2025 was a disaster for Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

2025 was a disaster for Windows 11

windowscentral.com

246 pointsspeckx318 comments

For me the strange and unproductive direction Windows is going towards in encapsulated in the right-click menu in the file manager (Explorer). 11 has a shiny new menu that shows up when you right click. But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before. Additional options from for example 7zip don't show up in it. You have to click "more options" at the bottom which them reveals the old menu. There is no benefit to the new menu except for the fact that it is aesthetically more "modern" to its detriment.

Nice to mention that this new menu takes ages to appear, on my computer I can wait 5s until it is rendered and I can finally click on more options...

That's funny because I was about to speculate that maybe the customized 7-zip options were removed as part of an API change to speed up the menu by getting rid of shell extensions.

Whoopsy!

I remember seeing some tech vlogger discovering that the lag was due to a bug where the fade-in animation of the menu not being played properly, and the menu just "appear" after the missing animation, leading to the feeling of sluggish interaction.

But that's not just a feeling, it's actual sluggish interaction. What's it doing a fade-in for, to build suspense?

If I remember rightly, "send to" is missing, even after clicking for more options. This was one of the first places where I felt the need to hit Windows 11 with a wrench, so I've had the old-style context menu back for years now.

I’d be willing to bet that behind a change like this is a certain amount of data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently, and a stakeholder decision that this must mean that they should be demoted. And it’s data driven. Makes for a nice bullet point in a report. Most users don’t miss it, on stakeholders can tell themselves that those that you are a minority who don’t really matter for one reason or another.

And as technology moves from tool that provides value to be paid for to cultural experience to be farmed, aesthetic changes drive a sense of currency and progress more than utility -and take a greater place of focus (and we’re a long ways from a time with a respected UX class considering utility even if the larger teleology valued it).

> data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently [...] Most users don’t miss it

Um, I am very skeptical that Microsoft's KPIs have this level of alignment with actual user workflows.

Of course they do. It's all the telemetry that some people complain about.

I wonder how much overlap there is between people who disable telemetry and people who use the right mouse button in Explorer.

Without knowing exactly how far the common "debloat" Windows tools go, which every computer-toucher seems to recommend, I'd assume the overlap between "Users that disable, intentionally or otherwise, telemetry" and "Users that use 'Right-click -> More Options'" isn't quite a circle - but it is approaching one

I'm not denying the existence of intrusive telemetry, I'm saying their KPIs do not care whether they break your workflows?

You really should assume that Microsoft knows exactly what you do on their machine.

Where did I say they didn't?

They know _what_ you do. They don't know _why_ you do it.

> I’d be willing to bet that behind a change like this is a certain amount of data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently,

On a normal OS you have to change usual settings exactly once.

> data showing that the removed options weren’t used that frequently

This is literally the shitshow that's post-Ribbon Microsoft UX in a nutshell.

In the 90s, they designed a logical ontology, then mapped every item somewhere into that.

Post-Ribbon, they pulled whatever happened to be most-commonly used in, and then everything else got stuffed in a jumbled junk drawer (because who uses that?).

What seems to have been lost in the move from one to the other is anyone at Microsoft giving a goddamn 2 seconds of thought, minimum, to EVERY item in the OS.

And because that thought was never given, you get wildly broken edge cases and odd settings, simply because it wasn't anyone's job to make sure everything had a place.

Ribbonification (aka polish the 80% and fuck the 20%) isn't bad for users: it's bad because it lets Microsoft be lazy about organizing.

This sort of thing has been a devolving disaster since the Settings App was included in Windows 8 as a partial replacement for the Control Panel. I'm not sure the current state of things, but as of the last time I used Windows, the sets of functionality remained only partially overlapping between the two different tools.

The partial overlap has been in this state now for years and years. I still have to access the control panel for network device control, sound control, and some of the advanced sharing settings. I thought it would be a short transition but now we just have crappy partial duplicates of settings and ui styles scattered around this half baked migration. When I open the disk volume management it's like I'm back on Windows 2000 for some reason.

Regular volume management can be done entirely within the Settings app. So can sound settings. There's probably an outlier that diskmgmt does better, I'm sure. But diskpart still exists, too. It could be that MSFT targets only the common scenarios and the fallback ends up being old utils/PowerShell at some point.

This was new in 2025, so it is still moving over.

As far as I know, to modify the audio Exclusive Mode settings and view jack information, you still need to use mmsys.cpl from the Control Panel. And I think many operations like converting MBR to GPT still require the Disk Management control panel.

You're correct, and those are likely all little-used in the grand scheme of Windows users (MBR -> GPT for certain).

Waving it away as little-used features is not an excuse, it's the entire reason things got this way. That's why we have layers upon layers of half baked UI with "only" the controls that "everyone" needs. Because those rationalizations are wrong and this is the result.

I would expect Microsoft to relegate little used features to CLI rather than figure out how to integrate them into the UX.

Depends if they want their OS to be easy to use with wide appeal like macOS, or a CLI nightmare like Arch.

And seeing as Windows is now a nightmare, and I am a technical person, I’ve moved everything to Linux.

Everything is still harder to get set up right on Linux, but it stays right. I’ve also found the LLM’s dramatically shorten the time required to configure things I don’t have experience with.

MS have abandoned their power users, and the power users (some of them at least), are abandoning MS. I keep Windows around in a VM for work purposes; never had a better setup! I’m in complete control of my PC again.

I have to use xattr -c on every "untrusted" binary in macOS just in order to run it. So much for easy to use with wide appeal...

Somehow macOS only has one System Settings app. (They did admittedly make a mess of it lately, but in an entirely different way than Windows.) And yes, they relegate a lot of advanced stuff to the Terminal.

> That's why we have layers upon layers of half baked UI with "only" the controls that "everyone" needs.

But this is the future. Layers over layers of abstraction. The main idea is to make the attacker give up.

Honestly I always hope that what I try to do, is still possible with the old Control Panel, since there I at least get understandable descriptions and can actually change things instead of the marketing speech and locked down settings in that abomination called "Settings app".

Oh but nowadays you have to access the old Control Panel only to access advanced options, like... setting the actions for lid close and power button, apparently.

It's still the same, more stuff got converted too the settings app, some stuff is still in the old control panel.

It's ridiculous how long this is taking really.

13 years... Longer than the time between Windows 2000 and Windows 8.

But Microsoft is a small business which just cannot afford to have two versions of interfaces for clearly distinct modes of interaction: touch and mouse-based. They had no other choice except trying to merge things together.

> But it is a new coat of paint over the ones from 10 or before

It's not, which is the point. They're trying to get people off the old way of extending the shell. If they just wanted to reskin the right click menu to look "modern" they could have done that.

https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-cont...

Right, that’s the strange part. I originally thought that the split was caused by the old shell APIs requiring honest-to-goodness HMENUs with all that implies, but File Pilot[1] does have reskin the old menu with some success so evidently that’s not completely impossible.

[1] https://filepilot.tech/

> except for the fact that it is aesthetically more "modern" to its detriment.

And also much, much slower.

The old context menu is nearly instant even when stuffed with extensions. When the new one is full of extensions, it takes full seconds to load the entire menu. You get a partial load, then the extensions pop in (and of course pushes elements down/up so now you misclick).

I don't even know how anyone could experience it in testing and allow it to go live in the state that its in. Its like no one even looked at it.

The old one had a similar problem depending on the extensions, to be fair

The old context menu can get slow as hell too, there have been third party tools to manage it for ages, like https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

Windows 10/11 UX is very slow in general. Combined with Intel mobile CPUs of the last few years running much hotter compared to Apple M models makes for terrible laptops. Lots of fan noise with a sluggish UI doesn't feel anywhere near a Macbook Air, even an M1. While full power raw CPU performance may actually be very close and the Intel based laptops typically cheaper.

> Windows 10/11 UX is very slow in general.

Drawing gray rectangles is a very resource intensive operation. It is a wonder how a Pentium was able to draw also a 3D border around the rectangle.

There were some sick people who, in 4 Megs of RAM were also letting you choose colors while presenting a Win10/11 interface (Apollo) but those were some heretics.

Indeed. I've heard Elon is upgrading his Colossus computer just to experience dragging grey rectangles seamlessly.

The only thing keeps Windows 11 usable for me are these two mods..

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher

https://github.com/open-shell/open-shell-menu/

They bring back the context menu and the old task bar, as well as the old start menu. It's like I never left Windows 10.

And I've switched to Linux Mint for all my systems except my laptop, which still has some hardware limitations under Linux.

Apps need to adhere to some new conditions to contribute items to the Win 11 context menu. The 7-zip creator has been unable or unwilling to make these changes[1].

There are other open source projects which do display in the context menu, such as TortoiseGit and Notepad++. In fact there is a fork of 7-zip called NanaZip which supports the Win 11 context menu.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/1...

They even hide ‘New Folder’ now when clicking within a folder - sometimes.

It’s the most bizarrely unhelpful ‘helpful’ UX I’ve ever seen.

You can disable the new right click menu with one registry tweak: https://www.elevenforum.com/t/disable-show-more-options-cont...

It comes back, or at least it did for me. Holding shift when rightclicking will get you to the menu you want reliably tho. Vetter yet, if at all an option, swithc to linux or start putting pressure internal to drive a switch. There's nothing left in windows but network effects, but the loss in productivity due to a switch to linux is readily be offset by not being hobbled by W11 anymore. Invest 1 unit of time now to recoup 1 unit of time per month ad infinitum.

Yeah first thing I did. The new one lacks a lot of stuff I use a lot and basically makes all that two clicks. Tedious.

Apps not showing up in the new menu is because the app has not updated to support the new menu. I am seeing third party apps in my Windows 11 right click menu such as WinMerge.

You mean like Microsoft's own apps? Like... all of them?

Someone wrote it like it's a Windows 11 issue though. But clearly it's a developer choice to support the new menu or not because some apps are clearly supporting it just fine.

I actually don't mind this at all. These days the norm seems to be to drop features just because it's more convenient. I think this hybrid approach is not bad at all: the new menu is more aesthetically pleasing and consistent from a UX perspective, and if you really need something that is not there yet you can always use the old menu.

For all its faults I think it's strange to criticize Microsoft for maintaining backwards compatibility.

The real problem is there's no setting to default to the classic menu, and you have to do regedit BS.

Isn’t the real problem that the new menu somehow can’t show the missing entries of the old one but with its new coat of paint? It’s all data, why can one of them not display the old data?

The Windows 11 default context menu uses a newer API (IExplorerCommand) compared the older method which involved screwing around with the registry, and having everything play nice.

Here's a MS blog post explaining why they want to move to IExplorerCommand: https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-cont...

