasm though

I'm going to get down voted for this, I realize it isn't for everyone... If it's not for you, no problem. Let me know what you prefer.

Anyways, try golang with imgui.

You can make imgui look like anything. Ontop of that, you get true cross platform binaries with native speeds with only a couple dozen lines of code and amazing dependancy management. If you've never done immediate mode front-ends, you'll be delighted.

From what I see it's the kind of library for people preferring usability over good looking appearance. Of course you can make it "look like anything", but sane defaults are also important for rapid software development and this definitely lack them

VS Code is like the absolute greatest Electron app that has ever, or will ever be written.

And yet it had an issue for quite some time where animating the cursor flashing was taking an enormous percentage of CPU.

It is also one that has big chunks of C++ and Rust code, and WebGL based rendering to make it actually usable.

Oh you can do that with Electron? This is not my area of expertise... Are there any other ways to have GPU acceleration?

Here how WebGL is used for the terminal in VSCode,

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/85971

Or how Rust is used for search via ripgrep.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-ripgrep

Rendering webpages is already GPU-accelerated by default in most browsers and platforms.

To be fair it was partially related to a bug in Chromium, and was fixed in 2017

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/22900

Yea vscode is really great! Could someone knowledgeable give a rundown of the exact stack/frameworks/etc they are using?

AFAIK it's Electron (i.e. javascript, chrome as the renderer, node.js I think looking at the processes).

So...not a lot of Microsoft product in it. Ironic.

It's chock full of Microsoft's telemetry!

I can't remember where I saw the post, but the reason it's such a fast product is that they put a large amount of time into performance analysis and fixing those issues.

So it's not so much the stack as the pure engineering time.

Take a look at Monaco, the editor that powers VSC: https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/

The rest of it is in hosting the processes and plug-ins for it. Microsoft also developed the Language Server Protocol that provides intellisense and other features for each language: https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

If you’re already used to WPF then you can continue using it. You don’t have to switch to something else.

This is M$ doing its tik-tok releases.

XP - decent

Vista - horrorshow

7 - alright (compared to vista)

8 - horrorshow

10 - alright (compared to 8)

11 - horrorshow

Personally I will never use it unless I really need to and then kicking and screaming but that is my observation.

That! It started before XP so...

and even before:

9x - please no!

2000 - great

ME - oh god, make it stop!

95 was a paradigm shift, 98 had batteries included for the internet, but 98se and 2000 server are the best OSes MS ever put out.

95/98/ME were operating on a different kernel than the NT line (which 2000 fell under). The difference really being that the NT kernel was targeting pretty much exclusively businesses, while the 9x line was targeting home users and some business users. They merged (with the NT kernel winning out) in XP, which targeted both home and business users.

ME was not an upgrade path from 2000 even though it came out after 2000, it was an upgrade path for 98.

Allow to fix your list :

XP - decent

Vista - horrorshow

7 - alright (compared to vista)

8 - Not too bad

8.1 - alright

10 - dumpster fire

11 - another dumpster fire

Yes, W10 is/was kindof a garbage. W11 is going to be worse. The only reason I still use Win is for work purposes, otherwise I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole

I completely agree with this list. Although Windows 8 had a bad desktop UI, it was easily mostly fixed with Classic Shell at the time (these days it is Open Shell as Classic Shell is not updated any more). What Windows 10 has now is a better UI, but it has all this background stuff and telemetry which screws any performance for long periods of time, other times it is fine. But I have had to have performance monitoring tools open all the time to see what is going through my hard drive. It is that bad that I have resource monitor open all the time, just out of habit, because of how often there is Windows telemetry stuff or update medic service or even stuff which tries to measure power usage of programs in Windows when I am running it on a desktop. This is all stuff built into Windows installed by Microsoft, not 3rd party stuff. I have been able to deal with this by bypassing the haphazard protections MS put into place to stop me turning that stuff off, if they truly manage to stop me using my PC the way I want, not allowing me to disable the stuff I don't like, then it will become to unbearable to use Windows. The only reason it isn't unbearable is the protections against turning stuff off can be bypassed (not that they haven't tried to stop it).

With Win 11 requiring SecureBoot and the Trusted Platform Module turned on, it is a hard no for me. I like having control over my PC.

Eh, I don't agree.

NT 3.51 — solid

NT 4.0, 2000 & XP — less, less and less solid

Vista — premature

7 — ok

8 — borked

10 & 11 — untouchable

2000 was pretty good really, more solid than 3.51 even

I hear the era of GDI being run in kernel mode was...not good for stability or security, but I rarely used 2000 and never used NT 4.0 so perhaps there are better mouthpieces than myself.

By W2K a lot of problems had been fixed, and on the other hand 3.51 was still a bit early and wobbly in other areas. I thought GDI was still in the kernel?

Well Vista removed support for kernel-mode printer drivers (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/pr...), Vista introduced the WDDM model for video drivers in user-mode, 8 removed support for XDDM so I guess one could say that by 8, things had come full circle.

This cycle doesn't work anymore. Windows 10 wasn't a normal release, it has been around for 6 years, and has at least 3 major updates(with many small ones). Windows 7 was around for ~3 years, and had one update before it was replaced with Windows 8.

FWIW, it’s “tick-tock.”

Vista SP2 was better than 7.

At least Vista had a real start menu. Yeah, early Vista was rough, but by SP2 all the problems were fixed.

> I will just wait for Windows 12, whenever it comes up, the UI war will be settled by then.

There is always hope ;-)

They've had 4 years to settle on a GUI for .NET Core and completely failed.

At this stage, the 3rd party gui libraries are looking better and better i.e. Electron.NET https://smackeyacky.blogspot.com/2021/08/electronnet-cross-p...

Here is the joke, MAUI with incompatible XAML is now delayed to post .NET 6 release, while with UNO you can go cross platform today, on .NET 6 and without having to rewrite XAML yet again.

I will go take another look at UNO then.

> To me Windows 11 feels like Vista

If they bring back Aero I'll be happy.

I like Windows, and I would prefer to keep everyone in my family running Windows, but Windows 10 just doesn't work as smoothly as it should considering the resources that Microsoft should be able to throw at it. Due to various latency issues in Windows 10, it feels like it was written by a couple of developers that don't fully understand the api/framework they are using. This should be their wheelhouse, since it is their OS, but it feels cobbled together. So I am slowly migrating my family to Linux as I don't have much confidence that MS will fix their shit.

Wouldn't surprise me if you reboot your computer one day and surprise! It's windows 11 now!

Remember, they did the same thing with Windows 10 a couple of times.

Welp, time to start dropping every packet from any Windows Update-related IP block in my router...

Seriously if you're genuine about that it's such a temporary solution. You're saying you can't trust your operating system vendor at all. Start making plans to dump them is really the only sane thing to do at that point.

I use Linux for most things and only boot into Windows for games. Wintendo is a real thing.

I'd like to be able to play the games I want to without worrying about being frog-marched into an OS without a taskbar.

At this point I would settle for a deny-then-allow solution involving dropping any and every packet that's not from the servers of the small handful of online games I play, any well-known wikis that cover the games I play, or any relevant modding sites.

