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People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

windowscentral.com

764 pointsbreve616 comments

This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel for other products and services.

It has to be a decision from the very top. I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. It's not just 10% of revenue, it's a foundation for how enterprises ended up on Azure and are bringing big money.

I'm still a Windows power user, MacBook is a wonderful piece of hardware and I'm typing this on one, but I'm not nearly as productive as on multimonitor PC with TotalCommander and Visual Studio where I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.

> I use all the shortcuts subconsciously.

I realize you probably are referencing visual studio, but at the OS level KDE plasma seems to have copped Windows hot keys wholesale. I was giving it a go recently and was delighted that even meta+arrow keys for monitor switching fullscreen apps works. My only gripe, and what got me booting back into windows, was that even the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky to reliably play multiplayer online games.

> the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky

A GL.iNet travel router in WiFi to ethernet bridge mode is an excellent stopgap until Linux support arrives. It also has the benefits of (a) taking with you on trips for safer/easier internet use (use your home SSID, even auto-VPN traffic if you want) and (b) letting you plug in other wired-only devices adjacent to the computer.

Here are their travel routers filtered to just those that support WiFi 6 and 7: https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filt...

FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...

This may be the first time that sentiment's ever been expressed.

Why do you say that?

A lot of shortcuts are shared between windows and linux and fairly consistent across applications. Mac is the one that takes a decided "we're different" approach to shortcuts. I.e., Alt+L for address bar instead of Alt+D, Command swapping with Control, Q instead of W for closing tabs, Command+Control+Q for locking a computer instead of Super+L, etc

They didn't mention cross-OS shortcuts, though. I interpreted "across the operating systems" as meaning "across the various versions of Windows". Yes, Windows is more consistent with their own common shortcuts. But Macs have exceedingly consistent shortcuts across Mac applications, compared to my experience with Windows and especially Linux.

I might also point out that Mac had keyboard shortcuts before Windows existed, so it's not really fair to describe them as the "different" one when MS chose their own, different shortcuts for Windows.

Apple also invented their own key “Apple” now “CMD” for operation like copy / paste to explicitly not have the issue to overload the already know escape sequences. Windows being on a system without a normalized keyboard had to reuse keys that are common to keyboards used back then. Vertical integration played into apples cards even back then.

I setup my Linux system to use it because it's more consistent for copy pasting in a terminal.

The location of the command key is also a lot more comfortable. Thumb vs pinky.

It takes thirty seconds to remap anyway

Aren't the Apple key and the Windows key just corporate branding on a super key?

With regards to the windows key, I have grown to appreciate it, I am on a X11 desktop and map all my window functions to it which makes a lot of sense, then ctl and alt can be freely used by applications however they like. I suspect this is sort of what microsoft wanted when they specified it but were hamstrung by their own backwards compatibility(they were not able to make the hard decision to move close to window+f4 for example).

The otherwise useless context key makes a great compose key.

On a theoretical level one would almost want one dedicated control key per level(os_key to send commands to the kernel, window_key to send commands to the windowing system, program_key to send commands to applications, user_key reserved for user custom bindings not to be pre bound by applications) I am not sure what role chording should have under this scheme. allowing a higher level to use the lower level button? a window manager cannot use os+key or app+win+key but they can use win+os+key. an app could use app+win+key. I would also like a unicorn, oh well, fun to think about.

The big one for me on Mac was refreshing a web page being CMD+R rather than F5.

Not to mention the muscle memory for pressing CTRL in the corner of the keyboard rather than CMD where Alt is.

Though I will say that having "Copy" (cmd-c) being different from ^C (ctrl-c) was kind of nice. Though Terminal has done a nice thing of making it so if you highlight text, Ctrl-C copies the first time you press it, and sends ^C the second time.

Conversely, when I use a PC, I have to stop and wonder why alt-R doesn't reload the web page like it's supposed to, and alt-C doesn't copy, and I have to stretch my pinky all the way over to use that shortcut. And what's the mnemonic for "F5 means reload"?

Which is to say that neither Windows nor Mac shortcuts are inherently better. It's just what we're used to. IME, the main difference is that once you learn the Mac shortcuts in a handful of apps, they'll pretty much work on the other apps you encounter, too.

Ctrl-R reloads the page in every browser that I have used, so perhaps that's what you're looking for.

A big issue with the macOS style I'd that there isn't a modifier key free for the user to build their own shortcuts around. The Win/Super key is a very good place to hang custom shortcuts off of on Windows and Linux.

F5LOAD doesn't look entirely unlike RELOAD if you squint?

The real WTF is who thought putting "close window/tab" and "exit browser" on adjacent keys was ever a good idea.

> The big one for me on Mac was refreshing a web page being CMD+R rather than F5.

It's not like you can't change it.

System Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts > add your browser > remap the Reload menu item to F5

Along with Karabiner you can pretty much make Mac OS work however you want it to when it comes to keyboard shortcuts.

If you want a little more consistency for muscle memory, ctrl+L goes to the address bar on Windows the same way cmd+L goes to it on Mac. Same for ctrl+W and cmd+W to close tabs.

Many of those shortcuts already existed in macOS before they were added in Windows. Inversely, a lot of desktop Linux stuff was designed specifically to mimic the Windows behaviour.

So, really, it's Microsoft that decided "we're different".

Also, as somebody who sort of lives in the terminal, the lack of the Command/Ctrl distinction is one of the things that really bothers me about Windows. In default GUI applications, application shortcuts use Command, and Ctrl is used almost exclusively for headline-style shortcuts (ctrl-k for kill line, ctrl-a for home, ctrl-e for end, etc). Ctrl-a Ctrl-shift-e is kind of baked into my brain as "select whole line".

On the other, as a Windows desktop person I can't live without Home/End/PgUp/Pgdown, and in different combinations with Shift/Control. That's one of reason I can't fully enjoy MacBook, not to mention the incredible fact that it doesn't have a Delete key. No, it's not the same that you can use modifier key with backspace, modifier keys are used for extra functionality, i.e. to delete to begining or end of the word, etc.

Macs have every one of those, just with different shortcuts: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102650

Sure, but using modifier keys. What if I want to add shift to the mix to select, let's say to the beginning of line or document? You'll need to press two modifiers. That's not optimal. And I use these all the time while editing.

And I don't consider this a MacBook flaw particularly, it's more or less general laptop flaw nowadays. If anything, other manufacturers have even more imagination to mess up keyboard layout.

Eh, I dunno. I played piano, so I'm not allergic to pressing 10 keys and a couple of foot pedals at once if needed. Here, that means I rarely consciously think about what chord I'm pressing to select from here to the beginning of the word/line/document.

On a related note, I've half-seriously considered wiring up a switch pedal[1] as a modifier key in Emacs through MIDI.

Where I really want chording to be universally available, though, is in video games when playing cross-input games on controller.

[1] https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/FC5--yamaha-fc5-foot...

I'd rather use more modifiers than reach for a key that's far away from home row. ctrl-a/e for start/end of line works pretty much everywhere.

This is definitely a Mac-apologia to the extreme argument. Microsoft isn’t event the one that came up with the layout, it was the IBM compatible PC keyboard layout that was specifically designed as a keyboard standard to be used across the whole industry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard

And then Windows gained critical market share mass long, long before macOS did, and when it did they simply adopted the already popular IBM keyboard layout, which is common sense. Common sense would be for Apple to do the same when their mass market PC OS came along later down the road, even if technically neXTSTEP Classic macOS had their own layout, that OS was essentially irrelevant in the computing industry until Apple used it as the basis for modern macOS (and thus their macOS keyboard layout was not known to basically any normal person). macOS/OSX as we know it didn’t launch until well after windows was already very popular and thus had continued the already cemented IBM PC keyboard layout.

I’m all for Apple being unique and using their own layout if that’s what they wanna do/design around, but there’s exactly zero arguments available that actually they had the standardized and popular keyboard layout first and IBM/microsoft were the weird ones. That’s simply not accurate whatsoever.

I've always found the opposite, do you have any examples where macOS falls short compared to Windows in shortcut consistency?

I've used macOS for years and still don't understand their windows minimize/restore logic. I'm always hunting for my minimized window. Yes, the fault probably lies with me.

OTOH the Windows UI is far better well designed and intuitive. But yeah... I'd rather fumble around in macOS: Windows is always trying to upsell a service that I don't need. If I say no it will helpfully keep reminding me (my answer is never going to change). I have 32GB ram and a recent processor being fed tons of wattage -- it feels so bog slow.