Frankly, this just follows all the same problems that MS has had with since after W7. Their own APIs have a lot of warts and problems, but MS has not been able or willing to follow through on the migration required to actually move to a whole new API. This has shown up in their Windows GUI frameworks, it's the exact same problem with the Control Panel vs Settings, and here it is again.

I can sympathize with many of the stated goals/benefits, and I can understand the technical difficulties with transparently porting registry craziness into their new framework, and infact I applaud that their fallback is "perfect" - it is just the old context menu. I just wish there was a setting toggle to set the default.

> is more aesthetically pleasing and consistent from a UX perspective,

It is a combination of a vertical and orizontal menu. Something like Edge with horizontal and vertical tabs in the same window

> consistent from a UX perspective

It changes its height dynamically by state of each shell extensions. how come it is consistent from a UX perspective.

It’s not even that. If you do it often enough sometimes the old (vastly more useful) menu shows up and sometimes it’s the new menu. There is no rhyme or reason.

God ! For a long time, the cut copy paste icons had no text !

I mean, c'mon MS, after so many years in the industry, surely you must know that having text below icons is how most users use the functions.

Heck, I am a seasoned developer, live and breathe computers and software. I too was confused at times with that.

Only recently did they add the text to the icons.

Also,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2287432/...

Exactly. This is the best example of what Windows 11 is. I have the feeling that Microsoft is trying to bring change at the same time that it cannot, and has to come up with workarounds like this one. This would explain the Settings panel like someone mentioned in this thread. Another thing that I dislike (with all due respect to developers of React) is this migration to React and Reactish behavior of Windows. We have been fine with Win32 after so many years. Why change that, other than wanting to stay "relevant" or "modern"? Just my opinion.

> There is no benefit to the new menu

I personally don't like the new menu and disabled it with some tweak program, but the new menu as the benefit of hiding dozens of context menu items any random app barfs into it (e.g. Google Drive adds 6! items to the root context menu). It would be better if Windows natively supported demoting/pinning items to the unexpanded context menu.

You can also just directly registry hack to force always-more-options: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/1cv8xt3/how_ca...

I installed Linux (an arch-based distro) last month. There have been some minor issues but nothing worse than what I experienced regularly on Windows recently. My computer feels fast again and when things randomly break I can at least get to the root cause and fix it myself.

I used to quite like Windows, but it has gotten worse every patch day for years now. The pain of learning a new system is not so bad and at least I own my computer now.

When things randomly break in my Linux install, I fire up Claude

Are you saying that any Linux install you've tried in let's say, the past decade, has actually failed for you? I've not seen that and I've put it on many dissimilar machines with success. I use Ubuntu, and now Kubuntu, perhaps you could name the distro that gave you issues?

Ehh, nothing so strong as "failed". For example in Cinnamon I will occasionally install an app that doesn't have a tray icon. Or if I install an app using a chromium based browser, it doesn't have an icon associated with it. So then I tell claude to fix it. It goes out to the internet and finds a suitable icon and will set it up for me.

Or trying to get Steam to work, which is wildly better than it used to be thanks to proton, but still not quite a perfect experience. For example there's a menu compatibility setting you have to enable for some menus to work, and other menus don't work when you have hover-click enabled in the accessibility settings of Cinnamon. Those weren't fixed by Claude CLI like the icons example, but definitely identified through chats with Claude.

The only "fail" states I get into are when I'm doing homelab power user stuff, setting up ownCloud, configuring Caddy, proxmox, etc. I don't blame Linux for that though.

All in all, I would say Linux is absolutely in a state I would install on my parents' computer without fear like I would've had in perhaps 2010.

Not sure why people are downvoting this. LLMs have made Linux far more accessible than before.

I highly doubt this. As someone who is pretty active in a lot of beginner linux communities its becoming the case that a lot issues are caused by users following LLM instructions and creating issues where there were none.

Example someone will want to configure something and the LLM will give them advice from the wrong distro thats 5 years out of date. If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins. Instead they go down a rabbit hole where an LLM feeds them worse and worse advice trying to fix the mountain of issues its building up.

Don't doubt.

Tried Linux around 5 years ago - took many issues, had to learn various commands.

Tried again a few months ago and used various llms to configure everything well, troubleshoot etc

Eg when waking from standby and your mouse isn't working, do you want to troubleshoot and learn various commands over an hour or ask an llm and fix it within a few minutes?

When creating an on demand voice to text app for Linux do I learn various commands and dependencies etc that may take one/many days or use an llm to make it within 30 min?

No brainer

> If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins.

Not minutes. In best case scenario it is hours, in worst it is years to infinity.

You are also not taking into account the survivorship bias. You only see people who couldn't fix their system with AI and need further help. But you are not seeing a huge number of beginners (recently a big influx of those), who were successful in fixing problems using AI the vast majority of time.

Nowadays, there is no good reason to use a simple Search engine to find solutions by manually browsing all the possible links. Just ask Phind/Perplexity/others to explain the problem, give the solution and provide verifiable links one can check to validate.

I search all the time. If I trusted the AI response i'd be coming away with the wrong answer more often than not. Why would that be a better outcome than spending an extra 30s to get reliable information? Perplexity IS a simple search engine. Its far simpler than google's engine.

It definitely depends but it's useful for me. In general I find AI pretty useful when you can do a guided search in which you are personally able to discard bad paths quickly before they start polluting the context too much. I have pretty beginner linux skills but I'm quite technical overall and have a decent BS detector, so it's been useful for me.

I had been Windows user since Windows3.1. More than 3 decades straight. After a few years of working with Linux, installed Debian on home PC about a year ago and couldn't be more happier since then.

I briefly test-drove Windows 2, but have been a solid Windows user since 3.1 too.

I have been forced to use Windows 11 on a succession of work PCs, but I stayed 10 at home due to the lack of a movable task bar and the terrible right-click menu in 11.

When Microsoft started pushing hard against remaining on 10 this year, I made the switch - to MacOS. It was an easy decision, since I was finally able to get a MacBook for work, too, so no context-switching required. I run a copy of Win11 in a VM for apps that need it, but find that I rarely have to spin it up.

As a product manager, I cannot image the decision-making behind building a product update so shitty that you drive away 35-year customers.

I've been trying out different distros, but still using windows 10 ltsc as my main OS. I've got 2 additional partitions containing popos with cosmic and kde fedora that I've narrowed it down to, but both need just a little more bugfixing to to become perfect for me. LTSC is still supported for a while, but if my computer stopped working, I feel like macOS would be a no-brainer for most people.

I was a fan, user, then developer from the DOS days-pre Windows 3.0–to Windows 10 without a single gap.

When they threatened Windows 10 EOL last year (?), that’s when I took a day to do a clean install of Mint and port my games and LLM tinkering over.

Because I knew MS was doubling-down on the user-hostile experience.

I thought I’d miss Windows but Steam, Wine, and Radeon made it delightful.

Windows is now only on my company-issued laptop. I predict that will also go away, as Windows 11 has introduced backdoors to circumvent company controls and install their BS.

> My computer feels fast again

A while back (Win XP?), I got frustrated with Windows and installed Linux on my dev machine instead. But I still had to run Windows, so I installed VMWare on Linux on that machine and ran Windows in a VM. For whatever reason, Windows was noticeably faster in the VM than running on bare metal. Super bizarre OS.

In my last job my Windows box was unbelievably slow at compilation. Windows Defender was burning 70% of the CPU on watching GCC I guess.

Using Linux in a VM compiled three times faster.

I don't know how people tolerate it.

I think part of it is that creating a process is cheap in Unix-style OSs, and expensive in Windows. Windows doesn't want you to exec gcc, cpp, ld, etc. over and over again. It wants you to run an IDE that does it all in one process.

How many IDEs run it all in one process? As far as I know they still call lots of processes.

Visual Studio calls just one (msbuild) for almost all of the compilation process, perhaps half a dozen processes at most. Certainly not hundreds to thousands, as typically seen under Linux.

Visual Studios creates worker threads used for compiling C# that are reused for builds. This can be seen in task manager. Ran into a bug were the VS compiler would only work properly for one build and require VS to be restarted.

Visual Studios is like Windows, each version just seems to be getting worse with more bugs.

I was a Windows Insiders user for a long time... When I was bumped to Windows 11 it borked (didn't have tpm enabled) and had to do a full re-install... a few months later, I saw an ad in the start menu search results... that was it. I switched my primary drive over to my Linux install and largely haven't looked back.

Still on Windows for work, but would happily swap. I also use an M1 Air for my personal laptop, but that is probably my last Apple hardware.

Microsoft in 2025: We fired a bunch of engineers and mandated AI usage. 90% of our code is now generated by AI.

Also Microsoft in 2025: Record setting bugs and anti-features released.

Case study in code quantity is not equal to code quality.

The relation is tangential at best. Microsoft's management was a personification of corporate rot for a long while now, AI or no AI.

They view Windows as a straw to suck users into their higher value products through, and are seemingly unaware of what "UX" is, or how their decisions affect it. Which is how Windows 11 ended up being such a clusterfuck.

> The relation is tangential at best. Microsoft's management was a personification of corporate rot for a long while now, AI or no AI.

Is it though? Wouldn't you expect "personification of corporate rot" to precisely jump on whatever trendy bandwagon there is to make a quick buck, regardless of consequences, then move on?

I would. But if Microsoft's haphazard AI push was the only thing making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10 was, it would be a good OS overall.

I also believe that OS-level AI features can be worthwhile if implemented right. It's just that the chances of that happening at Microsoft, under the current Microsoft leadership, are nonexistent.

To add they want to rewrite Windows in Rust with AI, which I can only assume they hope will keep the software quality up but I doubt it

It's unfortunate that falsehoods spread so quickly.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-re...

> “It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended… with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.. Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.

> My team’s project is a research project. [...]

I don’t believe for a second that it was a mistake. Probably got a call from some C-level and came up with this excuse.

Do you have any idea just how much code is in Windows?

I did a quick search and estimates are in the 50-60 million lines range.

No way in hell are they going to rewrite all that in a few years. Even if they actually wanted to, which they don't because it would be a truly enormous expense (even for Microsoft).

Not to even mention that huge software projects have a well deserved reputation for failing, and the scope of such a rewrite would probably dwarf any previous rewrite of anything, ever, and by a very large margin.

"Rewrite all of Windows in Rust" simply does not even begin to pass the sniff test.

Good news, because part of the original post was that engineers should soon be able to handle a million lines of code a month. So 60 engineers to birth an OS in a month.

  … Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,” Galen Hunt, who is a top-level Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, wrote in a now-edited LinkedIn post.…

Maybe he did not say Windows, but it is not a leap to imagine it falls under the umbrella of “largest codebases”

They should go back to Windows 95 (or NT), convert that to Rust, and then move forward from there. Most of Windows releases since '95 have been garbage.

