Windows 11 struggling to escape the shadow of Windows 10 | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 struggling to escape the shadow of Windows 10

theregister.com

21 pointsredbell112 comments

Microsoft literally chose to make Windows 11 refuse to install on the majority of PCs [1], so that's hardly surprising. They also chose to make one of the most fundamental interface elements, the Start menu, worse in every way.

There are some nice features too, and I'd probably upgrade another PC or two if they would let me.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3657628/more-than-half...

Which features seem nice to you?

Good touch gestures for window and desktop manipulation, multiple desktops easier and better, tabs supported in more places (e.g. File Explorer and Notepad), better behaviour when connecting and disconnecting external monitors, some nice window positioning, better WSL integration, etc. Nothing huge, but lots of little improvements.

The monitors is actually broken for me. Windows disconnects my monitor even for something as small as alt-tabbing from a fullscreen game and refuses to reconnect it till I unplug the monitor and plug it back in.

Proper HDR support. What's the point of fancy OLED screens when you can't use them?

I was going to say, if their goal was to escape the shadow of Windows 10 instead of doubling down on it, they did a poor job.

Apparently the thing making it to refuse to install is "TPM 2.0".

I'm not a Windows user but a Linux user, and this simply makes me wonder: will TPM 2.0 in any way make PC hardware impossible to install Linux on? I remember there was a windows TPM related thing that would lock in the hardware to only boot windows, is this it?

You’re thinking of secure boot, tpm is wholly unrelated.

As far as I know, TPM can be disabled in the BIOS. Perhaps not on every motherboard, but I have yet to encounter one like that.

I run Linux fine on systems with TPM 2.0 (with Secure Boot enabled).

No, that was the Secure Boot scare. TPM is unrelated to that particular matter, though it can interact with Secure Boot (as part of Measured Boot).

Both technologies apply to any operating system and provide important software security benefits.

The TPM 2.0 scare was a different one: that websites would start requiring the use of TPM 2.0 to prove that you're running unmodified Windows, which would make Linux users unable to access these websites (and even running legitimate Windows on a virtual machine wouldn't be enough, these websites would accept only Windows running directly on the bare hardware).

That is, the use of TPM 2.0 would not lock the hardware to only boot Windows (it's SecureBoot that would do that, once Microsoft stops signing Linux bootloaders and starts requiring that OEMs forbid disabling it, like they already did for ARM laptops), but the use of TPM 2.0 would lock Linux users out of important services, in practice forcing them to boot Windows.

Remote attestation is absolutely part of the feature set of TPM. That is isn't used is because of the poor adaptation. So I wouldn't say it 'was' as scare. Of course there are different threats too.

Actually it is quite a current topic, because tech companies are interested in this for very obvious reasons that is not referring to your evil maid. Web integrity comes to mind.

Windows 11 doesn't actually need a TPM or secure boot functionality to run at all, which is why Microsoft introduced an exemption commonly used in lab/school environments. When you get the “This PC can’t run Windows 11” error message during installation:

-Press Shift+F10 to open a command prompt and run regedit.exe to launch the Registry Editor.

-Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup

-Right-click on the Setup key in the left pane and choose New -> Key. Call this key LabConfig.

-Right-click the LabConfig key in the left pane and choose New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value. Call this value BypassTPMCheck.

-Right-click the LabConfig key in the left pane and choose New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value. Call this value BypassSecureBootCheck.

-Double-click both the BypassTPMCheck and BypassSecureBootCheck values and change the Value data from 0 to 1.

-Close the Registry Editor and command prompt windows.

-At the Windows setup screen with the error message, press the back button in the upper left and then click Next to continue installation normally.

After installation, the Windows Security Center will display a warning indicating that your system doesn't have a TPM, but you can choose "Dismiss" and you'll get a green validation checkmark next to that section from that point onwards.

Meanwhile Linux just installs, updates, and runs without having to trick the OS and performing 9 obscure steps.

Yet I continue to lose at least one whole day of my life per year trying to get some random wireless card working.

How many cumulative days per year do you spend fighting Windows updates. Clicking through the marketing campaigns for Windows 11, updating registries, etc.?

Zero - I run a script when I install the OS and it kills all of that. I've never once had a Windows Update break anything on any of the computers I own. I definitely shouldn't have to do set a load of regkeys to make the computer do what I want it to do but it certainly beats the experience of Linux on a desktop.