Windows needs to fix itself fast.

reading all these comments about windows having better shortcuts and window management features makes me feel like i'm taking crazy pills. windows for me was hands down the worst experience in ux. the shortcuts in macos are so well thought out and consistent.

now i'm using kde in linux land and it's the best and most customizable experience. I can't imagine going back to windows ever and would be missing a lot from linux if i went back to macos(though it would be fine).

getting macos keybinding in linux land is a game changer to me: https://github.com/RedBearAK/toshy and this just makes me feel at home.

I give you a well thought out macos shortcut for example. Ok, it is for a niche feature people rarely use... Screenshots, put straight to the clipboard.

On windows you have 2 options, bot pretty unintuitive:

1. You can either press PrintScreen button... (OK boomer, who uses a full size keyboard? My RGB clicky-keys 57% keyboard doesn't even have backspace, return, escape or delete, I don't even know when I saw a keyboard with Printscreen. My Neofetch-fork does save the screen, and otherwise no need for screenshots...)

2. Or you may press Win+Shift+S. Ok it is hard to memorize, how does S even relate to Screenshot?

Meanwhile on the intuitive MacOs to do this you only have to press Command+Option+Shift+4. So intuitive and easy!!! Also way easier to press, just try it! Only 4 keys to press at the same time, in a very convenient layout, way better than that illogical windows shortcut.

Sarcasm aside: It is clear why Microsoft is well known for the fact that in the 1990s they put a lot of effort to usability research, and why Apple is famous about Steve Jobs being the BDFL, and things had to fit his personal taste.

>Meanwhile on the intuitive MacOs to do this you only have to press Command+Option+Shift+4

It's command-shift-4, no option key involved.

afaik that way it pops up the viewer, and does not put it to the clipboard.

Now got hold of a mac, and checked it:

Command+Shift+4 is area snipping, as you said, but pops up the viewer window

Command+Control+Shift+4 is snipping, but to clipboard. I mixed up the shortcuts, yet my fingers are getting used to it anyways, still I find it terrible default UX compared to other desktops.

there's good reason the equivalent shift-command-s isn't bound to screenshot by default... it's the command to save a file and there's no good way to do partial screenshot and full screen screenshot with just command-shift-s + option if you want the option to put it into memory instead of a file. they chose command-shift-3 for full screen screenshot. command shift 4 for partial screenshot and add option to do either of those into memory which is a very common paradigm in macos shortcuts. the option key does something slightly different to the original shortcut in system shortcuts. in any event windows didn't get the non-printscreen version of a screenshot tool until very late in the game and osx had it in for a long time.

that issue isn't even an issue if you really want screenshots to be something else. you can change basically any shortcut in one place in macos. same with kde.

I don’t see much difference to be honest. I didn’t pick up Mac OS until later in life, so windows shortcuts are embedded in my brain. That said, I find Mac shortcuts just as simple to memorize. I’ve used cmd shift 4 thousands of times now and I don’t even think about it, I just press it.

It probably depends pretty heavily on your workflow. MacOS is designed around doing things visually with a trackpad. If you don't want to work that way, you're just out of luck, because that's the "right way" and if you disagree you're wrong. An example using my preferred workflow: I like to map the applications I use to <meta> (or option on mac) + number keys on the keyboard. So <meta>+1 is my editor. <meta>+2 is my terminal. <meta>+3 is my browser. Etc. If I have multiple windows open, just hit that combo again to cycle in a least-recently-used cycle. I don't have to raise all of the windows from the dock with my mouse and then go find the one I want. I don't have to open some mission control thing and go hunting for a window. I don't have to swipe to another space to remember where I put the window. I don't have to command+tab to a certain number of times to get to the window. I know exactly how to get the application I want with 1-3 key presses. Then once I've raised the window I want, I often want to tile it to one side or the other or fullscreen it with another keyboard shortcut.

Getting this to work on MacOS is a huge PITA. I tried app shortcuts in settings and they'd just randomly not work sometimes for some apps. Apps can override global shortcuts? What??? I tried the "shortcuts" app and it also similarly wouldn't work for some apps and would often forget my key bindings on an update. Tiling via the keyboard would randomly not work either. Multiple apps couldn't fix it. I finally found hammerspoon and scripted an option that consistently works. Rectangle finally solved my tiling issues. But why do I need 3rd party apps that involve writing my own scripts to get basic OS behavior? This is stock Windows behavior.

Beyond that it's just a bunch of papercuts. My dock randomly appears on the wrong screen. My windows sometimes don't get focus when I click on them. The coreutils are old and suck compared to the linux equivalents. Things built cross-platform are often the worst on Mac. Even though they're both sitting behind virtualization, WSL just feels much more integrated than running containers on mac. My usb mic randomly stops working...I've literally had more mic problems on Mac than I did on Linux. Sometimes I need to force kill my browser, and it'll sit for several minutes as a zombie descendant of pid 1 before getting cleaned up, preventing me from opening a new instance of the thing that should be killed. When I had initially mapped tiling to <option>+something, and it didn't work, I'd get a fun unicode character in my text instead, so I had to install an ascii-only keyboard layout to stop myself from looking like a moron who couldn't type. I'm guessing if you're a mac native, the shortcuts make more sense, but after 20 years of windows/linux shortcuts burned into my brain, moving to a mac for work has made me have to pointlessly relearn everything, and it still feels very unnatural.

The hardware is great, but the OS makes me hate this machine with a passion.

Overall it does sound like KDE is possibly the experience that you desire - did you try it before?

macOS does not and never has had a good strategy for handling minimizing windows. Keep in mind that prior to Mac OS X, you couldn't minimize windows at all, you could only roll them up. When OS X added the dock, they made minimized windows go there. Except, the Dock is an icon grid, so there's no way to see window titles, and the windows themselves are so small that it is difficult to identify them at a glance. Making things worse, the Dock is also a place you put app icons, so now you have an icon to show all your non-minimized app icons, right next to all your minimized window icons.

Meanwhile, Windows had minimize since version 2[0], except for whatever reason windows minimized to desktop icons, and there was no desktop folder. They'd known they'd invented a worse version of Mac OS, and in Windows 95 they made sure that there was not only a real desktop, but also a list of all open windows. This design was so successful that the only major tweak that stuck was merging the taskbar and Quick Launch[1] into something that superficially resembles the OSX dock, but is just plain better[2] because clicking an app icon actually shows you all the open windows.

[0] I don't have a Windows 1 install to check with.

[1] Strictly speaking you could put anything in Quick Launch, but only apps go in the Win7 taskbar

[2] Oldschool NeXT users will point out that in NeXTSTEP, minimized windows had an actual title on them, and the app icon instead of a screenshot of the window at tiny scale.

Early macOS also had rollup windows. I greatly prefer that to minimized windows in macOS, which are impossible to quickly access outside of the mouse or unminimizing all windows with a key combination which I can't remember.

You want to look into HyperSwitch and SizeUp. These two solve pretty much all headaches relating to window management on macOS.

The MacOS is a pretty nice system but their window management has been and still is shit. I get that tilling 4 windows doesn’t look good but all the view swapping and desktop switching stuff gives me a headache and sucks. Also that half second transition to full screen sucks. Windows seems so freeing when it comes to window management. Simple transition free resizing. Snaps into corners. The rapid transition free minimize and restores etc.

I’m going to use Cunningham’s Law here.

Windows menu navigation by keyboard allows almost everything to be done with no mouse, and macOS doesn’t. Alt-space, X will maximize a window from 3.0 to 11. Not a direct shortcut, more like the / menu of Visicalc or Lotus 1-2-3. Not as fast, but close, and better because it’s discoverable - if you forget, the menu is open and you can see the next step.

Isn't part of this Microsoft preparing for the requirement to do age verification in the OS?

It has more to do with Microsoft deciding to emulate Google and Facebook's surveillance capitalism business model.

If you combine mandatory online user accounts with telemetry and Windows Recall, you have a system for building out advertising profiles linked to known individuals.

I get that. But it's also the case that they can justify this by claiming that they have to do it for each verification.

> I'm still a Windows power user

I used to be, but in 2004 I switched to Linux.

I still use windows as a secondary operating system on another computer, though only Win10. I decided I will not transition to anything after Win10 as Microslop declared war on the users with Win11. Which was the case already before Win11, of course, but I feel the qualitative difference is too much now.

> far more political than technological

I don't know. A company worth trillions of dollars does a pretty fine job of making Windows incrementally worse in new and interesting ways, each release.

There's some truth; the bloated company structure has contributed to these unforced errors, but just at an engineering level, people are releasing this tripe without the skill or training or backbone to know what is bad, and push back on toxic management decisions.

Engineers collaborating with oppressive management is a technical failure. Google is riddled with the same problem. I'm sure all the FAANG-a-likes do. Paying billions in salaries to sycophant devs. They have the market share to keep failing upwards. They don't deserve it.

Who says the engineers have any leverage they can push with? I sure didn't, when I worked there.

Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem that's played out in construction, automotive and software engineering dozens of times over.

The penalty for Microsoft ignoring their devs might just be a slow decline into irrelevance, not a bridge collapsing, or an autonomous vehicle hitting the lane barrier because the boss refuses to use LiDAR, but it's all bad management causing an engineering problem.

> Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem.

No, that's the very archetype of a political problem. It is a political problem that impacts the engineering output, yes, but still a political problem.

As someone with a sizeable background in Linux system engineering.. I prefer Windows to MacOS.

It's IMHO a better desktop now with the edge snap tile layout and etc. Excellent device compatibility. And I get my linux environment needs satisfied via WSL2 these days.

But damn if they don't get in their own way. I have my own Pro licenses, and even with Pro turning off ads and features is text book whack-a-mole:

* Frequent "Let's finish setting up your PC" after updates

* Killing OneDrive is a like night of the living dead

* Edge popping up "ads" asking you if you want to pin apps when it closes(a lot of windows apps wrap edge, like streaming apps, and show this too on close!)

* Scary Power Automate crap getting injected on updates(haven't seen this in a while)

* Internet search results in the "Home" search

* Random popups and product recommendations

* Registry disabled "features" randomly resurrecting after Windows update

Holy. Hell.

Edit: I recall now; Windows was installing a power automate extension into Chrome during Windows Update un-prompted last year. Caused a minor panic.

Use LTSC. It'll fix all the issues you are mentioning here.

Second ltsc -look into it once you try you will never go back. Available from various resellers nowadays. It is, what windows should be sold as.

LTSC cannot be bought as a regular customer unfortunately. Legally, regular customers are only allowed to use the enshittified version.

You can get access to it, but it's a quest. You need to buy a volume license, and this requires at least 5 licenses (about $300). Then you'll be eligible to buy an LTSC version.

It doesn't require a corporation or anything, you can do that as a private person. But it IS annoying.

Why not just get the iso, install, activate with massgravel and be done for life?

Because it's illegal and that matters to some people

That's true indeed, but Microsoft is not giving us any other option so why not use the good version at home? I mean what is the risk really?

MS has always been (and probably still does) wanting you to pirate Windows instead of jumping to Linux or Mac.

AFAIK Office isn't supported on LTSC fka. LTSB.

Installed LTSB for a conservative superior. He just wanted to work, without changes. I supported that happily. Until we had to start using Office 365.

Or did they revert that restriction?

Recently I'm finding MSN home opened in Chrome over night. Aparently it's connected to some "active probing" feature, and I do have scheduled nightly restarts in the home router. But come on... No one could convince me it's not intended to inflate MSN numbers.

I also think Windows' native window tiling is one of its best features, but there's a fantastic program called Swish that implements tiling for MacOS in a very native-feeling way. It supports keyboard shortcuts, but it's built around really elegant touchpad gestures. Highly recommend if that's all that's keeping you on Windows.

The other native Windows feature I really like is the clipboard manager, and I don't have a great replacement for that yet. I'm kind of shocked Apple hasn't built one. If anyone has a recommendation that feels native instead of like a ported Linux widget, please share.

They mentioned Visual Studio, as in full-fat VS, not VS Code. That's only ever going to run on Windows.

It actually did run on MacOS until recently. Personally I like Rider over Studio, but yes, if that's a hard requirement they are stuck.

No, it was not real Visual Studio on MacOS, it was rebranded Xamarin IDE.

I'm using Raycast on Mac, it has a bunch of stuff included but I use it only for its Clipboard History extension.

It has window tiling too.

Apple did introduce one this past fall as part of Spotlight

*> the clipboard manager [...] If anyone has a recommendation that feels native

I use Maccy (https://maccy.app/). I've been very happy with it, and wish I'd installed it years earlier than I did. It's open source, and does its one job well.

I haven't used the Windows clipboard manager so I don't know how they compare on features.

I moved from Windows to Pop_Os! 6 months ago and am generally quite happy except for the window tiling. It really is fantastic in windows.

Idk which desktop environment you're using, but window tiling on KDE Plasma is quite good.

Thanks. Though, I can't find much about it's capabilities. Does it do "automatic" tiling, where windows just snap automatically into spaces and resize? Because popos can optionally do that too, but it's not what I'm looking for.

I want Windows-like functionality where new windows are full size and then I can use windows key+ arrow keys to resize and it will then automatically prompt me to select a window to snap into the remaining space. That's what's missing in popos

Thank you for the Swish recommendation! Just installed, looks great.

I've had good luck with the winutil tool, which is wrapper for a bunch of powershell commands and registry edits in a .ps1 to remove bloat. After using it on a fresh install I can't recall the last time I've had any of the mentioned issues.

If you're (understandably) concerned about the security implications most of the changes can be done manually going off the docs.

https://github.com/christitustech/winutil

Bloat will come back on every update. It's futile.

I’ve used this Powershell script on every Windows 11 machine in the last four years (5+ devices) and have never needed to re-run it after an update.

It’s the first thing I do on a fresh install, and with my selections I see fewer ads (0, more or less) than I do on my MacBook for iCloud products so I’d hardly say it’s “futile” in actual use and only takes like 5 minutes to run once.

I always hear people say nothing sticks after an update but have literally only encountered that with Microsoft Edge and the default search engine. Not any of the Windows features disabled or configured by the script.

Not sure if it’s just outdated or a meme being repeated by non-Windows users but in any case it is not at all what I’ve experienced exclusively running debloated Windows 11 installs for years.

https://github.com/raphire/win11debloat

> I always hear people say nothing sticks after an update but have literally only encountered that with Microsoft Edge and the default search engine. Not any of the Windows features disabled or configured by the script. Not sure if it’s just outdated or a meme being repeated by non-Windows users but in any case it is not at all what I’ve experienced exclusively running debloated Windows 11 installs for years.

Yup. From what I’ve gathered, there was once a legitimate bug that did renable features that users previously disabled, and from then on that just became canon behavior for windows, even though they fixed that issue fairly quickly and I did not see it reappear. I have a similar experience, stuff that was disabled magically becoming re-enabled is not something that’s ever happened to me either over the years with windows.

I had Windows on a Lenovo laptop, and Windows update installed and/or re-enabled Lenovo system services almost every time (those included things like popups helpfully telling you that you pressed CapsLock and crap like this). I ran debloating scripts, tried fiddling with policies, etc, but Windows Update would inevitably bring those services back.

Another thing is Intel drivers. There's official Intel driver assistant software which installs latest drivers for Intel things (graphics, network, and so on). Only for Windows to re-install their "stable" outdated graphics driver next time it sees it. Again, I couldn't stop it. How hard is it for Windows to see that the driver already installed is newer already? Why even Intel cannot talk to Microsoft and decide between themselves a solution for this?

Install "Bulk Crap uninstaller", which is libre software. Begin uninstalling every bloatware you find.

This is guaranteed just to be windows reinstalling drivers it thinks the laptop needs by default for basica functionality (it is considering the Lenovo service a standard system driver like the Intel ones since sometimes those are used to enable custom key and other functionality, so it makes sense to be a default driver so everything works out of the box for non technical customers). This is easily disabled by simply setting group policy manager to not automatically install drivers.

I’ll happily shit on windows endlessly but I can’t fault them for this, I think with the windows driver model this makes sense, otherwise you’re gonna have a ton of issues cropping up for normal users, especially since power users can always disable the policy. That was always one of the first policies I set and it never gave me any issues or automatically reinstalled unwanted/standard drivers again.

I'm not sure if I'm lucky or it's because I have feature releases deferred or if the tool ripped enough things out but this hasn't been my experience so far. If it does you could save off the changes as a JSON template and re-apply after updates, or automatically with task scheduler.

Use LTSC and you get 10 year support period, so you can update whenever it's convenient for you.

Yeah, that's a PITA for Windows 11.

It's an extra cost. $100 to $200. You can't buy it, generally, except through a volume licensing partner. You may need to have a tenant ID depending on exactly how you're getting it, too. Alternately, you need to have a Visual Studio subscription which is $3k/yr. Oh, and you can't upgrade to LTSC from Pro. You have to do a fresh install. And IoT LTSC is even worse.

hmmmm does this work if you are unable to skip account creating?

Don't forget the search that doesn't work. You have app "X" installed? You type X and it doesn't find it, but gives you irrelevant results about X.

At one point (last year?) internet search results would load in first so quickly typing and pressing "enter" from muscle memory would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted..

Then also in the past year or two the internet search results were lagging the entire search UI causing type jank and stutters.

I disabled internet results in the registry but a recent update seems to have caused that setting to no longer apply ;(

>> would often result in opening some internet page instead of the app you wanted.

and even worse, in Edge!

