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Comment by jerriep | Hacker News Reader

> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.

I think it will still be objectively bad. But maybe compared to Windows 12, it will seem good.

They say every second version of windows is bad. 8 was so bad they skipped straight to 10. But given the current priorities of Windows i'm not holding my breath. They seem to have abandoned the idea that "things should work" as a key principle. 10 was around for an extraordinarily long time but 11 has very few good ideas.

Windows 11 is pretty great though, it keeps all the good ideas from 10 and improves on them. I don't get the hate.

23H2 was pretty close to being solid and stable but 24H2 has been a disaster.

It's a buggy mess that harasses you. I understand the hate.

This morning I got three screens asking if I wanted to log in and configure backup. There is still not an option to say no, only ask me later.

Last week the top half of the taskbar disappeared for an evening.

I'm logged in to my Microsoft account, so I've not seen any of that.

The only thing that I recall popping up is those setup screens that appear after some updates for no good reason.

I also don't recall any particularly buggy experience with Windows 11.

Meanwhile my Mac mini M2 Pro is having issues all the time. From the start I could not even use my second monitor without turning off and back on the primary monitor first for the second to come on.

I get that moving the Start menu to the middle gives you a very "Iron Man in the command chair" type feeling on large monitors/multiple screens, where you spin off windows to the left and right...but is super annoying on a smaller monitor

The "Lets do it Later" trend of UI is one of the things i hate most about modern UI. Why cant i just say no, instead i have to say no to 10 different menus.

Not respecting a no is usually something very very bad people do.

Yes, I'm pretty sure not respecting "no" is a sign of abuse in a relationship. So is being told "no" but changing it to "yes" anyway.

Great for ... shareholders? Because you can't possibly be talking about users. Windows is an OS that forces cloud logins, tracks and records every interaction, steals email credentials, shoves ads and full screen nags everywhere, sabotages competing software, turns perfectly good hardware into e-waste, and won't take no for an answer from users. It serves the interest of billionaires, not common people.

For paying users, this is the definition of an unmitigated disaster. Windows 11 expands on all of the worst aspects of Windows 10. Inconsistent UI, duplicated settings, two context menus, laggy start menu with React in it, and on and on and on the list goes. It's obvious why people hate it.

No other OS has shown this much level of outright contempt towards its users. Modern Windows is, without doubt, the worst desktop OS to ever exist in the history of computing.

Don't forget the greatly reduced hardware support in return for no actual new features. It's a rat trap with no cheese on it.

> it keeps all the good ideas from 10 and improves on them.

Are there any good ideas in Windows 10 ?

Volume mixer

Volume mixer has been around at least since Windows 7. Maybe earlier but I don't remember.

My parents older windows 10 laptop was getting slow and battery wasn't great.

They bought a new windows 11 laptop from Costco for $600. Yes cheap, but not total garbage.

Tried using it for a few weeks. Worse performance that their 6 year old similarly cheap laptop running windows 10.

Returned new computer. I installed Linux Mint Mate and bought an Chinese battery for $30. Laptop better than new.

I'm with you. I've used Windows 11 as my primary work OS since release and it is absolutely quicker than Windows 10 and nicer to use. I do, however, debloat it and remove all the cruft when I install it.

I don't want to use a Microsoft account. I don't want to use Secure Boot. I don't want the new right click menu (good idea, bad execution). I don't want the new start menu (I want the Windows 7 one if anything). I don't want my OS calling home. I don't want AI. I don't want ads.

I went to Linux instead. I got what I wanted there.

What ideas did 10 have that weren't just purely technical updates (i.e. DX12 and the like), and weren't just undoing what Windows 8 did?

I remember a different apocrypha for why they skipped from 8 to 10. They wanted avoid OS specific code that conditionally activated from the substring "windows 9" but meant for windows 95 and 98. One would imagine any code like that not being quite as helpful a few decades later.

If true, this would align with Microsoft’s historic dedication to backward compatibility in the face of horribly-written third party software.

You misread the GP. The versioning skipping from 8 to 9 was because of bad detection code for windows 95/98. The GP is talking about people staying on Windows 7 until Windows 10 came out, skipping Windows 8.

Windows 95 and 98 VersionStrings were 4.00.nn and 4.10.nn

I don't know the details of that. But even if that's the correct way to determine versions, I think there might be some fraction of software that does it the less correct, more obvious way.

I thought it might be to bring Windows in line with Mac OS 10. Seems petty, but I could see a billion dollar company not liking their flagship is on version 8-9 while the competition is on 10.

I thought that was why the second Xbox was “Xbox 360” so it did not seem a lesser number than PlayStation 3.

That too

Not entirely apocrypha. Among the ones we can most easily name and shame from available source files there were early versions of the Java JDK known to have tests exactly like that in low level library code. Presumably Microsoft's famous app compatibility lab found many more that were closed source that they were not allowed to name and shame.