Don't exaggerate. 98, 2000 and XP also improved things.

A perfectly crafted turd ....is still a turd.

I did a clean install of Windows 11 when Windows 10 went EOL. From all of the complaints I was hearing from headlines I expected a disastrous experience.

But to be honest, it’s been fine. I’m not a heavy user but I switch to the Windows PC at least once a day for a few hours of CAD, gaming, and one other engineering program that is Windows only.

I don’t click any of the AI buttons. I declined the OneDrive or backup sync or whatever it was and it’s gone. I don’t use the built-in email client or the other features this article complains about and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.

The centered start menu isn’t my favorite, but it’s not like it’s unusable. I didn’t find it difficult to adjust the interface and hide things I didn’t like in the first few minutes.

On the other hand, my experience with the latest macOS and iOS 26 has been incredibly frustrating. I’m almost to the point where my basic apps have worked around new macOS bugs. My iOS phone is stuttering and laggy for unclear reasons and searches show I’m not alone. I didn’t expect my Windows 11 PC, of all things, to be the smooth sailing computing experience in my house but so far that’s how it’s looking going into 2026.

Give it a few undocumented updates that change your settings in the background, and come back to give us an update. Even my Win10 extended support is getting CoPilot shoved down the pipeline silently.

I’m not this person, but I installed win11 a month or two after launch and have lived through many many updates.

I’ve never had a single setting switched from what I set it to. Nor have I had AI shoved down my throat. My guess is that since I set it up with a local account originally and have never added a MSFT account, that insulates me from a lot of the issues others have seen.

> even Notepad now has a Copilot button, which is something literally nobody has ever asked for

AI is like crickets - some people like the sound, some ignore the sound, and some are driven crazy by the sound

I really hate what they've done to notepad. The entire point of the program was that it was extremely basic. There's zero reason to use it now over something much better like notepad++

The absolutely insane addition of the Copilot button aside, new Notepad did have some improvements that I liked. Tabs are one, but another overlooked feature is that it now keeps track of its state and maintains all the unsaved files that are open in it, allowing me to use it as a momentary place to jot down things that I want to remember but that I don't want to save in a txt file. Basically, like more full-fledged and convenient sticky notes.

So it's now like TextEdit.app running in plaintext mode. Plus one Copilot button evidently. Cool.

Everyone's hating on win11, but I'm getting more and more inclined to switch off osx day-by-day. Direct X and gaming is a powerful drug.

> another overlooked feature is that it now keeps track of its state and maintains all the unsaved files that are open in it, allowing me to use it as a momentary place to jot down things that I want to remember but that I don't want to save in a txt file.

There are plenty of apps that do exactly this. Sublime was the best of them that I know.

Notepad was great for the opposite reason. It is ephemeral. I can use it as a scratch pad for passwords and what not, with the comfortable knowledge that it’s all cleared away next reboot.

You can bring classic notepad back, it’s still there, so that’s what I do.

Notepad has always been a test ground for new features that may or may not make it to other parts of Windows.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...

I’ve been using Windows 11 constantly since release over multiple machines after decades with Ubuntu as my primary OS. In that time, I’ve had a number of undocumented updates and found a few settings that changed, but it wasn’t a very big deal or maybe I’m just significantly better at error handling than the average user. I choose not to follow the herd and in this case, the herd is angrier than need be.

Granted, I’ve never released perfect software in my life, have no intention of starting and tend to be sympathetic towards others who share my flaws. Maybe that’s a sign that I’m actually better at handling errors than the average person.

It’s been fine? Are you completely immune to attention grabbing features? I absolutely cannot use win11 as it comes on a stock lenovo. Maybe you got your hands on some corporate version with some of the standard settings off? But between the news feed and the advertising in the start menu I find stock installs to he maddening, and I loath needing to boot my win11 partition.

I finally updated a couple of months ago after putting it off forever and it's been fine for me too. I'm on Pro version and I just used this as the first step after upgrading: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

No issues so far, no ads, none of the complaints others are seeing. I'm a power user too: I do gaming, programming, music production, video editing, etc. All of those things are fine.

My only real problem was not being able to have two rows on the taskbar, which I solved with Windhawk's "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" mod. Done and done.

The average home user probably won't know what power shell and GitHub are.

I can't run the scripts you are talking about on my work pc.

I can sympathise with your point of view but it does feel a bit like "works for me because I know what I'm doing". Also how long before another Windows update that undoes what the scripts do.

I used to be very pro windows simply because of backwards compatibility and hardware support was ridiculously good. I can't recommend Linux to relatives as they'd be utterly confused.

Dave Plummer, ex windows kernel dev does a good job of explaining what the issues are:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60

I was answering with the idea in mind that this is "HackerNews" and most here are not "average" home users, but I see your point.

Does the average home user care about any of these complaints though? In my experience, they don't really, and I'm not even sure how many use desktop operating systems these days considering everything has shifted towards mobile.

I'm not "pro" windows by the way. In fact if you look through my history, you'll see I resisted the change to Windows 10 and have tried migrating to Linux without luck. I would love to move away from Microsoft when given a realistic opportunity to do so. I loathe Microsoft trying to take up real estate within the private boundaries of my life. I just think some of these reported issues are widely exaggerated is all.

Ah ok I see, yeah for the hackernews crowd probably not an issue.

Genuine issue I have is my unbelievably well specced work laptop does not run win 11 nicely. It's not just the adverts.

As for moving away from windows, I've been a Linux user in work before, and a casual user on and off for 20 years but it was a combination of windows 11 pain and buying a steamdeck that finally pushed me to just move at least one of my home computers to Linux. But yeah, not for relatives.

I didn’t run any scripts or utilities. When I encountered something I didn’t like I just found the setting to turn it off.

I prefer a clean system, but I’m not the kind of person who gets triggered into rage when the OS pops up a suggestion after fresh install or has something on by default. Spending some time customization the OS and desktop environment is part of the drill any time I do a clean install, whether it’s Windows, Linux, or Mac.

You seem like a reasonable person. Good job.

Is it Win11 Pro? I'm wondering if it's different than Win11 Home.

A friend of mine got a new PC as a present and it had Win11 on it. Found out it was Win11 Pro. I turned it on without it connected to my router, used the Shift+F10 trick to bypass OOBE and setup a local account, and ran a debloat script, and things seemed OK. The debloat script had removal commands for a lot of default apps and I think only the Xbox ones were on there. I believe Recall is not active. It has 16GB of RAM, 6 cores/12 threads, and Win11 didn't seem sluggish. I used a .reg file to disable the new context menu.

It was an upgrade from her old Surface Go 2 which came with Win10 on it, had only 8GB of RAM and was super sluggish after upgrading to 11 even after debloating. But this was Win11 Home since the original Win10 was Home edition too.

I keep hearing things like it's not possible to disable stuff in Win11 Home and I'm sure Win11 Home has more default apps and stuff enabled. I don't keep up with it. This is the only Win11 system here and other than my worklife I'm all Linux.

> I used a .reg file to disable the new context menu.

Complaints about Win 11 performance abound. Brings back slow context menu.

The purpose of the new context menu is to get rid of the COM init that made it so slow!

I haven't noticed slowness in the right click menu on <= windows 10. On Windows 11 it's slower simply because I have to open a second menu to get to what I want.

You've not had WinRAR, 7Zip, TortoiseSVN, et. al. as COM extensions, I see ;-)

7-zip yes, the others no.

You ran unverified debloat scripts (that could break in unexpected ways) on a clean "Pro" system to make it usable. It is and should be unacceptable.

By the way, Home version does not differ in annoyances from Pro version in any significant way in my experience.

When I first installed Windows 11 about 2 years ago, I had a similar experience. One of the things I noticed quickly was that much of the preinstalled crap that comes with Windows 10 can be easily uninstalled from the Settings menu or Control Panel, no PowerShell tricks required. It felt like Windows 11 was actually less bloated than Windows 10 at the time.

But, going through the same process now I notice a lot more of the cracks. Windows 11 nags a lot more, whether it's about OneDrive or Copilot or whatever new thing Microsoft is trying to push. My same Windows 11 install from 2 years ago kept reinstalling and re-enabling the same crap I originally got rid of, and I feel like it's only getting worse.

In short I think Windows 11 was actually really good when it first launched, minus the UI quirks at the time. But, in classic Microsoft fashion, it was totally ruined and has woefully lost my trust as something I can depend on for even just basic computing.

It would be interesting to see you compare notes with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46446021. You both seem to have similar uses for windows, but totally opposite experiences.

> I’m not a heavy user but I switch to the Windows PC at least once a day for a few hours of CAD, gaming, and one other engineering program that is Windows only.

Well yeah, maybe lead with that.

It seems like you don't actually need windows other than being a launcher for some very specific apps.

I use the OS for several hours per day for work. I don’t know what more you want.

I added that because this article is complaining about things like the built-in email client or Notepad, neither of which I use.

I bring my own text editor. I don’t care if Notepad has an AI button.

Isn't that all an OS is? A platform to launch apps?

It’s an impoverished view of what an OS is. A great OS is also providing APIs that enable a cohesive desktop, integrations that enable apps, and other core services.

For example, iOS has a built-in API for managing calendar events. That means my third-party to-do list can show a calendar view with everything from my iOS-managed calendar. Similarly, iOS has an API that enables third-parties to build apps that interact with Apple Music - so you don’t need to use the default client. Another example is focus modes/contextual computing - the OS enables configuring various settings in an automatable way. Another service is the health-tracking database - all my health apps share a common view of data, so my nutrition app can see my weigh ins, calories burned, and glucose levels - all coming from different devices.

On macOS, it goes beyond being just a launcher by providing rich file system services - for example, features to automate working on directories as contents change. It provides integration points to enable providing actions/services that work on text fields. It lets you configure dictionaries that support right-click/force press to look up. It implements a rich eMacs-inspired shortcut system in text fields.

Windows used to have APIs and integrations to support showing calendar events in the clock area. It was going to have a unified tab system that let you have windows with tabs provided by other apps (Sets).

In other words, an OS isn’t just a launcher. It’s a system.

After long-term usage, my environment on MacOS (laptop issues mainly!!!) stutters and becomes less-usable. Perhaps Windows, or Linux, or JUST NO COMPUTER WHATSOEVER would be better?

MacOS is less for power users. On my Mac (macbook pro with Notch) I can no longer see menu-bar apps, since I have 11 icons up there which are not from Apple. The 12th / 13th are simply inaccessible. Added Tailscale this week .. Annnnnd it is not visible...sigh. Looking into purchasing "notch optimizer" apps, but am disgusted every time I restart searching for the right tool.

MacBook Pro is less for power users. The miniscule builtin RAM "because we use RAM so much more efficiently" is causing my machine to chug. I continue to feel pain, then search + find, and pound-down apps that use more RAM than I need at this moment.