I heard people talk about registry hacks for the internet search results on here many times.

Windows has a "Search" page in the Settings app. You can also reach it via the kebab menu on the search results.

There you can simply disable Bing.

Windows' search has been broken for multiple generations now. Some people inside Microsoft seemingly even know, that's why the PowerToys team created "PowerToys Run." A Windows Search that actually basically functions correctly.

People act like it sudden was broken in Windows 11 when in reality it never worked correctly in 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 either. Instead of fixing it, they've only made it worse. It seems like nobody in Microsoft works on core stuff anymore.

Yeah, I've never experienced Windows search ever working. Even on XP, it couldn't find commonly opened folders or programs for me. It always felt like some sort of joke feature just meant to fool me into wasting time.

As far as I remember it was working well in 7 and 8 (deterministic and shows programs that you expect it to show). From 10 it started behaving erratically (same time it got binged but maybe unrelated).

It had problems in 8. I would frequently type my search term, see it was the number one result. I would then attempt to arrow or tab down and hit enter to launch that result. Between arrowing down and hitting enter, the result list would update/reorder and suddenly I'm launching some unknown program. Happened all the time.

If memory serves, Windows 2000 was the last version where search worked reliably. It was a simple linear search through files which could take a while on larger folders, but was reliable and predictable since it did not rely on a background indexing service which seems to get stale or just plain wrong most of the time.

If I search for “foo”, I’d like to get all files containing “foo” please, without a shadow of a doubt that some files were skipped, including those that I have recently created. I still can’t get that as of Windows 11!

> It was a simple linear search through files which could take a while on larger folders, but was reliable and predictable since it did not rely on a background indexing service which seems to get stale or just plain wrong most of the time.

It would be easy to have your cake and eat it too. Have the file search default to the index. Allow frustrated users to then click a button that says "search harder" which would initiate the full enumeration of the relevant filesystems. Of course some UX professional will tell me I'm wrong, they don't like anything they didn't think of themselves.

I don't know how but it works beautifully for me on windows 11. What I mean is, I have been using windows for decades and I do not like any changes at all, they are all forced on me. But this change successfully turned me around. I find I rarely use File Explorer/file managers any more and access most applications and documents through the search.

I do remember it sucking on previous versions. I did use winaero tweaker to turn off the web results (and many other annoyances).

Almost everyone's search has been broken like this. I don't trust Windows search, I don't trust search in Explorer - but I also don't trust search in my Samsung at OS level, in Google Drive, in OneDrive, in Dropbox, and in just about any other webshit there is.

I can't put my finger on what's going on exactly; there seems to be some design choice commonly made, that makes search behave (or appear) inconsistently to the point you can't really trust it to be exhaustive. I.e. "if I search for term 'foo' and it finds nothing, it means 'foo' thing is not on file". It's a fundamental guarantee search systems should deliver, but these days most don't. Without this guarantee, I always seek out means to manually walk the resource catalog (e.g. filesystem tree).

One of the first things to do on a fresh install is to disable the Web search results in Start menu search. There's a setting in the registry to do it.

There's also a setting on the Settings app's Search page, which you can conveniently reach via the kebab menu on the search results.

Same problem on MacOS.

As someone who uses both that's news to me. For some reason its AI based image recognition doesn't seem to work anymore but it actually finds files based on their name, something that hasn't worked in Windows since at least Windows 10.

Not with Raycast :D

It's weird how it does seem to do something even though it doesn't do anything. You can see the search indexer running and it's pulling a varying amount of power towards some kind of goal but nobody seems to know what it is. Does it build an index that always corrupts? Is it in a loop of crashing and restarting itself? And it's been like this my whole life practically. It really shows how anything can be normalized if it goes on long enough.

...where we get to one of the best things about Windows: there is a free (and probably open source) tool for everything: https://www.voidtools.com/

There is a definite disconnect, I cannot think of ANY scenario in which I (as a developer and power user) would want the Start menu to search the internet.

If I need to google something and I'm working in another app, it's easier for me to just type a search term into the start menu than it is to find the browser to click on, open a new tab and then enter the search terms.

Get Windows LTSC instead and run Firefox ! Most problems solved.

is not mozilla advertising company, that heavilly pushes AI? How is their spying any different from microsoft?

Where?

The only tolerable Windows 11 experience is a corporate PC with Active Directory login.

And an IT department vetting updates before they go out.

the same IT department that got blamed not allowed user changing wallpaper or installing crowstrike

Was it the 8 to 10 upgrade that MS slipped into Windows Update or a different one? Whichever it was, the IT department where I was at the time had apparently left Windows Update untouched and it wreaked havok.

This might be obvious, but all of those things have a single common denominator: Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing. This is the biggest generalized danger in computing today: That OS (and device) manufacturers have gotten it in their heads that it's OK for them to have a strong say in what your computer runs. User doesn't want X, Y, or Z running on his computer? TOUGH. We are going to run it and make it really hard or impossible for user to turn it off. As a user, I no longer feel like I'm driving the car--I'm just a passenger. "Where do you want to go today?" has turned into "You're going here today, whether you want to or not!"

It's more: you want to go to location A? Sure, but we're going to make a quick stop at locations B, C and D first, and the only available car is a known-to-be-dangerous self-driving robotaxi with no steering wheel or pedals.

... which in the middle of the route decides to instead drive onto a container ship and bring you to a robotic island?

ah no wait, that's the announced next update.

All true, and yet: Windows accessibility actually works. I use a screen reader daily. Linux a11y is complete dogshit — AT-SPI2 is unreliable, Orca is barely maintained, Wayland broke what little existed.

I need something that actually works. When Linux goes off and decides it'll rewrite its working desktop stack and it's still, ten years later, not useable?

ADHD-Driven development might be fine if you can see your system. When you can't, being at the whims of some teenager chasing the new shiny is just frustrating.

I mean, why are you even on Windows then? Apple is the accessibility king by far. Both Windows and Android are aeons behind.

I'm not completely sure I would call Apple the accessibility king. It's UI gets worse with each release. Modal dialogues with no keyboard options to make a choice in the window at times, etc.

Eh, no. My experience working in web accessibility, it seems most visually impaired individuals have a preference for windows, seemingly because it has the most mature set of accessibility/screen reader tools around largely because of how long windows has been around and how much of a requirement it is for enterprise environments.

As far as I know, accessibility has been built into macOS since the early days, and with great care. Which then propagated to application built for macOS, and later on, iOS. iOS is rather magnificent for (visually) impaired people.

In contrast, Windows has had its accessibility features bolted on, and the best ones are third-party which makes it even more bolted-on. And then you have twenty different frameworks to make Windows applications, all with varying (but usually mediocre) levels of accessibility support built in.

> When Linux goes off and decides it'll rewrite its working desktop stack and it's still, ten years later, not useable?

In fairness it wasn't just the rewrite that was the problem, but it looks for all the world like there was a large faction in the Linux UI world around Wayland that believes accessibility is insecure and designed the new systems to make it impossible. It has been an interesting if unfortunate situation that seems to be slowly being fixed.

All of this in the name of being able to run proprietary malware like you do on android.

What on earth are you referring to?

That the security model on Unix (and Linux) is to trust your applications and mistrust other users of the same machine.

While now the security model is that your applications are closed source and you cannot trust them, which is why you need wayland.

> [T]he security model on Unix (and Linux) is to trust your applications

If that were true, httpd (and all other system daemons) would be run as root and neither the 'nobody' user and group nor the various security-related X11 extensions would exist.

Anyone who has worked in this field for more than a few years (regardless of their era of entry) knows that nontrivial programs are faulty and can happen to or be induced to do things that are harmful in varying degrees to the operation of the computer that runs them.

Protecting against accidental mistakes and expecting applications to steal data are different levels.

9front tells me otherwise. It's security model with namespaces and rfork it's far more tuned to modern times than the GNU/Linux or BSD one where even wth mitigations and the like a good crafted NES sound file (6502 code in the end, as C64 MOD files) could cause mayhem on some buffer overflow executing x86 code.

rio(1) windows under plan9/9front have their own namespace and OFC you can restrict these per windows making these kind of attacks futile.

How's the a11y story under Plan 9? I always thought of Plan 9 as being very forward thinking for its time but unfortunately stuck in the past in various ways, but are there screen readers and voice input and everything?

nothing yet but an flite port. But by design it's far easier than with X and/or with DBUS.

Why was gnome pushed so hard? In my eyes it looks horrible and I still prefer xfce...

I wonder the same thing. I've been using KDE Plasma and have not looked back.

> but it looks for all the world like there was a large faction in the Linux UI world around Wayland that believes accessibility is insecure and designed the new systems to make it impossible

Agreed.