There's also different apocrypha about the numerology aspect that 9 is a very unlucky number in some cultures and commonly skipped in version numbers (similar to but more so than 13 in the US being skipped on many elevators). (Also why it is said other companies like Apple often skip 9 to make it easier to use the same version cross-culturally without cultural taboo mistakes.)

I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.

It's not anything at Microsoft that's doing it, it's just the way people are. Microsoft announces some big, new thing, and everybody hates it. When the next version of Windows comes out, people are used to that new thing, so they don't hate it. The new version has a ton of stuff they hate, but because the last version was sooo bad they ignore it all.

Could be, but I had lots of complaints about Vista, and 7 worked much better for me.

I stuck on 7 for a long time, not because I was waiting for 11, but because I was waiting for some annoyances with 10 to get addressed.

I still would rather have an updated W7 than W10 or W11.

Updated means - security updates, clipboard manager, dism (W7's dism was limited).

Yeah, I've never really bought that meme. They probably just jumped to 10 because they wanted a bigger number than a competitor, maybe OS X. This is the company that released the first version of windows NT as 3.1 because Netware was at that version at the time and probably called the Xbox 2 the 360 so it had a larger number than Sony.

> I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it

Last version was really bad, let's focus on fixing problems on the next ... last version was great, we need new revolutionary features to sell the next one.

That was visible on the older versions of Windows. Win 95 was kinda bad because nothing worked very well, then 98 fixed things, then ME tried to redo everything that still worked badly, what didn't work so they merged everything that worked into 2000. XP both worked badly at the beginning, and well at the end; Vista rebuilt a lot of stuff, and 7 fixed it so it worked.

And then the rhythm completely stopped.

The Windows version numbers are not used often but really do help group Windows into distinct "early vs late" product cycle tiers. They didn't really skip straight to 10, they just named 9 8.1 for reasons.

Windows 5.0-5.2 is Win 2000, Win XP, Win XP64.

Windows 6.0-6.3 is Vista, 7, 8, 8.1.

One large contributor to modern Windows's lack of quality is that Microsoft laid off all of its dedicated QA staff in 2014, with the expectation that developers would own the OS's quality themselves, and whatever they miss would get caught by telemetry reports from Windows enthusiasts who sign up to test new versions for free. Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc (invaluable when you're dealing with a 30+ year old codebase where large portions were written prior to automated testing being standard). The free Windows enthusiast testing didn't make up for this because you can't expect them to act like how a QA tester would act.

Of course I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly start caring about product quality. The Windows user base has largely stopped growing, so MBA logic is to spend the bare minimum resources on maintenance and to funnel the existing userbase into growth areas like cloud/AI services.

I can totally see how letting go the dedicated QA roles increased the amount of bugs that ship to customers, but

> Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc

Seems incorrect from all interactions I've had with dedicated QA to day.

They usually have no idea about any of that, what they do know is how to use a software and what scenarios have previously broken, but not from a technical perspective that can reason about error scenarios. More like a power user that just learned to use a UI, without knowing what it actually does.

I feel like their recent push to AI driven development has likely had more impact in their issues in the last 2 yrs vs a decision that's at this point 11 years in the past - but they are probably both (along with other unnamed factors) contributing to this end result.

Overall saddening, as windows 10 really was a big leap forward in usability.

Microsoft's Software Development Engineer in Test position was different than the "power user QA" archetype you describe and is common.

These positions required development abilities and they would develop the testing scenarios concurrently with the team building the software. And the results were less buggy, IMHO. But it's expensiving having twice the engineering staff when you can just ask software developers to test things themselves and not follow up to make sure it happened.

The "every second version" rule may be a meme, but it does not reflect the actual release order of Windows, nor properly count the NT series. It only really applies to sentiment surrounding Windows 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. But that leaves out Windows 95, most versions of Windows NT, and Windows 2000.

It works with 95/2000.

95 - good,

98 - bad,

2000 - good,

ME - bad,

XP - good,

Vista - bad,

7 - Good,

8 - bad,

10 - good,

11 - bad.

That assumes 10 was good and misses 8.1.

Also 95/98/me were a different line from NT/2000.

It sounds like a good theory but there isn’t much substance to it.

> That assumes 10 was good and misses 8.1.

I find this to be a mostly valid assumption, and 8.1 shouldn't be counted separately from 8 just as Vista SP2 should be counted any differently from Vista (Vista was mostly fine after companies fixed their drivers and Microsoft toned things down a bit. 7 just drove that home and put some necessary distance between itself and Vista).

> Also 95/98/me were a different line from NT/2000.

I fail to see why this matters.

I must be the only person who remembers everyone shitting on W10 saying it was awful and they were staying on W7 until W11 came around and suddenly we're pretending like everyone loved it

People were indeed shitting on Windows 10, but far less than Windows 8, and most people were willing to suck up the minor enshittification of 10 compared to 8 in exchange for a more modern OS.

People sticking to 7 until 11 came out is something I've heard nothing of. The people who stuck to 7 that I knew of knew that things were very unlikely to get better.

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