It's like being a computer user in 1988. And I wish it were more like 2025. AAPL is ridiculously successful .. maximizing profits.

I slapped 96GB of ram into my 13 framework laptop last year, when prices were cheap. I'm probably going to upgrade next cycle for fun and give my current laptop away (I'll keep the ram). I'm sure that laptop will last a very long time with linux.

Macbook Pro's are the best laptops I've ever used. But if you go that route you better up front that RAM or you'll be stuck. The one place the Mac destroys the framework is battery usage. It's not a deal killer for me, but it might be for many.

You can disable the notch altogether; in display settings opt+click on scaled to select the resolution list you should see some resolutions that are just a few vertical pixels apart.

Select the one with the smaller vertical value, this will turn the notch off at the cost of that small loss of vertical space.

It's fine in the sense that certain people are content to browse the web without adblock, or be interrupted by an ad every 30s on YouTube.

For those of us with higher standards, it's not.

I'm half content. I don't have issues for the most part with Windows annoyances, am ok streaming movies with ads, shrug when Spotify changes their UI yet again, and browse on my laptop without adblock. On the other hand, I had to pay to upgrade YouTube because I found those ads painful.

> The centered start menu isn’t my favorite, but it’s not like it’s unusable.

You can move the start menu back to the left if you like.

https://www.amandasterner.com/post/how-to-move-your-windows-...

It's been a death by a thousand cuts over the years. The only reason I still had a Windows partition was to play specific games that couldn't run using Proton on Linux. The start menu's inability to be moved to the left side of the screen was the last straw for me. It sounds pedantic, but that's where I've had my start menu forever, and I'm not about to change yet another thing in my workflow.

At this point, if a game won't run under Proton because of an intrusive rootkit, I'd simply rather not play it.

Edit: I specifically mean the start bar vertically aligned on the left side of the screen, with the start button in the top-left corner, not at the bottom-left.

If you really must use Windows and Linux is not an option at all for some reason, use a debloating script to remove/disable (most of) the AI cruft and telemetry.

> I declined the OneDrive or backup sync or whatever it was and it’s gone.

It is? How? Mine comes back every 30 days and there is no "fuck off, I never want this" button.

Which edition of Win 11? I've just disabled it in Win 10 and 11 via the GPO which may require some flavor of "Pro"

I'm glad to hear you say this. Been using Windows 11 daily for a few years, and I don't really have huge issues with it.

- I've shut off the dumb, simplified right click menu. - StartAllBack solves my issues with the Start button and menu bar. - I've removed the weather, the ads, anything else dumb. - Other than that it's just... Windows. - EXCEPT I haven't had a screen of death... One time in years.

Been using Windows since 3.11, Mac OS since 6, and I just don't get the vitriol.

I've been preaching this for a while but the era of PC as in "personal computing" is coming to an end and will slowly but surely be replaced with CC, Corporate Computing, where the corporations own everything, the hardware, the software and only permit you to use their equipment against a monthly fee and only to the extent they allow and permit. Everything you do will be controlled and observed and extracted for data for extra revenue streams. (Ads)

Free/libre software is the only bastion of hope but I'm sure if it would ever become large enough to threat the CC revenue models it'd be locked down, amputated, bought out or silenced by any means necessary. For the time being the technical hurdles and low quality is what keep the majority away from it and gets the job done for the corporations.

So basically rented mainframes like IBM did in the '60s but with ads?

I agree about free software but that only works as long as the hardware doesn't get too closed down. At some point even reverse engineering won't keep up with it. We need more free/libre hardware.

The rented mainframes were, imo, far less egregious than what's awaiting all of us. It'd probably be less "massive B2B transactions to cut down on costs and outsource operating a hugely complex machine to its manufacturer", and more "everyone participating in society making mandatory perpetual payments to be allowed to use tightly-controlled devices that they must manage their entire lives through".

> making mandatory perpetual payments to be allowed to use tightly-controlled devices that they must manage their entire lives through

This is the mainframe experience for companies that run on z/OS, the licensing makes Azure look simple by comparison

https://ibmlicensingexperts.com/ibm-mainframe-licensing-z-sy...

Imagine all buildings in New York replaced with mainframes, people living and working inside the mainframes. An Ad on every wall, every floor, internal and external. Actually it sounds kind of cool.

The PC as a growth segment was at an end, but that’s because Microsoft cornered the market.

It was good enough and they just needed to make security fixes and tweaks; and I still would have paid for it!

Yet, the leaders at Microsoft found a way to lose their marketshare.

tl;dr; it just needed to remain quiet, boring, but reliable to remain a cashcow.

Why don't laptop manufacturers deliver models with Linux?

I presume the problem is that users cause support costs?

Or that Linux and App updates cause costs?

Windows users have many support issues, however the users don't blame the laptop manufacturer?

I guess Chromebooks serve that market. And Google allow Linux installs on Chromebooks (helps attack Windows instalbase, but too little)

Dell offers several models with Ubuntu. Other smaller manufacturers also support linux, for example Framework and System76. A tiny minority to be sure.

Microsoft's EOL for Win10 means a lot of people are either going to e-waste their old laptop or just run without patches if they can't afford new hardware.

I'm actively helping people convert to Ubuntu if they want to give it a try. Their computer is effectively EOL so the risk is quite low. Especially when you can save several hundred or thousand dollars on a new box. The risk/value ratio is properly aligned. It's different to try out a new OS on new hardware - too much risk for your average user.

Yeah. I bought an expensive XPS since I couldn't get a Toshiba any more. I have always disliked Dell consumer product engineering but it was the best choice for Linux at the time. Unfortunately it eventually got flickering vertical pixel wide lines on the 4k screen (looked like a hardware issue - but might have been drivers). I had hoped they had fixed the transformer squeel mentioned as an issue on the older models: however the fucking thing squeeks with load (Dell didn't listen to user complaints, and didn't fix the problem).

I disabled sleep and hibernation because it never worked well (hot laptop in bag or flat battery).

On purchase I felt I needed to install a WiFi module with better Linux support (even though that interferes with warrantee?).

Admittedly Dell had superb ongoing Linux support for updating the BIOS - I would worry about that issue with other brands.

However I suspect overall I would never buy another Dell again.

I would help friends install Linux, however most of my friends either get a laptop through work or they have Macs.

The older XPS 15 were very solid (for a PC, still no where near a Mac)and they absolutely destroyed them. Complete garbage now, and at MBP price point too! They really lost their way.

I'm kind of glad I'm an old guy and got to live through the "golden age" of computing in the 70's, 80's and 90's. I get to check-out in the next 20-30 years or so, before things get really bad. The future really is looking ever more shitty year after year. Back in the 90's I had real hope for the future, but that has faded.

I was born in the 90s, but I'm nostalgic for the 80s/90s at least w.r.t computers.

I'm a macos / linux user who bought a second-hand windows PC last year for CAD and games. Windows 11 is worse than you think it is.

It's worse than the data harvesting (which required two hours to turn off), irritating ads (for an OS you pay for) and generally schizophrenic UX (don't get me started on the Start menu).

The Windows team has gone far beyond typical bugs. They're introducing new classes of bugs; one day your computer's working fine and the next, your GPU's 3D performance (somehow) drops by a half — you know, the thing I bought the computer for? — https://www.guru3d.com/story/windows-11-kb5066835-update-tri...

The bug impacted CAD too, AFAICT btw, though I couldn't find a publication that tested this update on solidworks / shapr 3D etc.

They shipped a patch that started bricking SSDs, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/latest-windo... / https://www.pcmag.com/news/pc-building-group-figures-out-why... / https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/reports-...

Another that kept crashing on certain motherboards and processors with integrated graphics, https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-11-24h2-intel-z890-...

If I didn't have a Solidworks license and Solidworks wasn't Windows only, I'd have switched to Steam OS or another linux distro a long time ago. I'm currently being held hostage by Dassault (and – to a lesser degree — the Windows-Gaming Industrial Complex).

Forget Apple Maps bad, this is Windows 11 bad.

As someone who has been primarily Mac for most of my life, I started using a Windows machine fairly recently for work.

I'm tied down to the Windows eco-system (Teams, Outlook, etc).

I still haven't gotten use to the idea of every link in Microsoft apps opening in Edge regardless of your settings.

This might seem like a small thing, but the entire UX seems to be designed around benefiting Microsoft, not the user.

It is incredibly user hostile. And it's not even free. This is an ecosystem you pay for.

They're treating folks shelling out $200 for an OS as if they were cattle on the adtech train.

Here's hoping that Apple can correct-course from this path. Last time I daily-drove macOS (Sequoia) it was pushing adverts in my face with every native app I launched.

I spend 8 hours a day on Sequoia and I haven't seen any adverts in any native app?

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251488227

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250786208

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254431520

  Having talked to Apple Support, there is no way to disable the pop-up permanently due to Apple's Promotional Policy.

There are certainly ads for Apple services if you don't already use them (or in the case of Apple Music, sometimes even if you do use it because the app is pretty bad), and there are sponsored ads in the App Store now.

I wouldn't say it's in any way equivalent to Windows 11, but it does feel like Apple is following a similar path as Microsoft, just with a little more Apple design on top.

Huh? I use macOS all day every day and I’ve never seen an ad.

iOS and macOS will nag you regarding iCloud if you don't sign up/in. Apple advertised... something, I forget what it was, via an Apple Wallet notification this past year (?). Might have been for the F1 movie when it was in theaters.

With respect - bull.

With respect, every single search query in the App Store displays advertisements by-default, and you know that.

You know you’re moving the goalposts, don’t you? I’ll grant you that the App Store and Music show ads. But that’s not what you claimed originally, is it?

What specific apps are showing ads?

Well, if you buy a new device and don’t enroll in AppleCare, you have a little red notification in the settings. I have two notifications currently that I cannot get rid of until the 60 window expires. I would consider this an ad.

Who is actually shelling out $200 for Windows specifically?

It's perceptually free if you bought it with your PC. And it's actually free if you took advantage of the free upgrade offer.

I've picked up a few licenses off MacHeist for like $10

The cost is rolled into your PC when you buy it. Its not free.

Your $10 licenses are not legal. Sorry. Those are sketchy grey market keys. Though Microsoft likely won't go after you for it, so I'm not sure it matters.

You should have just saved the $10 and downloaded a cracked copy.

You’d rather have an unofficial ISO?

Why?

If they're authenticated when I install the OS, what makes them illegal?

Cracked copy = trusting some shady 3rd party

I'm not going to switch to piracy to avoid some gray market sketchiness, as long as the keys don't seem to be stolen.

Never had issues activating the Windows keys nor the Office keys I've bought from them. And I always get the installers straight from Microsoft.

> perceptually free

Bizarre phrase. If you think mandatory bundling is free stuff then your perception is not very good.