Except you (or whoever you took it from) had to make a script to accomplish it in the first place. Something an average user on old hardware won’t be willing to do on Windows. Not sure what’s wrong with the Linux desktop experience that you’d go to such great lengths. My DE has been stable and feature full for 6+ years now.

And considering most people just run a browser most of the time now, Linux looks even better than the restricted non-user friendly marketing platform that Windows evolved into.

I never fight windows updates personally. Have not had an issue for several years at least and I use windows for several hours a day at least (without any custom scripts or modifications).

Unlike the other person who replied to you, I don't have a script to disable anything. I spend zero cumulative hours thinking or worrying about updates, it's just always up to date.

While I recall registry exploring in the 2000s, I haven't needed to do that in 10+ years.

None?

That's amazing! I found the time-traveler from 2005. NDISwrapper is tricky, but trust me in a few years it gets better, and kernels will come pre-stocked with most chipsets and blob-firmware packages will be available from the package manager.

I haven't had to worry about wireless cards working in Linux in 15 years or more. What sort of hardware are you seeing these issues with?

Laptops and NUC style devices usually.

Which versions of linux cleanly update? What do I do with an old Centos 7 system?

Plenty of Linux flavors update seamlessly. Update it or migrate to a new flavor. You might like Debian if you liked CentOS enough to keep a machine running it.

Ubuntu does. I do a fresh install of Kubuntu every couple of years, and in-place upgrades in between. With fresh installs, I make a file image of the old OS partition with dd and mount it from within the new system to copy across /etc files and settings (and I keep track of all of that in a text file to use as a manual script next time). The separate /home partition doesn't get changed at all.

For how many years have you had the same server running Ubuntu? Which version did you start with? LTS upgrades only? I don't want to update but once every 5 years or so.

The PC I'm on is from 2012 (well, its motherboard and CPU are; everything else has been upgraded at least once, and I plan to do a new build from scratch this year), and has been running Kubuntu the whole time, as did my previous PC. I don't stick to LTS releases, as sometimes I want updated software from newer ones. If you do update to non-LTS releases, you have to keep updating, as the non-LTS releases stop getting updates and security fixes after a year.

I set things up in a way that makes a fresh install (rather than an update) pretty painless anyway. I always have a dedicated /home partition, which stays untouched by any update or reinstall, so all app settings are just carried through. Before I moved to a more space-limited SSD for the OS partition, I had multiple OS partitions available, so I could leave the old OS intact on one, but I pretty much never booted the old one, so an image in a file does the job just as well. I document all my setup steps in a text file and follow that, updating it as I go, for the setup of the next fresh install.

I wouldn't recommend going 5 years between updates, for security reasons, but every two years between LTS releases would be fine. You could look into distrobox for running more up-to-date apps - I've done that a bit.

Fedora cleanly updates and is nearly identical to CentOS. It's also the distro that Linus Torvalds uses on his personal systems because it stays very current with regards to the kernel, and he doesn't have to worry about the small stuff because the Fedora project team members do a stellar job.

> Which versions of linux cleanly update?

Most of them, these days.

> What do I do with an old Centos 7 system?

Compare apples to oranges, since CentOS was discontinued, and then move forward anyways because https://almalinux.org/elevate/ has you covered.

Debian does, it is one of the reasons why I eventually made it my default choice for new long-term installations. Before I used Debian I tested SLS, Slackware, Yggdrasil and Redhat. I have run Caldera, Ubuntu and Mint as well as a bunch of special-purpose distributions (Raspbian, Puppy, LTSP on iOpeners, OpenWRT, etc.) but Debian is where it is at if it has to run for a long time spanning several upgrades.

Are they providing assurances that these machines won't break through an update?

Oh, yes, install Windows 11 with these simple steps.

Honestly if I have to open PowerShell and mess with the registry just to install an ad-full upgrade of my OS, I'd rather install Gentoo. At least I'll learn more and won't get ads by building from scratch.

I've helped a relative with some issue on a Windows 11 machine and the UX was just atrocious. The new design is just another layer on top of everything else, so depending on which setting you need to change you'll have to dive through 4 or 5 generations of "Windows Design Language" - the new right click menu is missing crucial entries (which can be retrieved by a sub-menu, which is just the old right click menu again) - things like "copy" and "paste" are just icons - it's frustrating to no end.