FWIW, accessibility is insecure, that is a fact, and it's also fine. The problem is that many security-minded people forget to ask the critical question: security for whom, and from what. There is no such thing as "security" in general. There is always a subject being secured from a threat.

With Wayland, like with most modern software development, the user ends up being the thing to secure from, and what is being protected are the interests of the vendor.

macOS supports VoiceOver even in the boot disk selection screen. That's the real king of accessibility.

macOS has some strengths and is certainly ahead of Linux in terms of a11y but my experience working in web accessibility, it seems most visually impaired individuals have a preference for windows, seemingly because it has the most mature set of accessibility/screen reader tools around largely because of how long windows has been around and how much of a requirement it is for enterprise environments.

Question. In this new weird age of agentic everything. Does running your system from an agent TUI resolve much of the issues you’d otherwise have without a decent screen reader?

What can be done to address this? Which project needs the most help do you think?

A fundraiser and/or financial grant to a foundation like gnome, or a distro that makes a11y a priority, is probably the best way to approach it. Without the financial investment, many contributors just aren't considering or even aware of issue.

The distributed best-effort approach works ok for some things, but is at a disadvantage for supporting holistic standards across independent apps.

> When Linux goes off and decides it'll rewrite

You're acting as if Linux is a single entity that can just decide to improve this or the other. The phrase "Linux should do X" is as useful as "Society should do X". It's not useful unless you can state what needs to change specifically, or you're talking to the right people.

> When you can't, being at the whims of some teenager chasing the new shiny is just frustrating.

Since most development on linux-related projects is based on volunteering, perhaps you can volunteer and organize for your own 'whims'? Personally I would love it if someone like you would get off their ass and use your knowledge about screenreaders to improve things for everyone.

> This might be obvious, but all of those things have a single common denominator: Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing.

Sure, but Microsoft have to strike a balance, too. If they push too hard in this direction, they'll lose their users to Macs on one side (probably the majority) and Linux on the other (a minority in number, but perhaps significant in expertise and clout). Once an exodus begins, it's much harder to stop. So where we are in that balance, and the state of user mindshare migration, is still interesting to discuss.

> Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing.

Nothing new. Microsoft has been exactly like that since its inception. People are asleep at the wheel of they only realize it now.

> all of those things have a single common denominator: Microsoft, over you, getting to decide what your computer is doing. [...] OS (and device) manufacturers have gotten it in their heads that it's OK for them to have a strong say in what your computer runs.

As I've said before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44923555), in my opinion the starting point of this slide for Microsoft was WGA on Windows XP. It was the first time that they made the operating system treat the computer's administrator as hostile.

Not coincidentally, that was around when Microsoft really internalized that they are an enterprise company, not a consumer company.

In enterprises, the local user IS hostile, or at least some percentage of them are. The ethos of “we can’t trust end users” leaked from enterprise fixation into general Microsoft culture.

Local user being hostile should be a user group setting in enterprise versions, not a default across all versions of them.

But now that I think of it, I was pretty hostile to my computer when I was ten years old and running windows 2000. I don't think we ever saw so many pop-ups before.

But even so, the admins of the computer system should have control over their computers. I can understand if my mom's user profile might have limitation, but the my admin profile should not.

Security isn't an unqualified good. You're always secure something from some threat. Keeping the subject and the threat actor implicit is causing confusion in minds of many tech people, and is in part the reason how we land in situations like this.

Windows is not just an operating system on your computer. It is a product (nowadays, a service) of Microsoft. Some security systems in it are meant to protect the PC/system/user from external threats. Others are meant to protect Microsoft, and Windows as a product/service, from the user.

Being specific about what is being protected and from whom, is more important than specifics of the actual security technology. After all, depending on the answers to those two questions, the very same security technology is protecting you from a cyber-criminal installing a rootkit on your PC, protecting Microsoft from you pirating Windows, and protecting copyright interests from you trying to watch a movie in a geographic location they don't want you to watch it in.

But Apple decides what your computer is doing even before it boots up, Microsoft is not even in the same league.

Curious about some examples of this. Consumer windows computers have historically had a lot more preinstalled garbage software. Do you mean app store restrictions or something else?

I mean Activation Lock Server Check.

As someone who had a brand new M1 MBP stolen from a San Jose coworking space. I am 100% in favor of the this having at best some parts and not a working computer.

Yeah let's all surrender what remains of computer ownership to a software-hardware conglomerate, because theft.

You can turn it off.

You think you can.

I do hope you understand that 'bad thing X happened to me, therefore any measure to prevent X is good' is a logical fallacy?

"As someone who had a brand new mbp stolen from me, I'm personally 100% in favor of the remote-c4 installed in every mbp. Just imagine if he could have accessed my banking information?"

Although prebuilts often come with preinstalled garbage, that is software that only runs after the whole OS has started and intialized. Before that there are several pieces of code that run.

When the motherboard first gets power, there's a chip that 'runs some code' that powers all devices connected to the motherboard, and loads the BIOS from another chip on the motherboard. Then once all components of your computer are powered and in a ready state, the BIOS takes over. Once the bios performs its checks, it loads the 'bootloader' from the harddrive. This is the first piece of MS code in a windows pc. The bootloader will locate the installation of the windows installation, and then load and run the actual windows install..

That's what the guy above you meant. Any motherboard can be used in any desktop, because the chip on the motherboard provides a standard way of loading a bios. The bios can be changed out, as long as it uses the same standard of talking to the motherboard, and it is able to load a bootloader, it should be able to function. The bootloader and the OS itself can be changed too. Basically the whole system is designed around standards that allow people to do whatever they want.

Apple on the other hand doesn't do this at all. The write every piece of code themselves, and all their chips are custom built to do whatever apple wants it to do. This is why it's hard to replace certain components, because there's code in some chip on the motherboard that runs way before the OS even starts, that checks if all your components are allowed by apple. And in contrast to whatever Microsoft this is something they build into the hardware, so it can never be disabled by the user.

That's the difference in control that you have between an apple and a (Microsoft) PC. If you install linux on a pc, there is nothing MS related left on your pc. If you install linux on a macbook, you will still have apple code running on your device.

You’re exaggerating - my computer has never prevented me from doing what I want to do with it. There are some annoyances but that can be said about absolutely every system.

Ditto. I've found it pretty tolerable once I've used "ShutUp10!" to disable the annoying stuff. I've used harder tools than it, but I've then found it breaks useful stuff (like the Xbox Gaming stuff, which some MSFT games use).

> Frequent "Let's finish setting up your PC" after updates

Fwiw, this one is entirely predictable. Windows shows the Second Chance Out Of Box Experience (SCOOBE - pronounced like Scooby-Doo) each time a semi-annual update is installed, i.e. once every six months.

Which you can disable in Settings.

Pro is almost pointless these days. If you really want to be upset about what could be you should try a windows server trial with Desktop experience.

Zero bullshit and it just works. Why does this have to be $1k+???

If you're on Pro, Group Policy tends to be more stable than plain registry tweaks.

In particular, I advise everyone to turn off web search in the start menu, it makes it so much faster and more useful:

   Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search > Don't search the web or display web results in Search

I use Linux exclusively on the backend, a Windows laptop is usually what my clients issue to me for gigs, and I migrated years ago from macOS to a Linux laptop as my personal primary daily driver (though I still use macOS, just not where I spend 90% of my personal time). I agree with Windows having its own issues like you pointed out. To be fair however, Linux and macOS daily driver experiences are also not without their annoyances.

The Linux daily driver windmills I am currently tilting at are the lack of 3D infrared sensor-based secure facial recognition. On Linux we currently are missing true 3D mapping, the option to bind the biometric data to the onboard TPM, and running the matching in something like the Protected Media Path stack Windows uses, so Linux facial recognition solutions like Howdy are not as secure as on Windows.

Other deep gaps in the Linux daily driver role are not having a solution to encrypt our disks and hibernate under Secure Boot, nor a comprehensive common application framework for power management like Apple's IOKit and IOPowerSources so my Linux laptop gets far less battery life than my macOS laptop. Linux has many different ways for applications to participate in power management, so as a result there isn't a single way for the applications to cooperatively negotiate for this centralized scarce resource based upon user preferences.

But the death by a thousand tiny cuts I was experiencing on macOS led me to reluctantly conclude I'd rather face the thousand tiny cuts in Linux where at least I have the option to go to the source and address or fix it myself a particular cut got annoying enough. In my clients' corporate land, I hide behind a small army of desktop teams that grind away most of the annoyances you list (mainly through the pricing discrimination magic of Windows enterprise licensing).

I've resigned myself to not hold out hope for re-experiencing what I felt was my personal peak user experience of the early 2000's PowerPC PowerBook and Intel MacBook Pro and early Mac OS X. It was a portable Unix workstation that could run a full virtual Windows box inside, giving me the best of all worlds, and It Just Works bled into every nook and cranny of the entire stack.