Either way it's a hell of a lot less than $200 in that situation.

>I'm tied down to the Windows eco-system (Teams, Outlook, etc)

All of them are available for the Mac.

The explanation is one sentence prior.

> I started using a Windows machine fairly recently for work.

It's by design completely self serving. It's no longer a product for the users the users are the product.

Unfortunately I think it can and it will get a LOT worse before the push back will make any difference.

After all most users are not tech savvy and will be stuck with whatever is installed when they buy the machine and for the corporate there aren't any real alternatives.

This is the fault of whoever is administrating your Windows machines, Teams and Outlook are perfectly capable of opening links in your configured default browser.

> every link in Microsoft apps opening in Edge regardless of your settings.

fwiw, there is a setting in Teams itself to have it use your default browser instead, on top of having to change it on a system level. This does not work when using the PWA though

Lol I have looked through the settings 57 times and only just now found that because of your note. Much appreciated.

I think if Dassault et. al. released a version of their software for Linux or Mac OS then the only excuse I have left to boot Windows would be gone completely. Hell even if it worked somewhat reliably as a viewer on Valve's Proton I'd be happy.

How did you get used to Solidworks, btw? Any advice? It's an awful experience.

Have you tried using OnShape? One of the reasons that I switched to OnShape recently is that I can run it on my MacBook. This makes switching between my mechanical design & app development workflows seamless. There are some things to get used to with the transition to a cloud system, but knowing what I know now I would make the same decision again.

At this point I'm using Windows almost exclusively for gaming (and it sounds like non Windows options have been getting better recently, so I may be able to step away from the Windows ecosystem entirely when that machine eventually dies).

I am wrapping up my shift from Windows to Linux. I will have a linux box to replace my Win7Pro/Win10Pro install on an old Dell workstation. I will also be migrating one of my older relative's pc's to an identical linux box to replace their 2008 model ASUS machine running Win10.

Once I have that all comfortably running I am walking away from iOS on the iPhone. I'm a bit tired of lock-in and in a position now where I have free time to manage the various things that interest me and to sort through any issues with data or software compatibility between the old/new OSes.

I've been a pc user since the early 1980's with DOS and my first pc was a 128k MAC which I still have. I won't have any more Microsoft or Apple stuff in a couple of months if all goes well. Wish me luck.

I wish you luck!

Tangent: Containerizing one's digital life feels smart - isolating apps and data from exploitation and unhelpful constraints of the underlying systems seems to be more and more necessary. E.g. can't launch my video-conferencing camera on Windows because the camera provider has a conflict with my recent OS updates. I do not want to pay money / attention / energy into the lagging software maintenance of a collection of finger-pointing ("not my fault") companies.

So, if I could bundle up the dependencies, and re-learn my own ability to trust (not "digital trust", genuine trust!), then that would be the future I'd potentially enjoy, using computers.

Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, .. these consoles achieve long term stability for their games because they put effort into making THAT possible. Old games do NOT need updates to run on newer Playstation/Xbox OS updates because the old games can rely upon their APIs working the way they did when the game originally shipped.

Sailing the seas of "my PC supplier wanted to release AI Copilot Online Storage Face Prettifier app 2028 and it broke my camera" is kinda an inhumane way to live.

Thanks. I sympathize with you here and hope to rid myself of all the subscription-based horseshit in favor of things I already own or those that I can easily compartmentalize. The hardest part of regaining control is getting everyone else close to you on board since some may actively use the things that regularly extract but never provide real value for the "service".

>Win7Pro

I have multiple systems set up, but my second-favorite is still my Win7Pro Core2Duo with 4GB RAM. It sits next to one of my typewriters, and still handles official/govt/tax forms quite well. It is my only machine that I allow access to Google services, all others being heavily PiHoled.

But this year I did finally convert an older dual core Xeon into a Linux-only box, which runs local Ollama quite well for predating ChatGPT by a decade+ .

Lastly, I sold all of my MSFT over this past year. I had only bought in, late 2022, because I had high-hopes for their integration of AI assistants... boy did they fumble that...

>walking away from iOS on the iPhone

Have you considered walking entirely away from smart phones? I don't even carry a cell phone, anymore (it is heavenly), but voice/text-only flip phones could be a sobering life experience for you.

I am on my last smart phone now. I almost "upgraded" to a flip phone when I got this one but I decided at the last minute to keep an iphone so that I could get regular photo updates from the kids. I don't see this as important any more. Real cameras take better photos.

Funny enough, my workstation here that I am ditching is a 2006 Xeon dual core with 32 - 8 GB of RAM and a nice NVidia GPU (can't remember which one). The "-8" is because a couple of RAM slots are dead, LOL. It has three dead caps that I can see but still boots if you're extremely patient and lucky. The main HD also has some boot sector issues that nearly prevent a Win7Pro boot but with the right combo of disk repair tools I can boot on the 10th or 12th attempt. That's the main reason I am moving on. I have a brand new NZXT machine with PopOS that I bought several years ago that is just sitting here waiting for someone to power it up and I bought a high spec mini-pc to see what that world offers.

I ditched MSFT stock a few years ago in favor of AMD. That's worked out pretty good so far. I'm no fan of AI. I'm sure there's a legitimate use case but today most of the players seem to be on a cash grab and I hate thieves and liars so I have a natural disinclination to support that shit.

>I ditched MSFT stock a few years ago in favor of AMD

I bought equal amounts of MSFT and AMD, about four years ago. Haven't touched any of the AMD, yet... and was thinking maybe I should sell it all (also don't like AI-integrated things, fellow Old Man)... but now that GPUs are getting even more expensive I haven't sold, yet. Until a few months ago, AMD had been break-even for my then-three-years of holding.

>I am ditching is a 2006 Xeon dual core

Mine is a 2009 (24GB RAM), and is figuratively held together with patches & glue. Also very stable after boot-up, but boots are becoming 50/50. With a VEGA64 GPU, this thing can easily pull 600W+ (idles @160W, compared to Apple Silicon @15W~).

I migrated off of Xeons (as my main machine) Jan 2023, when Apple released their M2Pro "Silicon" mini models. I also got a 15" M3 Macbook Air. Both machines make great internet browsers. I hate modern macOS, but it is usable when you block apple/icloud (entirely), at the host level. No update nags, no cloud storage BS, no problems.

>my first pc was a 128k MAC

Mine was a 68k Quadra 605 (which I also still have). The day I got 10mb ethernet was a BIG deal (upgrade from localTalk/dialup).

----

All my serious writing/paperwork happens offline, on quite antiquated equipment (oldest being my Smith Corona c~1946). For copyediting, I still love my 24" iMac Core2Duo — it IS literally held together with tape.

Very happily awaiting the return of in-person meetups, as generative AI video begins encouraging such authentic connection(s).

I'm really hoping that the Linux gaming folks keep making progress on Windows-on-Linux compatibility so that I can transparently and with zero-fussing run any arbitrary Windows application. Unfortunately there's still plenty of professional software that has not been and will never be released for Linux.

Linux ages like WINE, Windows ages like milk.

The incentives for improving Linux are driven only in part by commercial interests, and those interests are not completely centralized. Windows' fate is entirely in the hands of the current Microsoft leadership, and they seem hellbent on extracting maximum value from their users while ignoring the suffering their "Continuous Innovation" creates.

It's almost as if they want everyone to start looking for the exits, and thankfully Linux is finally at the point in its maturity on desktop to start attracting power users who have no prior experience.

I don't think 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but it does feel like we're at the start of a big shake-up in the industry. Once we start seeing the hockey stick pattern in the adoption rates I would expect that more money and developer time will follow to help smooth out the areas where the transition is still difficult, like professional software.

If the heavy WINE support continues, there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop because all software will continue to be perpetually Win32 -- OS/2 already proved out this path of [full] compatibility.

>OS/2 already proved out this path of [full] compatibility.

it is not the 1980s anymore. majority of apps are for better or worse in the browser or cross platform with electron.

Wine is merely a stepping stone for adoption because some software compatibility is a hard requirement for user to even considered another platform as an alternative, without these user there won't be any native development to begin with proven by the failure of the original steam machine.

As a developer, why target Linux in all it's permutations with an unstable ABI when I can target the only stable Linux ABI -- Win32?

If WINE fills the gap (and it largely does), there's zero reason to create native Linux builds. That's simply more bugs and more headaches for devs.

That is a subjective statement. We are moving our software off Windows to Linux hosting for our products. Microsoft has made Windows hostile to the embedded market. They are are pushing a Microsoft account over local with their IoT while plugging the hacks too.

It's difficult to compare embedded to desktop. It's not a market Windows does well today with the available alternatives. And yeah, if you're embedded, by definition you're resource constrained so running Wine makes less sense.

Not so with run-of-the-mill desktop software, games or otherwise.

Not all software is for consumers and a good amount runs a hardware as a whole product. 2026 will be the year moving from Windows IoT / embedded to Linux as the host OS for the solutions I work on.

Personally, I find software more stable when coding on Linux and making Windows changes after it is operational. Windows takes more work with edge cases than Linux, BDS, and macOS.

Windows treats STDIN and STOUT different between console and GUI. All other OSes that I have worked on threat them the same.

Note my comment was "Linux on the Desktop", not "Linux on Embedded".

It's quite obvious that not all software is for one platform or another. It's just the vast majority of Desktop software happens to be Windows. And if that's what you're writing, targeting Win32 gets you Linux on the Desktop as well as Windows. There's no reason to write a Linux-native version and have to deal with all of the incompatibilities across distros, let alone compatibility issues over time.

>why target Linux in all it's permutations with an unstable ABI when I can target the only stable Linux ABI -- Win32?

You simply do what Steam has successfully done for many years with there containerized Steam Linux runtime based on ubuntu or something like flatpaks.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

This seems to be a story written for the HN audience, rather than for the core user base. Despite a long trend of predictions of Windows demise, it is still very much here and healthy as a platform for user install.

I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA due to general resource exhaustion on mobile. None of that predicts the websites financials or “disasters” though.

If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.

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

(From your own link, the story is just a myth that’s not supported by modern scientific evidence. But the point still stands.)

This is just a metaphor and not meant to be taken literally. It's about how the masses get used to poorer service gradually. Had it happened instantly they'd protest heavily but doing it slowly isn't obvious.

From that same link:

"These modern biologists, however, did not produce any evidence contradicting Fratscher's results since they did not test such slow water-heating as in Fratscher's experiments."

Sounds undetermined whether they croak or not...

It's a meaningful change in behavior though.

Compared to us nerds, people aren't leaving Windows "to fight the evil Empire and join the rightful FOSS fight" or whatever pretentious bullshit de jour.