> I use Linux for most things and only boot into Windows for games. Wintendo is a real thing.

> I'd like to be able to play the games I want to without worrying about being frog-marched into an OS without a taskbar.

Lutris/Steam with Proton works wonderfully nowaday!

The main caveat is if you enjoy multiplayer gaming, it often require extensive low-level access to your Windows environment for anti-cheating purposes. Wintendo is the correct approach in that case; VFIO is an option, but afaik some anti-cheat systems will detect that they're running inside a VM.

Most security concerns go out of the window (pun not intended) when the most sensitive information your OS has access to is your Steam account, which has 2FA against a separate non-Windows device.

Since my PC is on wifi, what I do is set my wifi as a metered connection. Windows won't download updates on metered connections. I have to trigger the updates manually, which allows me to review them first. Like how it used to be.

Nifty trick, thanks for sharing. Will be useful to many readers. Including those booting into W10 1% of the time, for SD-Card formatters and other Windows exclusives.

"As a free replacement for Windows 10, your PC will upgrade to Windows 11 automatically."

From https://www.pcworld.com/article/3623008/windows-11-faq-featu... rather than the horses mouth but I expect it is correct.

I'm glad I'm on unsupported hardware.

The UI war predates WinRT - remember Silverlight? Or, for that matter, WPF itself. So why would you expect it to be over?

Silverlight was a response to Flash, and WPF was Forms replacement out of Longhorn's UI.

They had quite clear goals.

I think MAUI Blazor App + Blazor Website + shared libs is the way to go.

That’s not clear at all. Blazer is still very niche.

Until they decide to change strategy again in two years time at which point the existing stuff will be abandoned in a half finished state.

IMO the UI war is settled by now. It‘s either CLI or a web interface of some sort. Everything else just seems like asking for trouble nowadays.

I hope we will be able to wait for Windows 12.

It's possible that MS will just force-update everyone to Windows 11.

I can't even track these UI techs anymore. I thought WinUI is the new version of the UI layer of UWP and all apps who use WinUI are actually still considered UWP apps? I genuinely don't know, can somebody enlighten me?

Ive been using win 11 on my laptop for a couple months now.

I like the new UI, it feels simpler and less gaudy. The drop down menu expansion thing is fine. I also prefer the redesign of the settings app. I find casting my screen and bluetooth works better. Windows has been missing something decent window snapping features forever and although it's a bit clunky I appreciate that it's there.

The only thing that has annoys me is the taskbar not disappearing when its supposed to, leading to it covering the bottom of maximized applications. Most of the time its not there but sometimes it'll just stick after coming up.

I didn't know about the android apps feature but I might give it a shot when I go home. Widgets I just haven't used at all despite being aware of them.

I still have win10 on my desktop. I don't remember the switch being painful when I went to the rolling release windows insider on my laptop. Frankly win10 is fine too, so unless there's an android app I want to play around with I wouldn't bother switching.

"Windows has been missing something decent window snapping features forever and although it's a bit clunky I appreciate that it's there."

I've been using windows 11 for a few months as well. For window snapping, I simply enjoy Powertoys and will stick to that since it gives me more customization options.

I also have the issue with the taskbar sometimes not disappearing but I've had the same issue on Windows 10, various Linux DEs and macOS. It must for some reason be a more difficult problem than it would seem.

The biggest issue I have with Windows 11 is that the taskbar can't be moved from the bottom without a registry hack. I find the biggest UI improvement to be in the file manager.

I also find the whole thing to be a little better performing than Windows 10.

Exact same for me, gave Windows 11 a try, really liked all the new features, only downgrade is not being able to put the taskbar on the side of the screen. Arch Linux will always be my daily, but I think they've done a good iteration, other comments probably haven't actually tried it.

My biggest annoyance is that they've removed the ability to open the task manager by right-clicking the taskbar. Instead, I have to right-click the Windows icon in the bottom left. Just ... why? What benefit is there to not letting me right-click anywhere on the bottom part of my screen? Do none of these muppets even use Windows?

Oh man. I use this feature often. Microsoft is slowly driving me to Linux in the form of ChromeOS.

Ctrl-Shift-Esc brings up Task Manager, unless they removed that in Windows 11 too.

I have been using Windows 11 as a daily driver and don't really understand people's hostility towards it. It is definitely an upgrade over Windows 10. Comparing it to Vista is nonsensical. I don't agree with a few decisions (like making centering the menu a default?) but most are easily fixed. I would like to see them delay it to fix some problems, but it's possible those will already be fleshed out by launch.

People just don't like change. There will be lots of weeping and wailing an gnashing of teeth, then people will grow accustomed to it. Same happened with 8 and 10. The furor over 8's missing start menu was intense, even though it takes literally seconds to install Classic Shell and get a better start menu than Windows 7 ever had.

In 3-4 years the cycle will repeat again with Windows 12.

Why change something that you already are familiar with and already sunk time to master your own workflow on? Let that be people’s decision, not get it forced down their throats. Windows has been taking control from the users, became agressive with telemetry, inability to control when you want to apply upgrades, lost work on sessions due to automatic upgrades, removed settings after upgrade, interminable waits after upgrde when you really need the computer urgently to do something on and a lot of other things moved about back and forth because Microsoft couldn’t take their time and make a sound decision and stick with it.

There are often reasons to change, and sometimes reasons to keep things. A lot of it is subjective.

Since when “subjective” became “irrelevant”? You love how your home is built and you’ve done much to make its rooms and areas comfortable and useful. You know it from the roof to the basement. “Nah, a lot of it is subjective”, says the Home Redesign Standarten Führer and rebuilds it from scratch every few years, throwing out “this unnecessary, that obsolete” furniture and appliances. “There are often reasons to change, sir, and sometimes reasons to keep things”, mentions he, looking at you insightfully in his black uniform, while you’re trying to cope with the irreversible damage.

There is a small difference between home and software. Also between software and vehicle..

> People just don't like change.

People don't like clearly unfinished products rushed to market before they're ready.

I wonder if people have tried the most recent W11 updates. It feels like a polished release candidate, and some in my inner circle also running W11 will say the same.

No, more like what the parent said. People hated visa with passion but I had been running its beta as my main driver for 6 months before it was released. Imagine that, Windows Vista beta.

The only advantage I had over the majority is that it was a brand new computer (with 2GB of RAM, wow) so I did not experience slowdowns.

Vista was better than XP in every way except performance on the low-end.

Windows 8 was an exciting change from Microsoft, but yeah some things weren't fixed until 8.1 and the damage was done.

I still don't like Windows 8 at all, Windows 10 was a rollback in my opinion, I use it exactly as I did use Windows 7.

I’m not hostile towards it, but so far i see no reason to upgrade. What new features does Windows 11 have that Windows 10 doesnt?

Direct Storage?

Direct storage is coming to Windows 10 but apparently there will be a performance difference, still unknown as it isn't released at all

I am pretty sure Windows 10 will provide API, which is then implemented using existing kernel facilities with no perf gains, whilst Windows 11 kernel will have new subsystems for performance boost. Pure speculation, something like multi queue block layer (similar to blk-mq in Linux) or new IO subsystem (similar to io_uring , to replace dated IOCP) might be an option.