Before I touched it I thought Windows 11 would be an update to the design language used in Windows 10, but the fact that there's just another layer on top of the existing stuff is mind boggling. Nothing is cohesive, there's no discernible reason for the changes that have been made (who exactly is the new context menu for?), and I'm just left wondering what the hell this whole thing has been for.

And this has just been from a thirty minute session troubleshooting some issues on another PC, I'm sure if I had to actually get work done (and had to fight with the privacy-invasive attention-grabbing shenanigans going on in the start menu), I'd have even more reason to be frustrated.

Even W10 struggled to shake off the XP era control panel items, many of which still remain as another layer in W11.

I’m convinced that they released it prematurely as an attempt to claw back much attention from Apple’s M1 launch.

If you dig far enough, you can even find Windows 3-era dialogs:

https://i.imgur.com/I41a1vU.png

Well spotted. I’ve always found ODBC drivers to be some ancient artefact that we lost the source code for.

I've been regularly using Windows 11 for most of the time it's been out, which is about two years now. The main problem I have with it is even after two years it still feels beta quality. The number of major regressions in the main system user interface is baffling. I see obvious glitches fairly regularly, dropdown menus getting stuck and not dismissing, icons vanishing but still interacting, explorer windows appearing blank for a moment before their content appears, layout bugs (inputs extending past window edge, text labels overlapping), etc. etc. not to mention a bunch of features that went missing or became harder to access, like explorer context menu options (and others complain about moving the start menu), due to replacing the legacy UI with a completely new one that doesn't yet cover everything the old one did... but they shipped it anyway and even after a couple of years it's not back up to speed.

I've been advising others to avoid Windows 11 - stick to Windows 10 until Microsoft sort out this mess.

Yeah, it’s mostly fine but a little half baked in spots. Just kind of perplexed why they would rush it out.

Maybe they rushed it out originally, but it's been out for two years now, and I think it's reasonable to expect any rough edges to have been smoothed out over that time!

Yeah I agree. Win10 had similar issues to a lesser extent. The settings/preferences were all kind of a mish mash of new style and old style.

Rough-edges in the UI/UX never get fixed between major-releases (or ever, really) because of the risk of breaking third-party software using UI automation techniques to perform some workflow. The XKCD strip is real: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Speaking as a former MSFTie, my experience is that some orgs (like OSG: Windows) are more conservative with UI/UX changes (between major releases, at least) compared to others (like DevDiv: Visual Studio) and it's motivated by avoiding risk: i.e. "if it ain't broken, don't fix it, even if it is currently uglier than a mid-2000s KDE desktop".

Will Microsoft sort this out though? Looking at the state of modern software in general, I very much doubt it. Ridiculously complex software tends to have ridiculous bugs.

(Also, these half-baked UI upgrades have been going since Windows XP, not a single coherent concept since then.)

The bloatware on 11 is out of control. Feels like I'm using a Samsung phone. 8 was fine, 10 was bad too but not this bad. The start menu UI has been completely destroyed. My desktop folder was nested in a OneDrive folder and it took some googling to figure out how to delete OneDrive completely. Microsoft Edge is constantly running in the background and cannot be uninstalled. There were a bunch of icons for apps that had to be removed and were not actually installed like Tiktok and Kindle. Really big design by committee vibes. Not cool!!

>Microsoft Edge is constantly running in the background and cannot be uninstalled.

Soon not a case in EEA.

> There were a bunch of icons for apps that had to be removed and were not actually installed like Tiktok and Kindle.

That was certainly a thing already in 10, and my memory is fuzzy but could’ve been on 8/8.1 too.

It was always bad.

I upgraded my Thinkpad to Windows 11. Within a few weeks I was so angry with it, that I ordered a MacBook M2 and put my thinkpad on Ubuntu.

It’s a horrible OS that tries to remove any sense of ownership over one’s own PC.

Upgrading my Legion gaming laptop to 11 led me to enough annoyances that I tried out Linux Mint for gaming for 2 months. Ultimately there are quality of life and reliability issues that drove me back to Windows 10. But 11 is just so damn obnoxious.