They're leaving for the same reason most people stopped buying Roombas or Sonos Soundbars: New versions kinda suck, they have become expensive (if they have to buy a new device if they can't upgrade to Windows 11) and Knockoffs (Sure, linux isn't a knockoff but bear with me) or alternatives like macOS are good enough.

If your laptop is just a big window into Notion, Clickup, Jira, Slack or your web mail client, your OS has become entirely disposable.

> I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA due to general resource exhaustion on mobile.

I found it ironic that after reading an article about all the stuff in Windows 11 that no one asked for, the site hijacked my back button to show me more articles I might want to read.

Come on bro, the journalism game isn't about being right, it's about getting people to read the same rehydrated story every month for their entire life.

It is clear that Nadella has no clue what he is doing in 2025 and just wants to make another big splash with "AI".

If you force employees to dedicate 100% of their thinking power to agents, prompts, "AI" meetings, working on their necessarily fake "AI" success stories and "impacts", no one has time to do real work. Or have any real new ideas about anything else.

But Nadella doubles down and goes into "startup mode":

https://www.ft.com/content/255dbecc-5c57-4928-824f-b3f2d764f...

Not only Windows 11 got worse, Github got worse, too. So did the free Copilot.

So. Nvidia abandons the gaming market, Microsoft abandons Windows and Google abandons Search, all because AI is supposedly more important.

At some point it starts to feel like a drug for C-suites.

Hum. Windows has been ridden with bugs forever. I don’t see how this is connected to Microsoft abandoning windows in favor of AI.

Windows code base is just too heavy to maintain. They need to break compatibility with older products like MacOS often does, so that Windows can be manageable again… but that goes against Microsoft philosophy it seems.

That's not the whole story. The challenges associated with legacy app support have nothign to do with ads, telemetry, reCall and jamming AI into every crevice. Microsoft is doing both things wrong and 11 is a hot mess for that.

It more or less worked fine until they fired all the QA staff and bundled Windows with adware.

>Hum. Windows has been ridden with bugs forever

Windows had a reasonable share of bug analogous to its huge breadth and backwards compatibility needs. Otherwise, it was very stable and mature.

Now it's gotten way worse...

Yes, but it happened before ChatGPT. Windows 11 was released in 2021, already with shitty taskbar, search, and start menu.

Yes, but those were bad by choice.

Whereas the parent alluded to bugs just been piling gratuitously.

I didn't mean poor design, I meant literal bugs. Start menu search still fails to find things on my desktop, and done so since Win 11. Thank God for Everything.

And Start11 (which can integrate with Everything!)

I mean, define now. Windows has been progressively getting more buggy for a long time, before windows 11 or even 10. Windows 11 is pretty bad but it's been bad. Since day 1 the taskbar crashes for me a few times a day, file explorer crashes, and random things have stupid amounts of lag.

I only used Windows at work and for games in a VM, so take that with a grain of salt:

Older Windows bugs seemed fair: mostly edge cases, weird UI interaction, or stuff that only came out under heavy workload (also, windows file system).

This past few year, the bugs are incomprehensible. I understand non-professional versions are considered as Beta since Win10, but what it felt like is that Home version are actually alpha, and windows pro seems more and more like a beta.

NT4 had many serious BSODs. SP6 was so problematic due to a critical bug in LSA that it was re-released as SP6a.

Windows bugs have moved more and more into the 'edge case' territory. Not that major issues don't crop up for "everyone" today, but BSODs used to be much more common. Part of that was due to the architecture, thus drivers, but the other side of it was core Windows functionality that just had bugs.

Kernel is almost perfect these days. Can't say the same about user environment. Explorer and shell are buggiest ever.

Explorer is the shell ;)

But Explorer has had it's fair share of issues. I have a 98SE machine to prove the stalls, lockups, lack of refreshing directories, etc...

Not anymore, not entirely. Start menu and taskbar are now in a separate thing I believe. Welcome to 20s!

Explorer.exe is still the shell -- the shell is defined at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell, if you want to look (or replace it).

To be fair to Nvidia, they're only selling the pickaxes in this gold craze. It's smart for them to focus on the market that pays the most. When the AI bubble pops, they'll still be in a great position and they'll be able to return to gaming.

Are they only selling pickaxes? I thought they were also investing in prospecting firms, who then turn around and buy more pickaxes. Seems kind of dodgy, but also a lot riskier than just selling pickaxes.

They are training AI models.

They are investing in AI companies (OpenAI).

> Nvidia abandons the gaming market

Citation? I've been hearing this from Gamer's Nexus for decades, but Nvidia seems to be fine RAM shortage notwithstanding.

I was thinking about the revenue shift as described in articles like this one: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/nvidia-g...

Arguably, Nvidia has a point, probably more than the other companies, because they really are at the heart of the current buildout gold rush. So it's more actual economics for them than the FOMO it feels like for the other companies.

It's about which market segment gets priority in the company. Doesn't mean they'll stop making gaming cards altogether

Sure, that makes sense. I don't think anyone ever treated Nvidia like the "pure raster" competitor though. Sacrifices have been made for CUDA for 10+ years, when the Nintendo Switch shipped it was with automotive grade SOCs. Gamers have been chopped liver for decades, but they still get GPU releases and software products.

Looking at the flip side, Apple, AMD and Intel all eschewed compute performance for raster and have nothing to show for it. No "DLSS killer" in sight, no CUDA alternative, nothing. It seems like the gaming revenue is a ball-and-chain holding back profitable applications.

The last 3 generations of nvidia gpus have been a big middle finger to PC gamers in terms of price and power usage

Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000. 400 watts now instead of 100.

> Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000.

What are you talking about? nVidia only has two models in the $1000 to $2000 range and they’re clearly premium parts.

The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.

You're right.

People want to pretend fundamentals of economics don't exist AND the company has moral obligations to fulfill to consumers. It's laughable.

It's not just nVidia, I've seen other expensive consumer brands getting the same sentiments.

> The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.

I don't think that wanting to play games at the native resolution of your screen without changing settings from their defaults in order to make the game look and perform much worse is a very unreasonable "demand".

That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for people to point that out

> That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for people to point that out

That used to be possible when the most common resolution was 1080p and refresh rates weren't pushing 240hz+.

Fair, but there are 2025 games that don't run even well on the 5090. This is the fault of game developers who think they're making the next Crysis, targeting some hypothetical future hardware instead of providing a great experience on today's midrange hardware.

Looking at the best looking games from today vs 10 years ago, they're so similar it's hard to see where that extra performance is even going.

So far waiting ~5 years to bother with them has been a working strategy for me.

Pretty much all the lower price cards are a bad buy. Nvidia is only competitive on performance at the absolute top end, where they have no competitors. In every other price bracket they lose to AMD and Intel.

"Pay more and get less" has been the trend

https://www.xda-developers.com/shrinkflation-is-making-nvidi...

That's even before you get into bullshit like fake frames

> "Pay more and get less" has been the trend

That article doesn't support what you're saying whatsoever. GPU cores going down at the same price point is the opposite of shrinkflation, especially when you consider the US dollar is worth ~40% less than it was in 2012. And VRAM prices aren't going down anywhere, especially now.

> bullshit like fake frames

Fake frames are an option. You can play at native 4K/8K resolution, with the same 2.25-4x cost in power usage and raster compute. It will be miserable, but that's your choice.

> I've been hearing this from Gamer's Nexus for decades

I liked the idea of Gamer’s Nexus at first when it was supposed to be a data-first rigorous independent journalism.

Somewhere along the way it turned into a constant grievance and outrage channel. I guess audience capture pays the bills and YouTube Drama is hard to ignore. I haven’t bothered with that channel since they tried to go to war with Linus Tech Tips. I don’t even watch LTT and I certainly don’t want to watch two channels go to YouTube war against each other when I’m just trying to hear how the latest coolers perform or something.

I think a lot of the ultra cynical HN comments about how it’s the end of computing or how gamers have been abandoned are coming from these channels, though.

The drug is the dream of replacing their serfs (you) with robots. They feel like what passes for AI is sooo close, and they're willing to destroy everything and anything to make their dream reality, but I think they're going to be disappointed. Until they face reality we're all going to increasingly suffer.

Not even really "Until they face reality". I think "we're all going to increasingly suffer" suffices. Not to be too provocative, but I think that even if LLMs don't quite pan out for what they dream of using them for, there's still about a billion other things that can be tightened up to make your life more miserable and their lives more profitable. More ads, more abusive trickery, more 'attestation'/'safety'/'integrity', more subscription services, more discontinuations of old software and features that worked perfectly fine, more total oversight and tracking. It's the trajectory we've been on for a very long time, and there's no reason for it to change.

The C-suites are there to please the shareholders more than the customers. The shareholders hear how much AI companies are supposedly making and believe money is being left on the table lest their co-owned companies invest in AI too. The C-suites then go after AI as none of them wants to be told they haven't done anything to profit off it.

My youtube ads that I get are all fear about AI "You have to do this or you'll be out of a job!" and so on.

It's madness.

I think that quite a few large companies are currently entrenched in a way that is rather unfortunate for their customers: they are so hard to displace that it’s not longer important whether their product is good enough that the customers like it.

Microsoft: Windows is pretty bad lately (and is certainly not ahead of Linux when used as a desktop system in the way that it was, say, 20 years ago). But Microsoft barely cares whether anyone likes Windows because so many corporations are already thoroughly committed to Microsoft. If Microsoft were just starting out with its current product, it would be a hard sell. (Not just desktop — a lot of their serious enterprise stuff like AD is awful. But AD doesn’t need to be good any more — it just needs to be AD.)

Apple, too: their last few generations added very little benefit and a whole lot of bugs. Their hardware is no longer ahead of anyone else’s, and I don’t think their software really is either. But people have bought in to the ecosystem.

Android: Ditto, except there is barely even canonical hardware. Want apps but not iOS? You’re using Android.

Boeing: The 737 MAX seems to have been a commercial success more or less solely because quite a few buyers specifically wanted planes compatible with their existing 737 investments. Boeing doesn’t seem to be trying to make planes that buyers would choose if they were unconstrained.

The list goes on. Not that any of this is really new,

I built a new pc for gaming 2 years ago with windows 11 and I can’t see myself using this OS again when I retire it. From randomly losing Bluetooth, to keyboard resets, to the hilarious failure that is the new right click menu (which lags a bit before appearing, something that I find hilarious) it’s just a bad user experience through and through. My new pc will either run Linux or be a Mac mini. Hopefully Linux gaming will continue to improve and I will be able to completely ditch windows once and for all.

I've been running Steam on both linux and windows. This year I was 85% Linux.

Microsoft was a disaster for Windows 11. They made a product that's such shit that now you've got people who'd rather figure out what linux is or how to work on an apple computer than use Windows 11.

