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Comment by ramblerman | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn on this.

I'm really happy with where MS is going, I think they have been killing it with vs code, chatgpt integration, and I was quite bullish on the surface pros.

But after having owned one for 1 month, they were still a real disaster in the OS area. I "subscribed" to the preview track, and had to reformat my pc twice. It was a fricking disaster. I'm back on osx now, having sold the surface pro.

Hardware and OS is still very much their weakpoint imo. It's like the whole OS is designed by product owners working on macbook pros (which apparantly isn't far from the truth)

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I've sworn off Windows as an OS after multiple dealbreakers: advertisements in the OS, and hard reboots with no warning.

I understand there are workarounds - such as buying a non-personal Windows license, and fiddling with the registry - but that's like selling me a car that'll shut its engine off on the highway and force me to listen to its own advertisements while I'm using a bluetooth device, and assuring me that I can adjust the behavior. If I know how. If I even know that's possible. If I'm willing to pay more.

Yeah, running insiders and seeing an advert in the start menu search was the final straw for me. I've used it for work a couple times, but mostly choose Mac, only because the corp apple experience isn't as bad as corp Windows can get.

> I "subscribed" to the preview track, and had to reformat my pc twice. It was a fricking disaster. I'm back on osx

Are you tracking the pre-release versions of MacOS?

> I "subscribed" to the preview track, and had to reformat my pc twice.

"I subscribed to test betas and they were unstable. Thanks Bill Gates!"

I ran insiders since later windows 8.1 updates... I had to reinstall a couple times, when the win11 went full release (didn't have secure boot and tpm enabled and it broke itself) and there was another bug a few months later. What really irked me into leaving was that someone thought it was cool to show literal ads in the start menu search results. Insiders or not, that's something that is just wrong. I changed my default boot to my linux drive and haven't looked back on my personal desktop.

Yeah, I also don't get how people voluntarily choose to use a beta OS, and then complain that it broke.

Like, my brother in Christ, that's why there's the stable version of that OS.

Because (i wish i was joking) Windows is a beta OS with the exception of some specific Service Packs. NT was stable only with SP6. 2000 only with the last SP when they discontinued development. Same for XP and 7 only the last SP was stable. I skipped Vista and 8, but 10 is a rolling release. Nothing is stable, everything is a moving target.

Funny, I never had OS issues with stability and been using Windows since 95. Had issue with other things.

What stability issues are you referring exactly?

Yeah this is the sarcastic take, but MS pushes people to get onto the insider preview to enable certain features. My surface pro wouldn't sleep properly, and only the "insider preview" would fix that for instance.

There is a difference between having a few apps crash more often, and literally having the offical MS help tell you, the only solution is to reinstall everything.

This being the case on MS's own hardware is actually ridiculous.

And unsurprising.

> MS help tell you, the only solution is to reinstall everything.

They finally found out what everybody knew since Win 95 days: There is no problem in Windows(TM) that a complete reinstall cannot fix. /s

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