I bought a thinkpad that came with Win11 and haven't had many problems with it, although I dont use it much. I didn't like it auto-syncing to the cloud, but I can see that being a feature for many. I completely agree with the removal of ownership. My biggest gripe is having to disable the "rage-bait" news headlines it constantly tries to sneak into the browser and start menu. After I disabled those, I looked into my outlook email (hardly ever use it) and lo-and-behold, it's filled with rage-bait news headline emails. I was mocking it to myself, like "Hey user! Here's a new $tragedy you can be upset with. Aren't you glad that me and the helpful marketing folks over at MSFT supply you with these continuous updates of rage, tragedy, and gloom covering the world?"

And of course, labelling practically all of our computers as 'Not Windows 11 Capable' isn't helping Microsoft at all.

Windows is not today the 'Must Have' that people used to think it was in the past. Remember those all-night queues for Windows 95?

Yes, The TPM & secure boot requirements are somewhat understandable, but the CPU whitelist on top of that is just weird.

Especially since I believe they created exceptions for their own surface devices that didn't meet the whitelist.

Really? My Surface Pro 4 won't upgrade.

They sold gen 7 i7 surface studio that got one single chip from that series whitelisted.

It may be a very mundane complaint to many, but: The fact that I can't put the taskbar on the left side on the screen is reason alone to stick to Windows 10 for me. Also, the size of the taskbar.

I'm willing to throw a bone to Microsoft with regards to the bottom-fixed taskbar: Many programs simply do not account for non-bottom taskbars and run very jankily when executed under such environments.

I assume they judged it was better for end user experience to make dumb assumptions always true rather than try and convince programmers to stop making dumb assumptions.

That doesn't make much sense. The applications viewport can be resized, be in a widescreen, have a rotated monitor, hide the taskbar, etc. What difference does all that make having the task bar somewhere else? What's an example?

It's been a minute since I've used Windows but... what? Why would any program care?

Some programs have fixed minimum window sizes that may fit poorly on a barely large enough monitor and they were designed with bottom task bar in mind. An unlikely case and not a reason to disable left taskbar IMO.

Hm, I've never seen a program have trouble with a left-edge taskbar. Being able to move it is really useful for wide screens and remote desktop (avoids confusion), and the benefits seem to far outweigh potential jankiness of badly written programs.

I also absolutely hated this, you can move it to the left somewhere in the settings, can't remember how I did it. Terrible design.

You can move the start menu to the left corner of the taskbar in settings (look for "Taskbar alignment"), but you can't move the taskbar itself to another edge of the screen.

No, not the left side of the bottom, the left or right side of the screen.

You are not alone. I use Win11 at work(grudgingly), but I don't at home because my workflow and muscle memory is HEAVILY influenced by at least 10 years (ever since 16:9 ratios on monitors were common) of having the taskbar on the left. It doesn't help that my (expensive in 2017) CPU that is running perfectly fine. That computer, when I retire it from daily use, will absolutely be a Linux box next, and it'll be good riddance to Microsoft control.

Sounds like Gnome 3.

Using startallback so I can move the taskbar to the left. Give it a try if your work environment allows it.

That is the reason I don't use W11 on laptops due to limited vertical space.

On the desktop the main issue is that main taskbar can't be put on the secondary monitor anymore. That forces start menu and all the notifications appear over my full screen apps and games.

I don't see much to get anyone excited about moving to Windows 11 besides the escaping updates running out gun-to-your-head. To me it has a controversial set of UI changes, smaller set of hardware support and the march to cloudify the home PC continues on to the next stage.

The only interesting thing I remember was the android emulator which was just hope and dreams when Windows 11 released.

It's 2024. I've been a GNU/Linux user for a long time and FOSS OS and tools have been the single most powerful force-multiplier in my personal and career development.

Linux has been for me a personalised curriculum of learning, empowering, sharing, and fun.

Why would I accept any corporation's desire to limit or deny that experience, place barriers on my computer, or spy on my computer usage?

It's 2024... not 1984, Microsoft.

As a long time Linux user these W11 threads are always so amazing to browse.

It's pretty funny to contrast complaints over time - we've gone from "Linux GUIs are such a mess, why do GTK and QT apps look different" to "Windows is from one company; why is it using GUIs from every successive version of itself?", and "Linux is only free if you don't value your time" to "okay, so to make Windows vaguely usable, use this workaround on initial setup, click these specific options, run this patch script, rerun those steps on every major update..."

If you want to experience a clean and performant Windows, install Windows 7. I run it on a VM.

Windows 7 on a 10 year old computer is better than Windows 10 on a new. So sad for the history of the dominant OS.