A built-in X for WSL

If only WSL2 wasn't half baked dogshit that breaks all networked features over VPN and this release didn't spin up my work computer's fans to max at all times, windows 11 might be usable.

It's so true. My work laptop is unusable running wsl2.

...but its a free upgrade. If you think it's worse that is on thing but so its just been better except for the stupid fucking right click context menu.

A lot of the features were already part of the insiders version of Windows 10 before 11 was announced. Seeing as its a free upgrade, I think of it as just another one of the semi-yearly Windows 10 upgrades (i.e. Windows 10 21H2), rather than a whole new OS. Upgrade for the same reasons you kept Windows 10 up to date.

Easy, when coming from Windows developer experince since 3.0 days, and been burned by the rewrite hell yearly cycle that started with Windows 8.

Now better wait for Windows 12 until they make their mind what Windows desktop APIs are supposed to look like.

I've been using the beta for a week or so. It's pretty nice honestly. I got the beta because you can setup different wallpapers for each of your virtual desktops. I really like that feature and found nothing else either much better or worse.

I do find the search function is snappier and more accurate though. If anything this is a return to windows 7. It is definitely not problematic like vista or 8.

I really like Windows 11. Hyper-V has some MASSIVE updates which noone talks about, as well as stuff like the network stack being rewritten. It's better to view this as a Windows 10 Refresh with alot done behind the scenes and a new UI. Not much of this is talked about though, outside of really niche highly technical circles.

There's some false narrative about it which is bizarre.

Can't think of a single "MASSIVE" update since transition to win7 64bit.

It's all fluff for what it is.

There basically hasn't been a good reason to upgrade windows other than arbitrary security update cutoffs, and mostly arbitrary caps to max DirectX version you can run.

I wouldn't be surprised if it would be a downright downgrade overall performance and responsiviness wise.

> as well as stuff like the network stack being rewritten

I would be very interested in learning about this. Do you have any references ?

I would caution against being giddy about rewrites. As an end user, you should always be skeptical of brand new fresh off the factory bugs in rewrites, especially when the rewrite is of something as complex as a network stack.

The ui alone is basically enough for me to not touch it for a while. I dont need any of the new features and there are loads of anti features i tthe ui (rightclick menu, taskbar icons for more than 1 window, changing default apps, etc)

I dont understand what's driving these changes, but they seem so use hostile that it puts me off the whole os.

> Hyper-V has some MASSIVE updates which noone talks about, as well as stuff like the network stack being rewritten

Maybe be the change you want to see... Try talking about those things.

I've heard nothing about either one, do you have an article or articles? Microsoft hasn't done a very good job communicating the non-UI changes. Insiders have measured performance losses but no significant gains yet.

Hard to call people criticizing other things a "false narrative" when there's been near no communication on the things you're bringing up, and they don't mitigate the complaints.

> Hyper-V has some MASSIVE updates which noone talks about...

Have a URL for this?

Am I alone in assuming they'll just do the Windows 10 unwanted upgrade, again, when 11 adoption rate isn't where they want it to be? Choice doesn't matter to these mega corps, so long as we use their stores and view their ads. Thank god for Gnu and Linux!

I agree. There is a lot of fear mongering coming out of Microsoft now, like their "we can't promise security upgrades" for people who ISO install on unsupported hardware.

That's the most probable scenario and I wouldn't be surprised that in the end they'll lower the requirements for 11 even more. Back then, the marketing tactic of "hurry up, limited-time offer only" was in the use for this free Windows 10 upgrade but people were still able to get the upgrade after the deadline; then, some used the obscure way of getting the upgrade by special offer for people with accessibility issues.

> Choice doesn't matter to these mega corps

Choice doesn't matter and it's an OK policy to annoy user periodically with options, suggestions, offers, up until it gives up and agrees for something it didn't want in first place but wants to get rid of the annoying notifications or whatever form this harassment takes. The permanent "No, thank you, I'm not interested" doesn't exist in corporate world too - there's only place for "Fine but we will ask you again and again", sadly.

> then, some used the obscure way of getting the upgrade by special offer for people with accessibility issues.

On that note, it was removed, so now the only way I know that works is to do an in-place upgrade via the Windows 10 installation media ('upgrade this pc now') then sign in with a Microsoft account to get your license attached to the MSA, then you can do a full reinstall and keep the license.

They’ll have to be able to figure out where it will run first. Amazing to me that this is still in question.

Proton[1] is the reason my next machine will be Linux.

[1]: https://www.protondb.com/

Yup. I've been running EOS (https://elementary.io/).

It's almost as pretty as my MBP, and vastly more usable than Windows. And I have everything I really need (with first class Linux support):

* Gaming - Steam + Proton

* Digital Audio Workstation - Bitwig

* Video Editing - DaVinci Resolve

* 3d Modeling - Blender

* 2d Image - Gimp (this one could be a lot better)

-----

The only thing I can imagine dual booting into Windows for is Oculus Link. But I don't really think it's worth it.

How does bitwig do with multi channel audio? I need 32 in and 32 out. I have Merging and RME available as audio devices, but I don't suspect that either of them would actually work with multi-channel recording, despite both of them offering drivers.

If someone could guarantee rock solid stability, I *might be willing to switch, even though I'm fairly invested in the Ableton / VST world. 10 years of projects will likely force me to always run mac / windows unless Ableton decides to build for linux in the future. Who knows, maybe ARM will force their hand.

If you've got a tool you're used to, it's probably best to stick to it.

That being said, Bitwig does support Jack, so routing should be pretty open ended.

And there's this linux project (https://pipewire.org/) that's been doing really, really well. It (sorta) combines all the different audio servers into one.

Even though i gave suggestions how to try out Linux, i would rate this higher. Stick to your guns, never change a running system/winning team.

There is an amazing (IMSO) producer duo, highly recommend their liveset from Glastonbury, called Booka Shade. They produced a chart topping pop act on PowerMacs (G4 IIRC), which were allready ancient back then.

May i suggest trying it in a VM? Then you could check if all 32 channels actually record, latency can be disregarded in this case i think. Second idea would be buying another SSD, and install Ubuntu Studio on it to get better data. If you can free me from the predjudice Bitwig only runs on Ubuntu, please do. I would suggest switching off, or removing in case of a laptop, the Windows drive. This makes reverting easier if it should be nonsatisfactory.

web based solutions are getting crazy good. Pixlr in the browser probably works better than Gimp for simple use cases.

https://pixlr.com/

Honestly, the Linux desktop experience has come so far in the past 10 years. Sure I don't think it's perfect, but it's nowhere near as bad as it was in 2008 where Windows was still king and Linux had bugs everywhere in every distro and every desktop environment. I think people should seriously consider Linux now if they can't take anymore of Microsoft's shit

Anecdotal, but I have a 2015 Lenovo X1 Carbon running Ubuntu 20 (gnome 3.38), a 2020 MBP and a 2019 MS Surface Laptop 3 (windows 10).

The recent Gnome experience on hardware half a decade older than the Surface laptop is so much snappier than Windows. I dred MacOS and Windows updates these days but I'm generally very pleased with updates to Ubuntu/Gnome.