I believe a lot of it came down to that Steve Jobs was an intensely personal user of his own products from the perspective of someone doing it himself as much as someone who is the head of a multinational multi-billion dollar corporation could be, with as little corporate desktop support as necessary, and he had an extreme intolerance for annoyances in the small details.

Linux as a daily driver has many, many rough edges. But at least I can durably contribute into it as I solve my own annoying small details, and hope a flywheel effect eventually takes place in the future.

> not having a solution to encrypt our disks and hibernate under Secure Boot

Did you consider coreboot with Heads and a hardware key instead?

Thank you Kind Internet Stranger!

I dunno, you say you prefer Windows over macOS, but it sounds to me like you're fighting your OS.

MacOS has a lot of flaws, but at least I'm not fighting it. If I say to do something, it does it. It doesn't suddenly revert your decision.

My sentiment with windows (likely shared by most people here consciously using it) is that it's a good OS at heart somwhere. The core of it is very solid and has been for a while, and most of the crap parts that people complain about (see above) are "tacked on" to it and could fairly easily be removed/reverted if Microsoft wanted to (in fact they already have done, see IoT Enterprise LTSC and Windows Server), and it would still unmistakably be Windows.

I don't know much about MacOS but the same isn't really true of [desktop] Linux. Most of its flaws are not easily fixed in the same way and are much deeper architectural/social issues that require a lot of work to fix.

> don't know much about MacOS but the same isn't really true of [desktop] Linux. Most of its flaws are not easily fixed in the same way and are much deeper architectural/social issues that require a lot of work to fix.

I'm not sure where you got this, but I've been a fulltime Linux user for near 2 decades, and I promise you almost everything is fixable. The biggest issues are drivers, but even then you're bound to find someone who has developed some drivers or if not, you can develop your own if you have the skill or pay someone if you don't.

I agree about Winndows, but increasingly feel the same way about macOS.

As for Linux, hard disagree, but only because I'm able to fix most anything that annoys me myself with enough elbow grease (same goes for Windows and macOS) except for application compatibility.

Then again, a lot of this comes down to the fact that all three have decent terminal applications, shells, tolerable programming interfaces, and the same choice of cross-platform browsers.

Mobile devices, on the other hand, are the real enemy.

If by "conciously using it" means picking it over the alternatives and not using it while unconcious, then yes presumably that subset of people prefer it over the alternatives. That's pretty circular reasoning. Most people who actively choose to use linux also think that linux is a good os.

And I think most linux users would pretty strongly disagree that it's easier to fix windows, a user hostile, closed source operating system with far fewer options for every single user facing aspect of the OS than linux. You have that completely backwards.

>If by "conciously using it" means picking it over the alternatives and not using it while unconcious, then yes presumably that subset of people prefer it over the alternatives. That's pretty circular reasoning. Most people who actively choose to use linux also think that linux is a good os.

I'm not saying people who use it think it's better, I don't know where you picked that up from. I'm pointing out the awkward, strained relationship between its users. Like, "it's shit, but it could be so much less shit if Microsoft got their act together!". That sort of sentiment.

>And I think most linux users would pretty strongly disagree that it's easier to fix windows, a user hostile, closed source operating system with far fewer options for every single user facing aspect of the OS than linux. You have that completely backwards.

The other replies are confused by what i meant by this as well. Obviously it's easier to add a driver or patch a problem than on Windows, but the Linux ecosystem is fundamentally fragmented. You can't really boss people around when you're not paying them, so as a result there are a hundred different ways to do the same things. This is one of Linux's greatest strengths, but also a big weakness as people can't really agree on how to integrate things when it's important.

There is no real solution to this problem that I can think of.

Alternatively: you're not fighting your OS because you know you can't win, so you give up before even considering fight as an option.

Windows is super annoying to power users in large part because you know it can be beaten into submission with enough effort, but that effort is usually just not worth it.

Exactly! And this was a huge reason why I switched to Linux as my primary OS. For a while the only problem for me was gaming, but that's less of an issue now because of Valve but more so because I kinda stopped playing games.

LOL, any __ONE__ of those would be a deal-killer for me. The sum is so WTF I can't understand how anyone willingly chooses Windows over... anything.

(mind you, MacOS has its own nightmares from KeyChain hell, iCloud crap, signed apps etc - but I can use my Mac laptop without iCloud/etc and go weeks without thinking about Apple)

The right answer is that these things don't really show up that much. Like I encounter something like that once in a year? Yes, it's infuriating that they show up during install, or while you're downloading Chrome from the Edge, but apart from that, none of these show up on a regular basis. Or perhaps you're a casual user, agree to one thing here, don't disable another thing there, then yes, you'll get some of those. But that's not reality for any semi-experienced user. I mean it was perfectly normal to install replacement for start menu when it was bad at one point and that's it, you're good to go, and you'll use it for years the way you want. We're not masochists.

I guess many of these are fuel for enragement posts (and deservely so), but it's not a reality of how we use Windows.

Could be because I don't like "tinkering" with my desktop OS. I'm either:

* Configuring and operating them professionally as part of a larger system. I have "The Linux Programming Interface" and "Windows Internals" sitting right next to each other right next to me.

* Using productivity software professionally or for hobby.

* Doing leisure activities like gaming, reading, etc.

These annoyances are like 0.001% of my interaction with the OS. While super annoying, they are mostly brief and can be worked around(mechanics car though). The value proposition for me is still super high and better than the alternatives for me.

Probably the biggest negative impact on me is how these problems feed the flood of "Microslop" slop drowning out more interesting discourse.

Easy solution: Ditch WSL, ditch Windows altogether, and use a good Linux distro with Plasma 6.6. Problem solved.

FYI macOS now natively has edge snap, half-half tiling with draggable divider that resizes both windows, and even tiling options similar to Windows except a bit less options (e.g. no thirds) -- ok for a laptop screen, ultrawide monitors benefit from a free app to add more options.

And the shell environment is POSIX, with most bash scripts just being ootb compatible without WSL-like shenanigans.

>I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore.

i agree with most of what you said, but this is borderline fantasy.

the majority of home market share is not guaranteed, sure. with how good gaming is on non-windows machines now, there isnt much for a home user to get locked-in with (except games that require windows-only malware i.e. anticheat)

but government, institution (hospitals, universities, etc.) and large non-tech enterprise? that will be windows for at least 20 more years even if they started to change everything now (which they arent). and the number of machines in those places absolutely dwarfs the number of home installs.

Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already happening as we speak.

>gradually and then suddenly.

governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines.

20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" today.

Still, a lot of those woke up from a profound sleep about digital sovereignty and are now contemplating leaving the American software ecosystem.

It won't be sudden, until it is

and then something like COVID happens and they change fast.

expanding your vpn to support more employees working from home is much easier than replacing hundreds of thousands of machines, all of the windows-only software that runs on those machines, training all of your employees on a new operating system, cancelling all of your existing contracts... you get the point.

well, it happened with Teams meetings replacing fancy CISCO equipments.

It happened with all the vpn+shared drives buried to just use SPO.

different experience,I guess.

Did your employees got trained? or just sent the link to 3 'online trainings'?

Managers manage to switch to Mac seamlessly. I am sure the rest will follow with cheaper macs now available. And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian)

>And now, with 'office on the web', you can use basic office everywhere. (even on Debian)

office is a tiny, almost negligible, piece of the puzzle. quickbooks, solidworks and other cad software, bespoke software, security software, user management, permissions management (replacing active directory), contractual obligations, the millions of dollars required in implementation, the millions more dollars required for increased user support, and so on...

but, again, just to reiterate: i am disputing that windows is in "significant danger" today.

You can't suddenly replace them, but in a lot of cases you can find that over an extended period more and more people choose the MacBook option from IT rather than the Windows one.

most people are not willing to learn an entire new operating system for no reason, though. this might happen in tech-based companies, sure, but banks? accounting firms? ive never seen them offer macbooks.

this is also ignoring all of the critical software that is windows-only (e.g. quickbooks, solidworks, bespoke programs in banks and government).

point is: microsoft is not in "significant danger" today.

Most people dont even use the operating system. They look for the apps menu, then click what they want to run. Most people can switch between OSes easier than you think because there really isn't that much difference in how they work on the surface.

users are one component, but you are still ignoring/forgetting the rest.

user management, file management, security, windows-specific software, auditing requirements, required capital investment, lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on.

> lack of competent linux sysadmins compared to windows sysadmins, and so on.

Wasn't this a microsoft marketing campaign like 20 years ago? Are we still on it?

An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine, or only occasionally having done so when it was absolutely necessary.