It's great but Firefox is on life support on it. Chrome is not updated anymore, and basically all development languages and tools as well so Windows 10 is the best choice in the short/medium term.

Yeah. I'm not saying that I use it. But I still have a VM with some old software and when I use it, I am reminded of the saying "what Intel giveth, Windows takes away"

When you keep add bloat on top of bloat, fire your QA team, hire people not skilled enough for the task, protect your incompetent higher ups, at some point things start to fall apart, that's windows for you

The sad part is as a result, windows 10 is viewed as "good".. society fell this low

The everything app will certainly not be microsoft/windows based

We still have a long way to go in the west..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU

I hope we never get an everything app in the west.

We already have, it's just not in a digital form, yet

That's depressing.

AFAIK OLE objects in AutoCAD are still broken in Win11 due to changes to MS paint from what I understand.

Our whole drafting team is on Win10 until they can fix that.

i thought for a moment you were going to say that your drafting team is on MS Paint until they can fix it. ;-)

Its already wild enough that AutoCAD and Excel are both broken partially in Win11 because MS changed something in classic Paint that effects how Windows 11 does image embedding.

From AutoCAD's known issues page: On the Windows 11 operating system, OLE image objects (BMP, PNG, GIF, and so on) don’t display and can’t be plotted as expected. This is due to a limitation in the Paint application that ships with Windows 11. AutoCAD LT is affected the same way other Windows applications are affected.

It's pretty bad...

There's a screenshot of a supposed self-leak of Windows 12 doing the rounds. It looks like what they are slowly moving towards is a full-blown macOS ripoff.

I would not be using Windows 11 if it wasn't for office policy. I'm buying a new gaming computer soon and I'm going with Linux. This Windows thing is unsustainable.

Proton is amazing. I have no other words, it's just amazing.

Being a "Windows" guy forever and a day, Windows 11 pushed me to give Linux gaming a serious try. For a bit over two months, I did as much gaming on Linux Mint on my Legion 5 laptop as I could. And it is really, really good. For most people, you can probably switch and be pretty happy.

But Linux headaches have not all evaporated. I had issues with font scaling, brightness controls, networking, and of course graphics card drivers. I could not get Anno 1800 to join a multiplayer game. I could not adjust brightness on my laptop. And a new release game had crashes and easily 25% of the framerate when compared to running in Windows.

Meanwhile, plenty of games ran amazing and easily on par with how they ran in Windows. The desktop experience was mostly really great, and feels snappier than Windows. But because not everything worked, I had to dual boot, and about 33% of my reboots into Linux failed and took a bunch of wrestling with version to boot into, etc. to get it back online.

(You can read a longer version of my experiences here - https://www.retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm )

There are a lot of supposed leaks of Windows 12 which consist of individuals unaffiliated Microsoft coming up with their own speculative "concept art" for future Windows versions. Why people would feel compelled to put their creative talents into doing such a thing is beyond me, but if it makes them happy...

The Spinal Tap of operating systems: "its one more than 10"

Why not just make Windows 10 better and have that be the last OS

That was the plan [1], but then Apple changed from endless version 10 (X) releases to increasing their major number again. I think Microsoft just doesn't like having lower version numbers than competitors (see XBox naming, which started a year after the PlayStation 2 but a version behind: XBox -> XBox 360 -> XBox One (?!) -> XBox Series S/X).

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-may-be-last-versio...

As sad as this is, it might actually work when the user base is large enough and consists of mainly non-tech people who think bigger version number means better. At some point versioning stops being about backwards compatibility and the system itself, and becomes yet another aspect of marketing.

Given the direction they have taken Windows 11, I am glad that this is not an update to Windows 10.

At this point of desktop OSes, I see little need to migrate to the new OS other than for continued security updates.

It’s not like new OSes are chockfull of new and exciting features.

I suppose MS will try to cram A.I. everything to get people excited, but I still don’t see any good reason, other than continued security updates to move to an OS with minor tweaks and great annoyances.

Going from text to rich UI, then PnP, security, multi-user, management, etc. were necessary evolutions, but now what, A.I. integrations, that's the selling point?

> At this point of desktop OSes, I see little need to migrate to the new OS [...] Going from text to rich UI, then PnP, security, multi-user, management, etc. were necessary evolutions, but now what, [...]