I moved my server and 6 VMs running on it to Linux Mint this year, in response to Microsoft enshitifying Windows 11. It was a pretty easy move, and practically all software I needed has a Linux version. Plex, Agent DVR (security cams), and the LSI-Megaraid admin software for my RAIDs all runs on Linux. Moving the RAID was the easiest part, I just moved the LSI card from the Windows system to the Linux system and drives just showed up instantly. Of course they are formatted as NTFS, and it would be better for Linux if they were formatted as something else, but I'm working on moving ~35TB of stuff off to a backup server so I can reformat those RAID drives, then move all the data back.

The last VM I need to move to Linux is a somewhat complex Windows 10 IIS webserver setup that is still running on a Windows VM. I have to figure out a bunch of stuff to make that move to Linux happen, but I will do that soon enough.

Microsoft can fuck off, I'm done with them after 30 years. They have made it clear I am not their target audience anymore, and I won't recommend their products to anyone anymore.

I wonder if microsoft executives and product managers are using windows at all? It seems like tables have turned, they saw half baked apple implementation(s) on macOS and decided to clone these.

I still use Windows 7. The only problem I have with it is some software doesn't run on it anymore. I had to get a separate Windows 10 laptop to run my scanner and access some websites.

As Win10 is officially unsupported now, non-tech people have come to me to ask me what they should buy as a new laptop. So far I've been successful in installing Ubuntu or having them install Ubuntu and go on about their life. The vast majority of these people live in a browser. Sometimes I get asked "what's a good app for x?"

People who are hard-tied to Windows for some program aren't the ones asking for my input. If they don't want Linux I point them towards a macbook, which no longer scares people who use iphones all day long. If they do that, I ask if I can repurpose their old computer with linux and donate it to someone.

Well they have official extended update options, so it's still officially supported?

Aren't those only free for European customers?

Do they have to be free to be official support?

You get at least 1 year if you log in with your Microsoft account.

While it is true you can get extended support, their website states the following

>>>> Extended Security Updates for organizations and businesses on Windows 10 can be purchased today through the Microsoft Volume Licensing Program, at $61 USD per device for Year One. For more information, see When to use Windows 10 Extended Security Updates. The price doubles every consecutive year, for a maximum of three years. ESU is available at no additional cost for Windows 10 virtual machines in the following services

Maybe if you log in they just give it to you? It certainly seems like it's pay to play from the documentation quoted (I'm located in the US). Also, while I'm completely open to debate the exact definition of "official support", Microsoft's own marketing states that Win10 is no longer supported and they advise you to move to a supported version, or enroll in extended support as a temporary bridge to Win11.

>>>> Windows 10 support has ended on October 14, 2025

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-suppo...

When you enroll in ESU in the US you get these official options.

https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/0a367f45c6857e16b622ece2d1...

By backing up your settings to the cloud they give you 1 year of ESU for free.

2 more years beyond that will be able to be purchased.

Why does anyone still go through the trouble, for personal use, of buying and fighting against Windows terrible design decisions and crappy implementations, when there are so many great alternatives?

Because there aren't so many great alternatives.

There's MacOS, which requires expensive dongles (an Apple computer), and has some of its own systemic issues.

And there's Linux, in different subtly incompatible distros, with its own share of problems, and a non-starter if you need and/or want to use many proprietary staples, from the Creative Suite to video, music, and business apps...

Windows doesn't require a computer?

As in - if you already have a windows PC and someone says "you should try a Mac" you can't just install MacOS, it requires you to buy a whole new PC from Apple. With Linux you can at least just install it in a second partition and use it that way untill you're sure it works for you, zero money required.

The point they were making is that a Windows user generally (Hackintoshing aside) can't just install MacOS in their existing computer; it requires purchasing another, Apple-brand computer.

One of a generic PC-compatible machine, available in all kinds of prices, with all kinds of specs, from all kinds of vendors - one of which you likely already own anyway.

Microsoft Office, Paint.NET, Adobe products.

For personal use - because I play games that only run on windows(and it's my main social interaction every week so "just play other games" is not a viable option)

For work - because Visual Studio is the best IDE if you're a C++ programmer and if your toolchains only work on windows(so anything to do with PS5/Xbox/Switch development).

Linux usage is clearly increasing, so that answers your question.

Windows has been eroding my trust for a decade or so, and I really didn’t like having to make a Microsoft account to setup Windows. However there was that voice in my head whispering “Well, it’s not like you can play games on Linux.” or “See all those tools like Substance Painter and Unreal Engine you like using? Pfff can’t do that on Linux”.

Then the Steam Deck came out, and I was skeptical. I was wrong. Gaming on Linux could happen, it was happening. Proton and the strides made in Wine in the past decade or so have been amazing.

A month ago I installed a few different distros to “try out gaming on Linux”. I was shocked when Cyberpunk with mods worked with a little tinkering. Not only that, but it performed extremely well.

So if you’re on the fence, try it. Also all my tools still work ;).

p.s. Don’t let lack of NVIDIA support stop you if you’ve got an NVIDIA GPU, the latest driver works really well.

If you're using Windows, you're using a computer controlled by a corporation and your actions on that machine are not your own. Even if you walked into a store and bought it, your actions on that computer may not belong to your boss, but you're definitely working, directly, for Microsoft.

Any "feature" of Windows is there because one or more organizational leaders wanted it. Government, commercial, academic. Somewhere in between. But they pray every night for your more complete subjugation.

I've been using Windows since 3.1. I really resent how intrusive it has got. I feel that I am both paying and the product, at the same time.

I'm not a developer, but I consider myself relatively tech literate. That said, I really like Windows 11 and many other MS products such as M365, Edge, new Outlook, One Drive, and even Teams is tolerable (maybe not as polished as Zoom). Copilot is still struggling to find relevance, but I just chalk that up to MS pivoting rapidly to figure out how to make it useful (I currently use the enterprise version solely to draft emails, which is a huge time saver even if it is a bit pricey at $30/mo). The complaints I see on here so frequently just don't register with me. For example, I never see any ads. Maybe there is a setting I turned off long ago, but I cannot recall ever seeing an ad. The setting must be persistent with my Windows backups because no ads show when I reinstall Windows and restore the settings and configuration from a backup. Things are not always perfect, but the issues I have encountered are relatively minor all things considered.

The greatest sin of Windows 11 is that it will cause many people to throw out otherwise usable machines.

Sounds like Windows needs to undergo a similar evolution, or rather, renewal as what OS 9 did moving to OS X. I'm not sure what that might look like, but the easiest route is to probably rebase Windows atop Linux, with a WINE emulation layer to start with to keep compatibility with old apps, as they transition/port their cash cows to Linux/Rust. Rust has been in their sights for a long time now and seems MS is committed to it. They have a 4+ decade long legacy and it needs to be shed, not hauled into the future forever. It will breathe new life into MS. They know they need it. Question is, is Nadella the one to pull this off?

How would rebuilding Windows on top of Linux help anything? Nobody is complaining about the NT kernel and none of the Linux DEs are clearly superior to the Windows userland, they all have at least as many bugs and warts.

I think 2026 will bring many to Linux because of Steam Machine: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine

I can't help but think that Steam Machine/SteamOS/Linux gaming in general is severely bottlenecked by anti-cheat. Nearly all serious multiplayer games require Windows specific anti-cheat.

Maybe there's a critical mass of Linux users that will force AC support. Maybe new cheating paradigms (DMA) will obsolete local AC. I suppose one of those could happen in the next 10 years.

Arc Raiders on linux is fully supported and a lot of fun. Lots of people have steam decks and lots of people will have a steam machine. There will be FPS multi on linux. The larger studios might not, but many more will.

Last year I moved to fedora because tired of adware and forced updates on Windows

I disagree with AI being part of the OS. IMO, any desktop OS should have absolutely nothing to do with AI. It's only a platform for managing other applications and resources. Remote AI stuff should be on websites only, available only if I choose to go to them and interact, or in apps specifically designed to be AI, like Claude Code or Antigravity.

All the nonsense in Windows 11 has me thinking about trying Linux desktops again for the first time in decades.

You've got nothing to lose by trying but time. Time spent learning something new is certainly better than time spent trying to regain control of your OS and workflow after another mandatory "improvement".

Oh, I've run Linux on the desktop before all right, for years. I eventually decided, at the time, that Windows was drastically better at "just working" for desktop applications and it wasn't worth the bother.

Now, though, Microsoft's antics with Windows 11 is starting to make me think that might not be the case anymore.

My two chief complaints are instability and lack of consistency across the UI. There are 20-year-old dialogs lurking behind shiny new interfaces.

Search doesn’t work reliably. Right-Clicking on a file twice in a row will often present different options. Finally, inserting AI where you least expect or want it just slows common tasks. I don’t need AI to guess the next data value in a series.

They’ve left a huge opening for Google, more so than Apple, to get a foot in the door for corporate computing.

Windows 11 isn't too bad after running Win11Debloat, but I get quite annoyed when an update shows "You're 100% there" for more than a second. 100% means done, why aren't you done yet?

When I was working on a deployment dashboard, I made it show ">0%" or "<100%" near the endpoints, to avoid misleading rounding.

Sadly debloating doesn't fix the numerous bugs and it's a cat-and-mouse game with every major update.

Someone just gave me a used computer with pre-installed Windows 10 Home

I have not had a non-work computer running Windows to play with in several decades

It has enough RAM that I can boot UNIX-like OS with rootfs mounted as tmpfs. This is how I prefer to run UNIX-like OS

Not interested in connecting a non-work computer running Windows to the internet but it might be useful for offline usage

Something I've also noticed is a trending "silent exodus" from Windows 11 to Linux and macOS from a bunch of non-technical users.

Compared to the past, where some friend or relative who asked for help into moving from Windows to Linux or Mac usually had a certain ideology-driven strain in their decision, nowadays the requests I receive are along the lines of "look, I'm tired of Windows weirdness, I need something that doesn't change in weird ways between reboots, even if everything is not compatible 100%".

As of late my default answer has been "Do you need Photoshop or Office? Buy the cheapest Apple M-something laptop you can find. Otherwise tell me when you're free so we can install Linux on your machine", usually a bog standard version of Fedora KDE.

I've moved circa 10-12 laptops in the last year to Fedora, and outside of a single case it went way better than I expected. I've asked multiple times if they're ok and at least until now they all were like "yep, fine."

They do their job, expect their work device to never change in meaningful ways, and then forget about it for the rest of the day. Also they are not going to buy a new laptop just because a popup tells them their 3-years old pc can't be upgraded to Windows 11 for whatever reason.

Also we've reached a point where they couldn't care less if something like deCSS or an MP4 codec is missing. Entertainment apps are usually delegated to a tablet or an internet connected TV, as long as Youtube works they're fine.