>An increasing number of people are coming into the workplace never having used a Windows machine

i would love to see your numbers for this. what does "increasing percentage" mean? 1% -> 2%? 10% -> 20%?

i teach at a college level, in tech, and would estimate ~5% of incoming students have any experience with something other than windows on a pc, at best. outside of tech, i would estimate ~2%.

Maybe in US and related high salary countries where the Apple tax isn't a problem.

Rest of the world, depends pretty much even if an half work second hand PC is an option.

In the low salary countries, everyone is doing everything on phones, not PCs

There are enough folks with pirated Windows, which is what they use when a phone isn't enough.

My daughter works at a bank in Canada and she was issued a Macbook.

surprising! what i know of canadian banks is admittedly little, so they might be moving faster than the banks i am familiar with. may i ask what department? do you know if it is managed by intune?

I don't know much. She isn't allowed to talk about any operational details. She just started there a few weeks ago.

And Canadian banks aren't known for moving fast. They are pretty conservative (at least the big chartered banks are).

Only in countries where the quality of life allows such decisions to take place.

"Suddenly" in this case does not mean tomorrow.

It means that, today, a lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it, and then "suddenly" in 2029 Microsoft starts seeing a deluge of defections. It means a whole bunch of peopling finishing the conversion all at once, relatively speaking, even if that "all at once" is 3-4 years away.

To put it another way, the thresholds where people get annoyed enough to quit are highly correlated to each other. If individuals on HN are posting "I don't want to switch, I've been working this way for decades now, but Windows has crossed the line for me, I've switched to Linux, and it was easier than I thought it would be", then corporations and governments are having very similar deliberations internally.

This is probably a more accurate model for how "influencers" seem to work than the idea that some crazy guy in your organization falls in love with Product X and evangelizes it internally. I'm sure that happens and is a real force, but this correlation-of-experience effect is probably bigger on the whole. If Product X was good enough to make an evangelist internally, or more germane to this conversation, to make some a mortal enemy of it internally, it's usually because it was a good enough or bad enough product to be able to do that in the first place, and eventually everyone will figure it out in exactly the same way, just later.

20 years is way too large a minimum estimate. If Microsoft responds correctly that might be good, but if they just decide to rest on their laurels and extract whatever value they can out of Windows while they can, Windows would never last 20 years of that. Even the slowest organizations can move faster than that. After all, to cut Microsoft's revenues off at the knees, they don't need to remove every last Windows 2000 server in their backoffice they can't upgrade, they need to cut out just the majority of desktop licenses.

>20 years is way too large a minimum estimate.

i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software, etc. and every company is willing to retrain 95% of their employees on a new operating system, have increased support requirements for a few years at least, etc.

not even touching the capital required for such a transition that in many cases has questionable benefits (from a business perspective).

time will tell! i have first-hand experience with how fast banks move, so i will stick by my 20 year minimum. happy to see otherwise, though.

in any case. what i replied to was a claim that windows is in "significant danger" today. it is not.

It doesn't take all the specialized Windows-only line-of-business software being rewritten to have massive defections to Linux happen.

The market you're describing is real, and very significant—but I don't think it's even a majority of Windows users. If so, it's a small one.

And imagine what even 30-40% of all Windows sales disappearing over the course of 2-3 years would do to Microsoft. To Windows as a platform.

Then imagine what would happen if it was 50-70%.

The former, I would describe as "a disaster".

The latter, I would describe as "apocalyptic". (Y'know. For Microsoft as a company. Not in general.)

It's an interesting case to me. The company I work for has been shipping systems on windows since the 90's despite pretty consistent requests from customers to ship hardware on Linux. 2 years ago we started creating our own Linux distribution and this year started shipping products on it. We still ship a lot of stuff on Windows 11, but that market share is starting to shift now. 10 years from now I could see us completely moved to our Linux distro. Now, what's actually interesting is that it wasn't customer requests or efficient capital allocation that drove this. Microsoft effectively forced us to do this against our will by a combination discontinued products and handling of Windows 11 and now that we've spent the capital we won't be going back.

You can't abandon Windows because of software X, Y, Z. Over the years vendors move to multiplatform as more and more customers ask for it. These changes are slow but steady. And one day you find out that the last "must have" software is not limited to Windows anymore. That's when the dam breaks.

To me, this is the way linux wins, if it does.

Product teams deciding it's easier to ship on + customers having enough linux familiarity (from their other projects).

And the current crop of Microsoft people on the Windows team don't seem to understand building a platform in the way 90/00s Windows teams did.

It's clear MS moved a lot of their smartest people over to work on Azure products.

Out of curiosity why a custom distro instead of one of the major ones?

We have some special cases I can't go too much into that lend themselves well to rolling our own and stripping things down as much as possible.

> i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks, every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software, every government branch is rewriting their custom windows-only software

Up front they won't need to do a full rewrite. They'll only need to make it work well enough under Wine.

At a source level, tools like Avalonia's xpf make porting WPF apps to other platforms easier:

https://avaloniaui.net/xpf

of the stupid enterprise-y software like quickbooks, solidworks and other proprietary stuff that i have used, they barely work well enough under native windows. not to mention, even sticking them in a windows VM voids any support contracts.

In 20 years I expect basically all of these to move to web-based interfaces and away from thick clients. You're already seeing graphics heavy use cases like CAD do this (Onshape has been hugely popular and is cloud native on Linux). Even behemoths like SAP are increasingly web enabled through fiori.

it would be awesome to see less windows-only software. i am all for it.

> unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks

They already have. You can't buy QuickBooks for desktop anymore unless you want Enterprise, the expensive $4k+/year subscription. They dumped the Pro/Pro Plus and moved all those users to QuickBooks online.

And now they've launched Intuit Enterprise Suite in an effort to move the QBE customers into Online. The writing is on the wall there, desktop is going away.

It's also happening in more specialized areas too. I work in waste management/recycling, and this industry was traditionally windows heavy with thick clients on desktops. Even the truck scale software is moving to web interfaces, as are the dispatching and asset management.

OS increasingly doesn't matter for most knowledge work.

Yeah, there are going to be industries that will probably never move, certainly not within a 20 year timeline, but there are a ton that are moving or have moved entirely to SaaS and web apps.

> i disagree. unless intuit is also rewriting quickbooks, dassault systèmes is rewriting solidworks

Autodesk Fusion runs in browser, and even SolidWorks has an online version. You were saying?...

> every bank is rewriting their custom windows-only software

This has been happening for a while, actually. Typically they rewrite software as webapps, with a microservice-based backend.

> not even touching the capital required for such a transition that in many cases has questionable benefits (from a business perspective).

Software gets rewritten all the time, often in the "Ship of Theseus" way. The next rewrite will just focus on moving stuff away from MS.

> Autodesk Fusion runs in browser, and even SolidWorks has an online version. You were saying?..

Mostly used for visualisation, rather than real work, especially given the browser limitations.

> lot of enterprises begin pondering the question, and then about a year from now, they start seriously studying and prototyping it

Not sure about big enterprises, but I already see this happening in the mid-size, non tech company market.

I'm an IT manager and has been a sysadmin/ops for my entire career, and the past ~4 years I've been seeing a pretty consistent shift toward companies my company does business with deploying more and more macs. Windows is still dominant in my industry, but the cracks in the wall are widening. It's gotten to the point that I'm genuinely surprised now when I see Windows when someone screen shares.

Apple silicon is just too good and the generations coming into the workforce now don't have a "default" windows familiarity that we used to have. They're coming in needing to be trained on how to use a PC in general, windows or not, having used nothing but chromebooks and mobile OSes.

Now, Office OTOH is more entrenched than windows. Even the macshops I interact with are all on M365. Macs are managed with Intune, users & SSO with Entra, Defender for EDR, and of course the office apps. And that's why Microsoft probably isn't as afraid as it seems when it comes to Windows. Even without Windows lock-in, there is very real M365 lockin that is far more entrenched than the endpoint OS.

And how many times this year have you seen a headline with some European country's government starting to migrate away from Microsoft?

a couple? and as far as i know, none of them have completed the transition.

it is great that some are starting, seriously. but windows is not in significant danger as of today.

Wait, I'm confused, are you calling moving from Windows to Linux a "decline"? Because I can agree with that ;)

"Decline" in people's trust in a particular platform, in this case. Or the decline of the platform or company itself.

And I'd imagine that this decline accelerates as _developers_ begin migrating to other platforms, since the applications they created are what made that platform appealing to non-developers. That's why Steve Ballmer was jumping up and down, shouting, in a sweaty fervor. Say what you want about pre-Nadella Microsoft, but they definitely recognized the importance of having lots of developers writing software for Windows. And they treated developers like VIPs.