Furthermore everything just works, too, which is what I grew up to expect from Windows, but literally yesterday the Surface laptop bricked itself installing an update. I have daily problems using Windows with WSL, too. It's infuriating.

I used to feel stable and assured using Windows, but these days Windows is an endless labyrinth of dialog boxes, it's hard to comprehend how anyone could take it seriously any longer. Maybe I'm getting old.

Imo gnome is better aesthetically and from a ux/feeling/default shortcuts perspective than windows and has been for seven or eight years at least. As far as I can tell the issues are graphics cards when you have both a dedicated gpu and an integrated one, and gaming/popular productivity apps. Both have been getting steadily better over time though.

I've got a Lenovo x1 xtreme and I dual boot Windows 10 + Arch. I haven't used Windows in so long, the last time I tried it was so insanely slow I don't know how people deal with it. Arch with GNOME is super snappy.

1% of the time i boot into W10 to check the FW for my BT-Cans or something else. After a while, even while idle, the fans suddenly shift into overdrive. The CPU is undervolted by 0,095V.

I totally agree. There are still times you will need to investigate why something isn't working on linux. But the upside is when you do, there's almost always a way to make it work the way you want.

In stark contrast with Windows 10 which has had features like window snapping at edges when dragging something across the boundary between monitors that you just can't turn off. Or updates that seem to obey their own arcane rules instead of requiring a simple sudo [package-manager] [update-command]

Between Proton and WSL we're getting closer to a true "write once run anywhere" world where host platform won't matter so much. Devs will be free to develop with whatever tech stack they like most, make a canonical build, and other platforms will be able to run it.

What's going to be hilarious is that much like dosbox became the best way to run old dos programs even if they might still technically run on windows, wine/proton will be (and sometimes already is) the best way to run many older windows programs. Particularly I'm in love with proton's fullscreen magic that doesn't actually mess with your display mode, so e.g. I can run Touhou games fullscreen in proton with my display at 4k despite them only supporting 480p fullscreen -- running on Windows will try to set my display mode to that with varying success. At some point we'll be running old Windows programs on Windows with wine/proton through WSL.

Maybe with Proton, but WSL will not be an option when shipping software to general users.

Why not?

WSL needs to be manually added to windows by the user before it can be used. Also a distro then has to be installed in the VM.

They said the same things about Java and .NET Framework

Can proton handle ableton live or deal with audio device drivers?

Haven't tried, but i have a hunch that Windows in KVM with passthrough might work better for that. Just my zero cents.

I'm a happy user. I only have one game currently, for which I reboot into my win10, but only because it has BattleEye anti-cheat.

I suspect that Valve is actively working on anti-cheat solutions because of the upcoming Steam Deck console.

I read that too that it's in the works. When they announce that it's official, I'll give it a try for sure.

If WSL2 is your killer Windows application, then upgrade to Windows 11 whenever you can. WSL2 on Windows 10 suffers from some FS corruption bug [1]. The bug is currently fixed only in Windows 11 Insider Builds. It is uncertain if/when the fix will be backported to WSL2 for Windows 10.

But other than that, Windows 11 is mostly Windows 10 with a different shell. So it's not like it will disrupt your workflow or something.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895

It's cool you don't have to do anything to get it to work now, just install distro and bam!

For me, the lack of a "Never combine" option for the taskbar has made win11 unusable for me. I have already reverted back to 10 and will not be updating again till this option is made available again. Its a huge productivity hit for people who are used to multitaking between dozens of open windows

Never combine, drag files onto taskbar items to open window, clocks on secondary monitors, taskbar in positions other than the bottom, small taskbar, option to always show all tray icons instead of having to set it per app, right click not having most of the options unless you right click the start button. A lot of the functionally focused options are gone.

Not that it's 100% bad. Ability to fully disable the show desktop region at the end of the taskbar, the combined volume/network/quick settings icon region, the general redo of the popout for quick settings, the search not being larger than everything else in the taskbar by default, the notification region merging with the clock region, and the general styling update are good. It's just heavily outweighed by the bad... and the broken.

The still broken even though they rewrote the whole thing including things like the new menus often getting stuck open even when you click away from them, auto-hide taskbar on secondary monitors still having issues popping up, the start menu always opening on the primary monitor when you press the win key even when you're active in another monitor, the new "Chat" Teams client that integrates with the taskbar still not supporting corporate accounts, sudden rapid fire 1 by 1 bursts of notifications about the emails I've gotten and already responded to in the last hour despite focus assist being disabled, and I'm sure more I can't think at the moment.

Also the dislikable additions which are of course preference based but I think most people will find things that received a lot of effort like widgets and chat useless.

All that being said it's still livable for me but it is a definite downgrade and a bit disappointing.

Yeah, I’m generally tolerant of UI redesigns, I was fine with Windows 8 even, but lack of “never combine” is a bummer :(

It's also a dealbreaker for me.

Hopefully, RaMMicHaeL will be able to fix that: https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tweaker-and-a-first-look-at...

The auto-hide functionality is actually a smidgeon better now, not reserving space anymore (on Windows 10 I have to use ButteryTaskbar), but I want to disable the useless 2-pixel (or whatever it is, haven't measure it) border and the mouse hover to activate it. I'd also prefer to have it oriented vertically since I use super ultrawide monitors (49"), but can live without it, even though it's a regression since Windows 95 (or 98?).

Also, you really have to disable animations because the animations are sooooooo sluggish. I always disable those OS-wide anyway though.

Taskbar can no longer be moved.

Sheesh, another Windows 8 debacle coming at us.

Is there any logical explanation on why they did this?

I wish I knew. I literally cannot think of any rationale.

It isn't like they have any concern about efficient or lightweight code so are stripping out features for that reason (and I know from conversation w/their lead developers decades ago that they have not had any interest in any such optimization for at least that long).

I don't see how it confuses anyone, since it requires no action or knowledge to just leave it in the default position - I've encountered a few people who are surprised to see that it can be moved, so it isn't like the capability will cause problems. If they're concerned that someone might accidentally drag it and be surprised, then leave only the buried radio-button position control to select bottom/top/left/right.

Seems like under-talented developers and product managers who can't think of anything that is actually creative and an improvement, so they just vandalize it to leave their mark.

It is utterly baffling

Maybe it has better security, but it has worse privacy. Windows 10 is my last MS OS. Heading back to Linux as my daily driver with a System 76 machine.

Got my first Linux machine because of that, partially at least. I like an OS, for which I don't need an account, that just runs on hardware I own.

Found this out the other day: you can have local only accounts for Windows, although it's pretty hidden nowadays.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/can-i-sign-in-to...

(Search in the page "Switch from a Microsoft account to a local account")

Good call! Too late for me now so, especially since the majority of my Steam library is running just fine under Linux. Maybe for some online stuff, Teams for potential home schooling and so. The fact that local accounts are hidden sucks in itself so. I will keep Windows on my private laptop so, just in case. Not that I am going to upgrade to Win 11 so.

Better switch your wifi to metered connection then, like recommended upthread. Prevents automatic updates and being upgraded involuntarily (hopefully).

