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Comment by jampa | Hacker News Reader

I am glad that I don't need to use Windows anymore. When I did, the LTSC version (the one made for ATM and Kiosks) was the only one that was productivity-friendly.

Microsoft doesn't want to accept that no one cares about Windows, and the OS is the thing that gets you to the thing you want to do.

I saw 2 instances of people getting "updating windows" in their personal laptops when they tried to present something and lost everyone's time. I imagine this happens a lot of times every day. And now they are just breaking everyone's system by forcing updates as well.

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If nobody cared about windows there wouldn't be any posts like this one everyday on HN. The problem is people do care and need to use windows which makes all these stupidity by Microsoft the recent years frustrating.

I am personally just a lurker. Windows used to be my only OS for a -very- long time (DOS 2.x, yes 2, was my first MS OS). Now I click on these just to see how far it has fallen. It is like that friend you drifted away from and now you look at their FB posts now and again to watch as they get crazier and crazier.

We need something that just works. I guess Microsoft made me care because their products are unpredictable.

It's more like "nobody cares about Windows" as in: no one is impressed that you added Copilot into Notepad, no one wants you to move the cheese, they just want to get on with their actual work without being interrupted by "good things coming your way" which is inevitably just more annoyance, more bugs, more Copilot buttons.

Most people would probably have preferred if Windows had zero feature updates* since Windows 7, just security patches.

* Well, OK, fine. Task Manager is better now, I'll grant them that one.

I am not going to defend MS but I have to say that the frustration is less than it was in the 90s.

Reinstalling Windows used to take an entire afternoon. Now I can do it in an hour.

Basically Windows and computers in general have always been frustrating.

I'm not certain what point you are attempting to make, The size of Windows install has not smaller and therefore improving install time, but rather the hardware has gotten so much faster. Installing from a USB 3 key is so much faster than floppy or optical media, as well as NVMe drives are receiving the data vs old spinning rust drives.

Ah my point is that Widows hasn't gotten worse. You can probably still find old forum posts complaining about Vista...

It was always bad. It is now easier to fix it. We are making progress lol.

You can find complaints about Windows Vista, but then find praise around Windows 7. Being better than a single point in the past doesn't imply a trend. The perceived quality varies between releases, and it's clear that Windows 11 has dipped in that regard.

Even windows 7 had complaints when released but it kept improving, on the other hand windows 11 is deteriorating in both stability and anything new added is either half baked or unnecessary borderline user hostile.

I've never once installed macOS in 20 years of using the platform

That's a ridiculous comparison...

If for example you take a bus to work, and starting this month, the bus shows up only every hour (last year it was every 10 minutes), would you be frustrated?

But if you complained about this and someone said "Well in the 90's this bus showed up only every 4 hours!"...

I think the point is that they don't care about Windows in particular as much as the my care about having something that works out of the box for them, and for years that was Windows. Not many people really want Windows to iterate with new features, and in practice it seems that they aren't really able to push those features without breaking the stability, which is the one feature people do actually want, and that leads to backlash like this. The best Windows is the one that gets out of the way and lets users not care about it.

LTSC is what mainstream Windows should be. It doesn't load up a bunch of apps you don't ask for or throw ads in your face all the time. Solid, dependable, reliable, and stable.

Windows IoT (Formerly Windows Embedded) is the version made for ATMs and Kiosks.

Windows LTSC is meant for organisations favoring stability over new features.

Funnily enough, Windows IoT also has an LTSC version.

Msoft understands the position very well, that's precisely why updates are so bad. Windows is just an entrypoint. The actual critical parts are office suite, teams, visual studio & stuff - they are the cash cows and can't be easily replaced, hence windows will be picked even if it's hated

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