People who weren't using computers of the "IBM PC" lineage back then might underestimate how big the jump from MS-DOS and Windows 3.x to Windows 9x was. The jump to the NT kernel (Windows 9x or ME to Windows XP), while smaller, also brought many benefits to normal users. Windows Vista (and Windows XP SP2 before it) tightened the platform security. Every Windows release after that feels like incremental improvements at most.

I'm finding the adoption of Win11 especially awkward because some programs that were built for earlier versions seem to draw blurry. I also am getting a lot of weird playback issues in Firefox for video on both arm64 and amd64. It feels really rough for something that is supposed to be the replacement for win10 and feels similar to when win 8 first came out levels of awkward.

I have 2 win11s and 2 win10s I use more or less daily so the playback/UI draw issues really stand out.

Windows 11 is pretty fantastic. The continued accretion of functionality, customizability, and polish to explorer is nothing short of amazing.

I recently got a macbook air for my preteen. I really hadn't used a mac since my neighbors old Mac+. I was shocked. I was expecting a nearly perfect Unix GUI, instead it felt like some sort of 90's Motif flashback. Does Apple not care that Gnome passed them 15 years ago?

Why users would upgrade? Windows 11 brings absolutely nothing on the table and on top of that has weird hardware requirements.

Exactly how I feel. Windows 11 has no features that interest me, and in fact does not play well with several pieces of software I use, making it a direct downgrade for me.

My assumed eventual upgrade will only come because Microsoft assures me that they will stop supporting security updates for Windows 10.

> Windows 11 brings absolutely nothing on the table

It also removes a leg from the table, the one labelled 'usability'.

Attaching a 3rd-party leg to fill the gap helps (https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher), but it's not an ideal solution

(Still, it's not as bad as Win8 and the big attempt to push a locked-down dumbed-down touch-centric monopolistic-app-store-based replacement to 'real Windows')

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-auto-hdr-for...

Ehh every time I watch this, I think to myself: "I don't want taste and fashion from my hammer, I need it to do its job" - and Windows is a really nice hammer for most tasks.

I had this discussion with "standard" (non-power) users, and the opposite reasoning actually applies.

The concept of upgrade is appealing in itself, and since the technical details are not understood (or worse, not relevant) to standard users, from their perspective, upgrading is a net win.

Newer CPUs with performance and efficiency cores require 11 for proper scheduling.

Better memory management, better wsl, newer cpu support, better multi monitor and desktop features. It actually has a lot of ui improvements as well (like most of control panel has been finally migrated compared to windows 10) but at the same time regressions mostly related to the taskbar.

I have given up on trying to set any settings in windows, they all get reset eventually.

count me in as one who has given up in Windows 11 for now - their unwillingness to let me run in on an Intel Mac that is only a few years old (using bootcamp) is a non-starter for me.

Won't throw my hardware away for AI tools

I expect Microsoft to start removing or degrading features in Windows 10 to make Windows 11 more attractive.

I guess their old "Windows 10 will be the last Windows" tagline is coming to fruition...

Pedantic, but this was never a tagline. This was an impromptu interview comment along the lines of meaning "this is currently the newest/latest version of windows" but worded poorly. It's not clear they ever meant for this to be construed this way as there were never any marketing materials put out to support that interview comment.

Interesting, I always thought their strategy back then was basically to switch Windows to an "evergreen app" like Chrome where the "real" versions are service pack revisions but the "branding" version would always stay the same. Then at some point, the strategy was abandoned and the traditional "a new Windows every few years" model was re-established.

Good. companies should pay for their hubris in revenue and it should actively harm the brand they represent if and when they begin refusing to listen to customers and instead capriciously act against their interests.

Thats how capitalism works. good product = money, bad product = no company.

instead what we have in 2024 is a walking-dead of radioactive money golems on government life support through various federal contracts, siphoning profit from corporations by rent-seeking cloud products and racketeering licenses for services we've been able to provide in open source software for about thirty years.

Cold shower incoming but Microsoft has been a roaring dumpster fire of miserable products for 25 years now. Azure is a hastily constructed dog food factory powered by Office subscriptions, email users and XBox services thats slow featureless and expensive. Windows is a KGB agent who randomly resets your browser to his bosses favourite and makes you buy new hardware. Everything inbetween is just filler from this company that hasnt had a win since word processing.

Honestly at this point I am curious to see how far Microsoft can degrade the experience before its users discover the concept of self-agency.

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