I just fired up a Win10 machine for the first time in some while in order to run specific software.

Good gawd. It was finally useful about 4 hours later after all the updates and tomfoolery. Never again.

Well, I am not sure it'd be painless to boot up a macOS machine or an Ubuntu desktop that hadn't been getting updates for months - probably not 4hr, but there'd be some annoyance.

The difference is that those will at most nag you, but unless you've been extremely thorough in disabling all of the automatic update machinery (which is almost malware-like in its persistence), on Windows it will come back with a vengeance.

Some anecdata: updating packages on Linux will finish in less than 20 minutes (given a high DL speed), no reboots inbetween, and afterwards you can keep working, unless you want to boot a newly installed Kernel.

I've been using Linux as my primary OS for about a year now and have had a great experience [Manjaro KDE on a ThinkPad T14s AMD]. It's really so much more pleasant to use than windows these days.

On rare occasion I need to be able to use RemoteApp for work, and have a win10 VirtualBox machine for those situations. Though I actually boot into windows even less than I thought I might when I first switched.

> so much more pleasant to use than windows

Is there anything in contention with windows in that regard? Maybe the mobile OSes?

In what regard? In being unpleasant to use? No, I believe modern Windows to be singular in its unpleasantness.

In seriousness, though, try as I might I can't seem to parse your first sentence even using my "native English speaker" plug-in.

> In being unpleasant to use

Yea.

The security is better in that it's more secure against you.

Windows 10 was what pushed me to start using Linux full time. It just broke me, how nonsensical it was. Going through several layers of new UI style sidebars, submenu items just to end up... in classic Control Panel with configuration elements divided up between new and old?

Windows still has an insanely convoluted installation process whereas Ubuntu boots straight into a usable desktop from installation medium and has less prompts before your one single reboot into the installed OS.

Windows honestly needs to be burnt to the ground and redone from scratch before I'll consider using it again.

> Windows honestly needs to be burnt to the ground and redone from scratch before I'll consider using it again.

Preferably without requiring a LiveID and all the idiotic "Send to Grandparents" social media features. I want something to run programs and games, not a Facebook wannabe that tracks my every eye movement to show me more relevant ads or suggests content. If I want news and ads, I'll open a fucking browser (like that's not bad enough already).

I lived with Windows 10 for a few years, but eventually got tired of every update reverting my privacy and update settings. Jumped ship to linux and haven't looked back once.

Installing the OS and browsing the web at the same time? Take my money! Free? Ain't kiddin?

1000x Thank You to all devs, packagers and all i forgot in the Linuxverse.

A happy user since 07

If privacy is a concern for you, you should never have accepted Windows 10 in the first place. It's very likely that the same reasons that made you tolerate Windows 10 will make you accept Windows 11 as well.

I don't see how it would be a good long term financial strategy to keep asking people to upgrade, and how are those financials looking when there are free upgrade paths?

I don't think we need more Windows. It's "good enough" as it is. As was 10. I think we need more doors, ceilings and kitchen sinks

What if 11 is it for now, and going forward focus on creating a Windows Store that is filled to the rim with MS-quality software that rivals those of their competitors. What if there was a MS quality Photoshop light for cheap in the Windows store? Or tooling for pretty much anything you can imagine, some for free some with a cost.

I say don't focus on the next Windows, focus on making it silly to even consider buying a Mac, or other popular software from other companies.

Upgrades to the 11 is of course needed, but we are talking touchups not rewrites.

I have been using 11 for a while, and I'm very happy with it. It feels generally more snappy, and a lot of features I ended up not using before because they just didn't work well enough are now polished and I use them every day.

The amount of kvetching and unneeded stress over what is basically a UI overhaul is astounding.

If your computer doesn’t run it then it’s moot. If you’re not interested in the UI overhaul don’t install. But neither case requires the amount of wahh that were seeing.

Complaining about Windows is one of the few things people have left to agree about. Now why would you want to go and mess that up with your comment?

You do realise that a UI overhaul is, for a surprisingly large number of users, essentially bricking the computer, right? And it's not just a UI overhaul; the Home version cannot be used without a Microsoft account.

"Bricking" refers to something much worse and completely different. Besides pre-release versions having a broken update is fair game in my book, surprised it hasn't happened as often as it used to to be honest.

I think our versions of bricking are a little different

>If you’re not interested in the UI overhaul don’t install.

That won't be an option for the majority, it will install automatically as long as your hardware supports it.

I thought way longer about the subtext to the headline then I'd like to admit...maybe, as a non-native speaker, I'm missing something? But no. It's just mixed up.

This fits really well to all the horror stories about date driven software release, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28548613

Even the market leader is apparently doing it wrong.

It isn’t mixed up, but it is idiomatic and somewhat provincial. “Just say no” is a reference to an anti-drug campaign from the mid-80s, instantly recognizable to just about anyone from the United States.

I think they're referring to the subhead, "In a few weeks, Windows 11 will arrive. Should you upgrade to it? Let me answer with a question: 'Should you stop hitting your head against the wall?'" which is not only challenging to parse but (as I read it) contradicts the headline.

That's what i meant, thanks.

(Native U.S. English speaker here) As far as I cant tell, the subtext for that heading/sub-heading pairing would suggest that users currently considering upgrading to Windows 10 are currently doing the equivalent of hitting their heads against a wall, which once again I don't think quite fits the narrative of the article.

In my opinion, it's just a poorly chosen subheading.

Ah, that makes sense.

I understood it as you should say no to the question whether you should stop hitting your head against the wall.

Sub-heading:

> In a few weeks, Windows 11 will arrive. Should you upgrade to it? Let me answer with a question: "Should you stop hitting your head against the wall?"

Well, I mean, yes, I SHOULD stop hitting my head against the wall. So then, you're saying I SHOULD upgrade to Windows 11? I think the author's logic got confused here. Or else the joke just flew clear over my head.

We should stop hitting our heads against the wall. Instead, the wall would automatically hit our heads.

Microsoft told the world Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows, but we now have Windows 11 meaning that earlier idea is dead in the water.

Seeing how badly Windows 11 has been received, it looks like Windows 11 is turning into the new Windows Vista.

If Microsoft fails to turn around that perception, they'll need a Windows 12 just to hide the smells produced by this release.

i just upgraded my Windows 7 PC from a 2012 desktop to a modern 2021-level Windows 10 desktop with i7 CPU, 32 GB memory, etc.

I honestly can't tell the difference between the two systems. I don't play games which is probably the biggest thing driving upgrades, but for everything that I need to do, which is an advanced use, my 10 year old Windows 7 system was more than good enough.

The only reason why I did end up upgrading was because I bought a 10Gbe switch, and the motherboard in my Windows 7 PC didn't support the bus speed required for 10 GBe speeds.

I'm pretty sure that it's not worth $1000 just to change my compiles from 30 seconds to 5 seconds so I'm not sure what the compelling reason to upgrade is for the hundreds of millions of other users except a fake Windows 11 upgrade forcing a hardware upgrade.

To be completely fair, there were significant upgrades to the networking stack in Windows 8, so you probably got more support for your 10Gbe switch than just the motherboard change.