They're people who don't really care about open source, GNU, Software Freedoms or so on. They're looking for something that doesn't interrupt them with Copilot this or AI Update that while they're having a call or a meeting on slack/teams/whatever.

Truth is linux has become... "Eh, good enough, that'll do it" for most people. Which is a lot more enticing compared to "Pay 400€ for something you already own and spend the rest of the day closing popups".

Once they move product testing to the Engineering group charged with releasing the product, it was inevitable that Release would take priority over Exhaustive Test. Even if bugs surfaced during their sketchy testing, the group would be pressed to release anyway, to meet schedule.

This is obvious to anyone. The management at Microsoft was naive or ignorant to make this process change, take your pick.

It is baffling how sluggish windows explorer has become, same with the start menu...

Even worse that there are no end-user settings to turn down what makes both suck... you have to run hacks, tweak registry keys in order to have it working ~normally~

I truly don’t understand how the world’s most valuable corporations with huge reserves of cash employing tons of developers can exist and NOT make a stable and reliable bug-free product after 30 years. It’s just more bloat and bugs all the time. I think open source projects by contrast get better over time, because they’re not constrained by whatever corporate agenda is that obviously doesn’t prioritize combatting enshittification over chasing fads and enriching shareholders.

Apple has had the same crap, Webkit/Safari is now the sick man of browsers, the entire development stack for Apple is a steaming pile of ad-hoc kludges (from Objective C to Swift to iOS APIs) and they even forgot to renew the certificate to their own app store, breaking all their apps. Twice!

https://magarshak.com/blog/if-steve-jobs-still-ran-apple/

Even today, the new OS they shipped is focused on creating a usability nightmare with liquid glass making everything hard to read and forcing users to use “Accessibility > Reduce Transparency” to try and combad rather than, say, focusing on fixing long-standing bugs and making their browser better. I mean hey, iOS has been around for almost 20 years and their search is still so broken that “Coo” shows a result but then continuing to type “Cool” hides all results including those with the word Cool, for some mysterious reason every search keeps hitting their servers before it can reveal what’s on the local device. The “Spotlight” MacOS indexing sucks more than “Sherlock” did 30 years ago, it never seems to find the files, always appears to only begin indexing only when you search (default setting), the search results interface sucks with everything including previews etc. despite a single guy at Apple literally creating Previews for every major file format! But somehow they can’t be bothered to make it easy to use, but you can hold Option or Shift and then open each found file in a full program to see what it contain. Technically takes literally at most $200K to get this right and rock-solid out of $50 BILLION DOLLARS. One would think they’d care about “user experience”. The old Apple did.

And Siri is nearly as dumb as it was 10 years ago, and ALSO needs to send data to their servers just to, say, find out what time it is on your own device. “I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t do that — I can’t reach my servers right now.” Sigh. This isn’t buildin rockets to Mars, people. You have BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SITTING AROUND and you don’t know what to do with them. This is a failure of basic product management. These corporations KNOW that their users aren’t leaving. They are an oligopoly in devices and browsers. That’s what they use to keep the plebs in line.

I agree with your general complaints about the decline of Apple’s software quality, but what’s your problem with Safari? I’ve never found another macOS browser I like half as much.

On MacOS it is way better than the crippled hacked-together thing that is on iOS. Google was right to move from WebKit to Blink for Chrome. It is far more stable and impressive.

Windows users: Linux is too complicated, you have to configure too much stuff and eww command line

Also Windows users: I downloaded this massive collection of registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts that I have to run as admin after every update to undo whatever fresh fuckery Microsoft just forced on me. And there's no guarantee that it won't all be undone with the next update.

I'm being facetious to make a point, but it's always amused me how much effort you have to expend just to keep a moderately sane experience.

Software should adapt to the user, not the other way around.

filepilot is a very snappy and feature-rich alternative to the native file explorer.

I wish there was a runner alternative. I love tofi on linux where a tiny bit of config makes it show up with dynamic yet deterministic results in a couple frames (at 60Hz).

I only use Windows for gaming and 11 has been fine. Only use it to launch Steam though.

My biggest complain is that every time I reboot I get the annoying ad for copilot and one drive that I can only skip for a couple of days.

I love Windows 11. I'm sure some of my code still lives in Windows 11 from my days at Microsoft. But, the hasty and haphazard ways that some teams at Microsoft treat it sadden me.

I specifically despise Microsoft Accounts being forced down our throats because, among all other things, they make certain workflows impossible. For instance, you can't schedule tasks to run as your user when you're not logged in[1]. It won't work because your Microsoft account doesn't have a password in the traditional sense. You basically can't do anything that requires you to enter your Windows user credentials. I also had problems with making Remote Desktop connections to my other computers at home in the past and maybe it's related to this too.

Another thing; I don't like seeing multiple WebView-based apps running on my system all the time either. WebView or Electron screams lazy to me. Because some dev team didn't want to bother to write a decent and lightweight GUI frontend with numerous GUI frameworks Microsoft had released, 1.5 billion Windows users have to pay the price to have an extremely heavyweight layers of layers of abstractions on their system running all the time. I can't imagine the waste at this scale. Something basic like "Start menu search" should never be a WebView, but it is[2].

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m7vpkshbgc2p

[2] https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3m2wt3cyrv22q

How many browser tabs you have open right now?

I find JavaScript and its ecosystem atrocious in many ways, but several browser tabs and Electron/WebView apps running just fine on an early 2010s PC I employ.

I don't see an XAML based C# .NET desktop app performing marginally better than an equivalent well-written Electron app either. In both cases, GPU takes care of the graphics rendering, JIT and GC do what they do, and you might be able to offload the pain points over to C++ through WebAssembly and P/Invoke or COM objects.

> but several browser tabs and Electron/WebView apps running just fine on an early 2010s PC I employ.

"My car runs fine with the five anvils in the trunk" isn't the argument you're looking for.

Performance isn't the only problem with Electron either. Electron apps fail to integrate with native system components both from look and feel and accessibility aspects like incorrect zoom levels on HiDPI displays etc. They are even worse than browser tabs in that manner.

> I don't see an XAML based C# .NET desktop app performing marginally better than an equivalent well-written Electron app either

RAM usage would be at least an order of magnitude different. Nothing to do with how well-written it is either. It's inevitable.

Well, we're in the anvil business. Unless someone pulls the cart himself using C++ and MFC, similar amounts of oat will be consumed to get to our destination. Based on my empirical observations, WinUI 3 with C# eats memory like a horse. I'm willing to stand corrected with more data.

Platform integrity and accessibility are the real concerns with Electron. What is the solution, though? Does anyone still have time and patience for the byproducts of WinDev vs DevDiv power plays, even at Microsoft?

Windows has fans? I just thought people tolerated it.

100% leadership inflicted.

Meanwhile they keep downsizing their workforce while not making personal sacrificed (personal pay) while they chase AI.

Microsoft and Windows are fully self-sufficient as disasters, they need no help from outside in that area.

The last 12 months? The last decade.

> Too many bugs. Too many changes. Too little control. Windows 11's reputation might be at its lowest it's ever been as 2025 comes to a close.

That, sadly, also applies almost perfectly to macOS. And yet, as bad as macOS has become, it is still a distant third in the race to become the worst desktop OS.

Very difficult spot to be in when the entire industry is racing to make desktops awful.

Linux starts to look very interesting, but is held back by the lack of good efficient high quality mobile hardware - the only such devices, Macs and snapdragon x elite devices, have poor Linux support.

Weirdly, Windows Server is a better desktop experience.

It does not ask you to play Candy Crush, for example.

> The last 12 months have been an incredibly frustrating time for Windows fans.

Windows fans? What?

In Soviet Windows, you don’t control the operating system; it controls you.

All I wanted was a native tiling windows manager; all I got was shit on by a bloated cloud.

I've used macOS for development for 15+ years now but always built my gaming rigs using Windows. For the first time in my life I'm so annoyed with Windows I'm seriously entertaining the idea of putting SteamOS on my rig and fighting my way through whatever nonsense I have to to make it work. I was able to tolerate a lot of Microsoft's nonsense so I could have a very easy path to just turn my machine on and play some games without having to think too much about it but my patience is finally at an end.

Is Windows usage actually down?

    > "As Forbes reports, a whopping 1 billion PCs are still running Windows 10 - despite half of them technically being eligible for an upgrade. During PC maker Dell's November quarterly earnings call, the company's COO, Jeff Clarke, admitted that "we have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," referring to all PCs, and not just Dell machines."

    > In other words, those who own a whopping third of the estimated 1.5 billion PCs worldwide are outright refusing to upgrade, indicating Microsoft is seriously struggling to woo them. That’s likely due to a number of reasons, from simple frustrations over a tweaked and unfamiliar interface to the need to run software that isn’t Windows 11 compatible — and annoying ads.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/windows-users-r...

I don't hate Windows 11, I just don't give a shit about it. I can run nearly any software I might possibly need professionally on MacOS or Linux. The latter is also so good at gaming, that I don't really need Windows for that either.

At this point, Windows is just something I occasionally dual boot from my laptop, for the rare piece of software that I can't use on MacOS or Linux easily.

> In this scenario, going into your update history to see what changed is going to confuse you, because the update that includes the new Start menu was installed on your system weeks ago. You're only seeing the new features now because Microsoft allowed you to see it, which is insane and frustrating beyond belief.

Holy shit that’s insane, what a giant middle finger to users.

And Microsoft don't care in the slightest, they have lots of market share so they have been pivoting to the enshittification phase especially over the past few years... the UX is still a cluster fuck but hey there's plenty of space for ads and AI integration now

windows 11 was a disaster for 2025, IMHO.

I haven't had a _terrible_ UI experience with Win 11 that Apple hasn't put me through already. But it took away my sideways toolbar. I don't click anything that loads edge, like "Show me more from the web" type links. So I don't see ads. I use firefox and thunderbird.

The telemetry all the way through the operating system sucks ethically. But I'm invested and familiar with Windows and Office. Not being able to make Copilot disappear is annoying.

However, all my games and software that work on Windows won't necessarily work on linux. I am not interested in making a political stand and putting up without abilities and features I currently have.

So, for my own use-case, Win 11 it is.

Clearly not an endorsement, just a data-point.

Yeah, I think it's just a matter of what you know. I recently got a Mac for work and the UI is horrid and I have no idea how people put up with it, it's like designed by people who never actually had to use it afterwards. But clearly it works for people so I strongly suspect it's just the personal bias here.

> However, all my games and software that work on Windows won't necessarily work on linux

Unless you specifically know what won't work: there's a solid chance that your games and software will work just fine on Linux.

Of everything wrong with Windows 11 I’m most perved that I can’t have a vertical taskbar. Seriously? Something so simple that existed in Windows 10 and we can’t have it in Windows 11?

Linux is now better than Windows.

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