Between 8 and 10, though.. yeah. The only reason to upgrade between those was if you hated 8 (I loved it on tablets/phone, not on desktop).

There are many Microsoft-hatred-driven reasons to not upgrade from 7 to 10, but lack of progress in the underlying OS is definitely not one of them. People confuse the shell with the OS all the time (and yeah the shell is atrocious and gets worse every iteration), but it's not the entirety of what makes a Windows version.

NB: "shell" here means the thing hosting the UI (including Explorer), not a unix shell.

The biggest difference I noticed in upgrading from a 2011-vintage desktop to a 2020 desktop is that npm and all the JS-heavy compiling and bundling operations were much faster. That's got to be almost entirely CPU-based, because I kept the same SSDs and graphics card when I built the new machine.

If it weren't for Gulp and WebPack, I could have kept using that old machine, even for my moderate gaming purposes, until it wore out.

Windows 7 lacks 'UP the directory structure' button in the explorer :)

I'd love to say "I would never install windows 11!"

But microsoft already decided that for me. I don't have any TPM chips.

And I'm definitely not going to upgrade hardware for an OS upgrade that doesn't really add much.

I have a couple of almost identical Ryzen 3700x machines. One has an Nvidia card, the other has a radeon 5700. One runs Ubuntu, the other is Manjaro. The Radeon was barely usable for anything vulkan until well into 2020. Even Valve's own Half-Life: Alyx needed a month until it was just as good on Linux

It is Q4 2021 now and can't remember the last time I felt the need to boot from my windows SSD.

My wife used to be against Linux but even she doesn't want to deal with windows 10 these days. She has noticed how bad the software on her laptop is and agrees our Linux desktops are easier to deal with.

I would've completely given up on windows a decade earlier if it wasn't for gaming. What it took was to for MS to scare Gaben. Oh, the irony

Windows is still superior if you do anything on GPU beyond UI. Linux desktop basically freezes when GPU is at 100% load. It's like Win98/Me and CPU before 2000.

Where is Satya lately? The last few years his face was everywhere, doing some very common sense things that got MS back to being a leading player. What the fuck is with Windows 11? Some common sense judgement could be used here.

I see this claim a lot, but I always ask myself "what, exactly". As far as I can tell, he just happened to get swapped in during the transition away from Windows 8 and the building up of Azure (both happening anyway).

Allow me to vent: yesterday windows cumulative update wouldn't install. Fine, Google error code

"we recommend an in-place upgrade"

I have no belief Windows 11 is going to be better just more of the same.

cmd as admin, sfc /scannow followed by chkdsk /f C: then reboot the PC and try the update again. Works every time for me.

I can't wait for Windows 11, because it means Windows 10 will become blissfully boring. Security updates, game and driver support probably for years to come.

Windows - just say no.

I bailed out of Windows when Windows 7 reached end of life. Windows 10 has ads, and that's unacceptable.

>Windows 10 has ads, and that's unacceptable.

just use enterprise/ltsc.

Where can I buy a single license for personal use of LTSC?

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...

Imagine going so far out of your way to buy software from a vendor that clearly has so much disdain for it's users. Gross.

What if they lock the next version of DirectX behind Windows 11?

That's how it's worked forever, basically; Windows 10 was the minimum requirement for DX12 and Vista with DX11 before that, with 6-7 year time gaps. The APIs also evolved slowly and incrementally with features between those years, but I don't think all of them were available in every operating system. DirectStorage for instance (allowing P2P DMA between your GPU and SSD) is only going to be available in Windows 11 apparently. So when/if they release DirectX13, yes, it will surely be Windows 11 only.

Speaking from personal PC gaming experience though, I don't expect this to be some major blocker, based on my experience with DirectX12 uptake in games today 5-6 years after it was introduced (it's not high outside of AAA titles, and all of them have fallbacks/alt renderers.) Not to mention the fact Windows 11 will only work on very recent hardware, so you might as well just target the "old" APIs for a good while and have a vastly larger userbase. I don't plan on upgrading for a bit and I don't think I'll miss much, game-wise, in the mean time.

>DirectStorage for instance (allowing P2P DMA between your GPU and SSD) is only going to be available in Windows 11 apparently.

Pretty sure they backtracked on that. "As such, games built against the DirectStorage SDK will be compatible with Windows 10, version 1909 and up"

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-develop...

Then people will probably spend time trying to get the Wine/Proton implementation of that version of DirectX running on Windows 10.

Windows 11 is going over like a lead balloon in the enthusiast gaming community, so the will is there.

People make the same 2 claims every release yet it never actually happens at any measurable scale. The second the old version everyone die hard loves (that was also widely trashed on at launch) stops being supported for the latest features and security updates the vast majority of gamers just move on.

After reading all the grumbling here I decided to install Win11.

Downloaded the beta iso, burnt a DVD and installed a new SSD.

My PC is a few years old and doesn't have a TPM chip, but the RegEdit hack was simple and worked just fine.

The install went smoothly and surprisingly quickly.

After using Win11 for a day or two, I really like it and soon got used to the UI changes. It seems to be very fast and snappy.

My one criticism is the rather clunky right-click menu's in Explorer. Hopefully that will be sorted in the next release.

Bottom line, I love Win11 and won't be going back!

P.S. have installed every version since Win#1, way back in 1985.

I really feel like these system requirements came from top down. I work on SQL Server from home and the machine I use to connect to my work machine is not even close to meeting the Windows 11 requirements despite being a solid machine. It has a 2014 processor that still does great and the GPU is a 1080. The only parts that really need an upgrade in my opinion is the RAM (since it only has 16GB).

I was forcibly updated to the Windows 11 developer builds, because I have setup the release channel to get new WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) features early. The UI was a big letdown. I've had my task bar vertically in the left edge of the screen for ages. It makes sense because screens have more width than height. However, in Windows 11 they explicitly "do not support" that.

Jesus, even Mac OS with its similar design supports that

I've been using win 11 for the past couple of days. Biggest annoying thing is the right click context menu in explorer. First you right click when selecting a file and then have to pick additional options in secondary menu to get to things like 7-zip or any other context registered app. If Microsoft doesn't provide an option to disable it , then I'm staying with win10.

I... have been using win11 on a few machines (gaming and a work/coding computer included) and... it's just a reskin with some long overdue features. The way MS does updates now means no more huge monolithic releases and also means the update is smooth and mostly problem free.

It even updates the windows sandbox (which has needed an update for YEARS) which might be worth it by itself.

Just curious, what are 5 new features that you find useful?

I've updated my Surface Book 2 to Windows 11 by accident (thought that it was just another windows update but next morning I was greet with totally new system :O)

It works just nice, but it has the 1 thing that drives me crazy - rounded corners! WTH Microsoft, you could at least has an option to toggle it - I really loved the square UI of Windows 10... :|

2022 - year of the Linux desktop

I made a similar joke in front of some coworkers recently and nobody got it. Reminds me how small some of the bubbles we live in are.

The year of the Linux desktop is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Installed Manjaro on my HP laptop instead of Windows and the hardware actually works better with less issues.

Has been using Windows, Linux and BSD at the same time for almost two decades now. I use Windows for almost everything, Linux/BSD were really for exploring OS implementations, experiments etc.. Don't really want to mention Windows 9x/ME as I wasn't impressed at all, Windows NT5/2000, then Windows Server 2003/2008 were very stable and those perhaps the best releases of Windows IMO. At the same time, Linux/BSD might be more stable but the usability of the GUI was much worse. Linux/BSD get much better since then, especially Linux, I can almost do everything it need with it now. But Windows well, get much worse. Windows Vista required too much resource and I did not really use it much. Windows 7 was much better than Vista, but really I did not see much improvements from Windows 2000 excepts it looked better. Windows 8 was a step way too far by forcing user to change their habits for decades and also looked much uglier. Windows 10 basically is just Windows 8 adding back those visual elements removed from Windows 7. Worst problems with Windows 10 are not really trying to switching the UI to a new one but really not respecting the users at all and breaking existing functionality while replacements do not work at all. I seriously no idea what was their product managers were thinking by forcing restart to update without asking permission. My colleague's laptop restarted in the middle of a presentation to his boss and a whole bunch of other stakeholders as Windows 10 decided it's time to update and the estimated time to complete was over 2 hours as there were over 200 updates to install... The annoyance I personally found were Disk Manager GUI and diskpart utility broken at the same time; Both traditional GUI and so called modern UI to set IP Address/DNS server were broken at the same time. Have 32 GB of RAM and got BSOD because of out of memory for no reason etc. Almost every update, there would be surprise, not necessarily bad, but you just don't know what's going to work or break each time. Unfortunately there is still something I don't really have a replacement on Linux, or I would have ditched Windows now. If the current trend does not change, I will have to ditch it eventually, only a matter of sooner or later.

I finally cracked and installed Linux Mint on my mother's pc after failing to give her proper phone assistance in Windows 10. I was shocked how cluttered it is. For someone like my mother it's very confusing. Why do web searches show up in the menu? Everything seems to be full of confusing effects and the settings remind me of the metro UI, there's almost no options or else you have to follow one of the little links (choose the right one!). I think Microsoft secret plan must be to have everybody switch to Linux. I mean how hard can it to have a menu open, show a search bar and give proper results that you can easily scan visually?

I was wondering if the old curse afflicting Microsoft that makes every other version of Windows broadly hated was going to happen again.

Given the current amount of criticism, apparently it's happening again.

I'm not touching Windows 11 till someone comes out with a comprehensive shell replacement (i.e. it must replace all of explorer.exe) that re-creates the Windows 98 taskbar experience.

Honestly, I would have just stayed with Windows 7, if not for Windows Terminal [1]. The Unicode support and ANSI escape code support is a big improvement. However I was not eager to upgrade, as people reported over and over all the privacy and telemetry issues. I have turned off all Windows Updates, and ideally I wont be upgrading Windows for a long, long time.

1. https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

>I have turned off all Windows Updates

You mean you have turned off automatic updates?

Or you NEVER run Windows updates? - do not do this. Even on an airgapped machine. Insanity.

I turned off automatic updates, and I never run Windows Update. I have heard enough horror stories that I dont need that ever again. There was a Windows Update a few years ago that literally deleted files from the user folder. Fuck that.

Windows 7 was OK.

If you're a windows user you don't really have a choice if you care about ongoing support. This really should be "Windows: Just say no".

One thing Windows does well is support lifecycles. You can still get security updates to the original launch version of Windows 10 until 2025. The current LTSC branch will last until at least 2029.

If you want to play by the rules on home edition you still have at least through the end of 2025 to say no and remain supported.

> Why would the company do this? Doesn’t it know it’s going to tick off some of their most loyal users who want an early jump at Windows 11 when those users discover — surprise! — they can't run Windows 11 after all? That makes no sense.

…

It makes a ton of sense if you are trying to quickly fix all the shit that isn’t working that you don’t know about. Plus you will have certain users actually helping you figure it out.

The elders of the tribe know you always have to skip one version of Windows every two. They publish a good version followed by a bad one.

I'm reluctant purely on the basis of MS's track record of every second version since Win '98 being crap:

Win 98: good

Win ME: bad

Win XP: good

Win Vista: bad

Win 7: good

Win 8: bad

Win 9... well, #8 was so bad they had to skip a number

Win 10: good

Win 11: I'm not optimistic. 20+ years predict for badness.

I'll wait until either 1) proven wrong or 2) Win 10 is EOL'ed. I just upgraded, but if I need a new system & it comes with Win 11 then I'll just wipe it out and install 10.

What about windows 2000, which was also considered "good"? As for windows 10 being good, I'm not so sure. It might be good now, but it was also panned on release and received 12 major updates.

Windows 2000 was not a consumer edition of Windows. I also didn't list server versions either. Up until Vista I don't recall any truly awful NT versions.

As for 10, I liked 7 more. But 10 was still and improvement over 8, so I think the pattern still holds.

>Win 8: bad

>Win 9... well, #8 was so bad they had to skip a number

If you know what to install to replace the stupid touchscreen interface with a proper start menu (eg. Stardock Start8) and disable metro ui feature, it's a great OS. You get 3/4 of the modern features of Windows 10 without the downsides (eg. telemetry, no control on updates, keyboard layout management, taskbar freezing, etc.) and an interface that's halfway between 7 and 10.

If you don't replace the start menu, I agree it's a dumpster fire and I would never use it.

I'll agree that, especially with 8.1 and some tweeks, things were much better. But I think the out-of-the-box experience-- what most consumers will be stuck with-- is a better comparison. Because you can change just about anything if you're willing to use 3rd party tools or dig into buried settings, and especially if you're willing to dig around the registry.

I see it more as:

Win 7: good

Win 8: bad

Win 8.1: good

Win 10: bad (there were early issues)

Win 10 later: good (they were fixed)

Win 10 even later: bad (remember when people's files were being deleted)

Win 10 now: good

Win 11: bad (mainly due to growing pains)

Win 11 soon: good

The os landscape is destroyed by devices requiring special drivers. This is why the options are constrained. I definitely do not like osx or Windows. I prefer Linux and Solaris needed more love. But there are newcomers like haiku and genode. The market is very hostile to these efforts.

You know I used to follow Windows news rabidly. The new features were incredible, I looked forward to every release. Somewhere around the time Microsoft added a lock screen to a desktop computer without going "only joking, haha", I started dreading every update.

This seems incredibly out of touch with reality.

I'm sorry, what? Why wouldn't you want a Lock Screen? That's a basic security measure, without a lock screen Windows would be a non-starter for any secure enterprise.

A lock screen without full disk encryption is security by obscurity. Change my mind.

Windows can definitely also do full disk encryption via BitLocker...

It couldn't when a lock screen was introduced in the 90s. Bitlocker being enabled by default is a pretty recent thing.

It's a different type of security:

I leave my email, jira, slack, and other services logged in while I am working. When I step out of my computer I lock my screen to prevent other people in the room from using my account in those services.

I am aware that they can grab the hard drive and get whatever crap I've got there, but they cannot login into my email, bank, and other services. That's why the lock screen is useful for me.

A lock screen is not the same as a login screen. A lock screen is the functionless screen you have to dismiss before being presented with the login screen.

So the last "good" Windows was what then, 3.1? Modern lock screens are essentially just glorified login prompts and we had that in 3.11 I believe.

I'm talking about the pointless screen you have to dismiss to get to the login screen. The one that was introduced with windows 10 to make it look more like a smartphone.

s/11//g

And it becomes the call I made over a decade ago. I really haven't regretted it. Literally anything you use will have multiple frustrations you have to get a bit zen about, why pay microsoft for that?

Come on in, the water's fine.

I just installed Windows Server 2019 on my new laptop, in the hope it gets less telemetry, fluff and UI innovations. At least I can sleep well at night knowing I won't wake up one morning to new Windows 11 on my laptop.

Mostly, I'm simply not interested in upgrading because what I have works. I spend so little time thinking about my operating system itself these days that I'm a hard sell on value-add in replacing any aspect of it.

The commentary here reminds me a lot of the comments around Windows 10 as it was at a similar stage. And not without merit! Windows 10 did have many issues in the early stages, but got progressively better with updates.

This is just the Windows product lifecycle.

- Windows 3.0 crashed all the time, Windows 3.1 was great

- Windows 95 and 98 were okay, I don't remember having much of a problem with them.

- Windows ME was terrible, Windows XP was great

- Windows Vista was terrible, Windows 7 was great

- Windows 8 was terrible, Windows 10 is great

- Windows 11 will be terrible, but there's always looking forward to Windows 12.

If anything I'm heart-warmed that a new generation will get to experience their own Windows ME/Vista/8 debacle. It's a coming of age story every computer kid must experience.

I would upgrade to Windows 11, but my 5 year old desktop doesn't support it apparently.

Just buy a brand new computer and throw your old one in a landfill. Easy!

A clean install should work though.

Why would anyone want to upgrade to Windows 11 on release day? Surely it’s better to wait a couple of years for the worst bugs to be shaken out. What new features are worth putting yourself through version .0 pain?

As far as I can tell, the only reason to upgrade to a new version of Windows is because the old version has stopped getting security updates.

I like it but started dual booting with Ubuntu for better UNIX understanding.

someone should sue microsoft to force them to split windows 7 as a separate company and revive them

Ok I will keep using Windows 7 then.

I tried to use Win 7 recently and I've gotta say, I really prefer 10 in all aspects. It's faster, and still supported and feels more modern.

It's Vista all over again.

FTFY: Windows. Just say no.

Just remember the requirements for Windows 11 and know that 90% of the machines out there cannot run it because it needs TPM 2.0 and the latest CPUs to work or even install.

I got $2000 saved up for a Windows 11 Pro PC when they come out, my current PC will get Debian and act as a server.

This article seems to be making a point that you shouldn't upgrade to Windows 11 right now, since you might be encounter problems that result from the upgrade. But I have bigger apprehensions about Windows 11 than just that. Windows 11 feels like the culmination of a push to turn Windows into a walled garden service rather than a utilitarian operating system for generic computing devices. Dark patterns like forced logins, pop-ups tips, ads (https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-breaks-windows-11-b...), a lack of hardware support (https://www.pcgamer.com/how-the-hell-is-microsoft-already-sc...), and so on make me feel like it is time to move on from Windows.

At the same time, there isn't a good alternative for everyday use. Although I would consider myself reasonably tech savvy, I can't say I am comfortable enough to use Linux as a daily driver and to trust that I am using it securely, as compared to taking updates with one click from Microsoft or Apple. Maybe my perception is wrong, but we really need better educational resources to teach people and get them comfortable with computing infrastructure (hardware/software/services) from outside the big tech vendors.

Leaving that aside, I am not sure what Microsoft's larger strategy is. It feels to me like they're trying to be more like Apple at times. But if that's the case, why would I use Microsoft? Apple is already very good at being Apple and has better software and hardware for such an experience.

I had the same feelings about Linux. Turned out Ubuntu runs just fine on the certified hardware from Lenovo, and personally I trust Ubuntu as much in terms of security updates as I trust MS.

try linux mint .. or as already stated Ubuntu .. both are fantastic daily drivers IMO.

Using Linux is quite easier these days than ever before. About the usability: One command can update your system as well as all the apps installed. No hassle of shutting down your pc after an update. Limitless comfigurations to make the system your own. I would suggest using a community based distro, ones like Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, Arch (Slightly hard), KDE Neon, etc. There's a very large community and also well written documentation to support you if you get stuck. Also, help is available most of the time in the terminal itself, no need to go anywhere. There's also the feeling of freedom and that an OS doesn't track you and staying out of the way to give you the most fluid experience acocording to whatever suites you.

What's really difficult for the average user is the installation process.

Debian is what I install to friends and family because the system is really tested, stable and does not annoy them with continuous update pop ups. Then every two years, we have a dinner at my place and I help them upgrade.

They tell me that their pc seems less "magical", that they feel they have more control over what it does.

The only real issue is compatibility with the office suite when the beancounter sends Excel sheets.

Excel really is the/my last hold-out for Windows. Excel for web is not adequate. Maybe it's better that way for MS/windows, otherwise there are no reasons to stay with windows except it being a habit. For my private use I'll try changing to Linux with Steam Deck.

> No hassle of shutting down your pc after an update.

Has kernel hotpatching made it into a free distro? The only way I ever got it to work was installing RHEL (money) or Ubuntu Landscape (money after 10 servers). This would be super nice, as then I could once again have year long uptimes for my boxes.

>Windows 11 feels like the culmination of a push to turn Windows into a walled garden service rather than a utilitarian operating system for generic computing devices

They cannot do this due to enterprise apps.

Maybe for the Home version.

So many companies are on older Win32 ERP software that do not have a webapp. Also games. All Steam games etc would stop working.

They tried with Windows 10S version and nobody uses that.

But wow that pcgamer article shows the mess. Im on a i7 4790k PC w Windows 10 but with 11 I might not get updates??

I haven't actually had any Windows 10 issues... runs all the PC games ever made, all the Windows apps. I try and disable all the telemetry in UI, turn off animations, use Firefox to minimize the privacy issues. Takes a while but once its setup it just trucks on.

>lack of hardware support

Lol, this might be a chance for linux to outshine windows in hardware support.

Excel, Adobe products, CAD/CAM programs

Unless you use the products above professionally, you could easily make Linux as your daily driver. You don't need to be tech-savvy to install Linux distros nowadays since most of them already come with a GUI. With that, hardware issues are easily resolvable since (1) it is open-source thus simpler to troubleshoot and (2) other users probably already found a workaround. Most updates in mainstream distros are already one-click too. A lot of them just doesn't update automatically since the philosophy of Linux is "it only needs to be updated when the user explicitly asks me to."

Lol terrible article. Cant wait until the rest of the plebs are forced into 11. 10 can die in the hell hole it came from. 11 feels more akin to the Linux realm I'm used to. Not to mention sweet sweet TPM. Can finally get rid of all the cheating dogs in gaming.

Tldr 11 rocks, it's built for business and has mad benefits for gamers.

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