> decline accelerates as _developers_ begin migrating to other platforms

developers don't control what platforms an enterprise would use. Vendors don't dictate the platform either - vendors sell to a customer, and so it makes sense that the customer dictates the platform.

when migration to different platform happens, it's because there's something disruptive that enterprises need to move to, or a new class of enterprise without existing/legacy baggage sees competitive advantage in moving. This happened to IBM when their mainframes no longer offered competitive advantage over the newly minted PC platforms.

If/when windows become lackluster in terms of a required feature, or did not keep up with a needed feature that an alternative platform provides, then the switch will happen fast. What that feature might be i dont know - if i knew, i'd be making it.

> developers don't control what platforms an enterprise would use

They might not control it directly, but they absolutely influence it. Linux was on the losing end of this for many years, as common end-user enterprise software was native and only available for Windows (or in the case of Microsoft Office, nominally available for Mac OS but with fewer features and lots more bugs). That was Microsoft's moat and it started leaking when web applications became ubiquitous. That leak later accelerated when those web applications had to work on mobile operating systems (namely iOS and Android) that Microsoft did not own and could not control.

> Vendors don't dictate the platform either - vendors sell to a customer, > and so it makes sense that the customer dictates the platform.

There are plenty of counterexamples here. I used to have two legacy SGI machines in my cubicle at work precisely because a vendor dictated the platform to that Very Big Enterprise company many years earlier.

Similarly, many people buy Macs solely to run Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro, because the vendor (Apple) dictated the platform by discontinuing the Windows versions. Apple doesn't have the market share Microsoft has, but unlike Microsoft, they can maintain strong control because of their breadth (OS and hardware for desktop, tablet, and phone, plus high-end creative software) and because a lot of their customers are all-in on Apple's ecosystem.

> Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ?

This comment is multiple years out of date at this point…Lunar lake was considered an exceptionally successful Mobile processor platform that was extremely competitive with Apple M series chips, Panther lake is supposedly improving on that by an even greater degree, and Nova lake is supposedly an extremely promising upcoming desktop platform, and their Arc graphics are excellent for the price point. This is like writing off MacBooks during their thin and hot touchbar/butterfly keyboard era and then assuming they’re that way still in 2026 when they’re now extremely well received laptops lol

I do believe the OP's comparison was with AMD, not Apple. Intel has fallen into financial difficulties following product failures and AMD's strong competition, a far cry from Intel's heydays.

Apple barely comes into the picture, with less than 10% of the worldwide PC market, and was not a factor in Intel's decline.

Perhaps on the consumer front. But if you have some 30yr old factory with machines, those machines probably use windows software, and you can be reasonably sure that that software will still run in 20 years.

It's not like apple just deciding that we don't do 32bit applications anymore all of a sudden. However many ads MS will shove in windows, as long as they can run software that they depend on, companies and factories won't care.

I resemble that remark. I've got to wonder how many people are starting to cut over to Linux/Mac or just stopped caring about being patched on Win10.

A couple weekends ago, I made the overdue call to kill my dual booting with Windows 10 and go full Linux. I'd considered finding a copy of the embedded Win10 long term version or paying for the patching. The local account was one of the things holding me back from doing the update. I knew I could muck with things to still have it, but figured it would be yoinked away later. Similar thoughts to updating the old threadripper that no longer qualifies for Win11. The reinforcement came from all the blasted copilot integration -- notepad, paint... just looking like evasiveness was going to be everywhere.

For a long time my 'good' box was Linux, my old box was Windows. So much just works. I still have an M2 with Windows 10 on it, but it is not in any machine right now. Will see if I run out of space and need it before they actually provide something I'd want to even have on my desk.

I agree with this. At this point, Windows is like COBOL.

Large parts of one german state switched to open source. First they laughed at them and now they are envious.

The switch to Linux is happening this year. Until the end of the year they want all workers on Linux instead of Windows.

It is possible, and fast if you want it.

kudos to them!

out of curiosity, "large parts" of "one german state" is how many machines roughly?

i am suspecting that it is probably nowhere near enough to put windows in "significant danger". however, i am rooting for their success and hope that they thoroughly document (and publish) the process. i have never seen a transition like that go smoothly, let alone when it is in government.

This alone obviously doesn’t put Windows in danger, but if it does go over well then it’ll mark a turning point; A large non-techy institution getting away from Microsoft’s castle and being better off for it would signal to the world that it’s not only doable, but could even be worth it. It’ll take a while, but this could be the start of the end for Windows.

>This alone obviously doesn’t put Windows in danger,

so, the quote i specifically replied to said that today windows is in "significant danger", and i said it isnt. we seem to be in agreement.

as for what the future holds, i think it will be much slower than other people. but maybe i am wrong! which would be fine with me.

but, today, windows is not in "significant danger".

That "significant danger" was a bit of dramatization on my part. I don't expect anything to significantly change in the short term. I was more referring to long-term tidal-like change, which would be very hard to stop once momentum builds up.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...

That was the situation at the end of December.

Note that projects like these often fail not for technical reasons, not even cost, but political pressure from other parties, pressure from people that worked for ages in the administration and, well, have some problems to adjust to new software.

There is also a push from the German state to switch to open source or at least European solutions. There is the Deutschland-Stack, for which the IT planning council made open source mandatory: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Deutschland-Stack-IT-Planning-C...

And so on. At my day job more and more customers are reconsidering cloud adoption, especially M365 and such.

thanks for the link! it is unfortunate that they do not provide numbers, just percentages. i would love to know exactly (or roughly) how many machines "80%" is.

and the "80%" seems slightly misleading, because it is 80%, not including the tax administration. i have no idea what overall % of machines are inside or outside of the tax administration.

it also appears like this is mostly about software like office, rather than operating systems?

>"outside the tax administration, almost 80 percent of workplaces in the state administration have already been switched to the open-source office software LibreOffice."

switching away from office is significantly more realistic than migrating away from windows altogether, and something that every business can and should absolutely consider doing soon.

anyways, seriously, good for them. as i mentioned elsewhere, i hope that they are thoroughly documenting their experiences and are willing to share them after completion.

Migrating to linux will be started this year. I think a big step is also replacing sharepoint with Nextcloud.

Iirc they have 30k workstations.

This exact same thing (literally another german state i think) almost happened about 20 years ago and Microsoft freaked the fuck out. Thats where all the TCO nonsense came from - just one german state trying to de-microsoft.

I think Microsoft won, too.

I think theyre terrified of positive examples. Especially ones with FAR lower TCO and lower geopolitical risks.

> Large parts of one german state switched to open source.

Haven't they been doing this every 5 - 8 years since 2004?

there's a lot of parts of Germany. the original versions were town at a time. now it's whole regions.

> with how good gaming is on non-windows machines now, there isn't much for a home user to get locked-in with

The options for the average user are not linux or windows, but only macOS or Windows. Gaming is abysmal on macOS on any of the current hardware.

That said, I agree with you that there's less-and-less gaming lock-in on windows, but that's because the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android.

>That said, I agree with you that there's less-and-less gaming lock-in on windows, but that's because the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android.

I don't think you are aware of how much the landscape has changed regarding gaming and Linux.

ios gamer and pc gamer are different kind of gamers

>The options for the average user are not linux or windows, but only macOS or Windows.

i dont think this is true. steam surveys also do not agree: linux gamers are about 2x the number of OSX

2% (linux, really 1% steamOS and 1% other linux) and 1% (macOS) makes it sound much less impressive than "2x".

The options for an average user, who does not use steam and is not in the steam hw survey, are just macOS and windows.

The options for a serious gamer who uses steam (a tiny fraction of PC users) is clearly just Windows or SteamOS at this point, or more likely Windows + a steam deck (which is half of the 2% there, SteamOS).

Or just gaming on iOS / android, like most gamers do these days. The steam hw survey isn't really representative of gamers since the vast majority of them game on consoles and phones.

Or PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox as well, where XBox means another Windows flavour.

> the majority of gamers are gaming on iOS and android

Majority of mobile gamers. A very distinct category.

The home market is interesting, because they do need to address that as well. I'm not sure how many people are switching to macs, and even fewer are switching to Linux, That's not Microsofts problem, not on the large scale.

If you have a PC at home right now, and you're not technically inclined, and Windows is driving you nuts, you're just not getting a new PC again. More and more people are managing without PCs at home, using their phone or a tablet.

To many of us, the idea of your phone as your primary computing device is complete bonkers, but more and more people are choosing that option. Microsoft isn't really giving them a reason to stay, because every time they fired up their laptop Windows updates starts rolling in, taking forever, the UI keeps bugging them about things they don't care about and now there's ads in the start menu. So will Windows attempts to boot, the average person already did the thing they needed to do on their phone.

Windows Home Edition, or whatever it's call now, isn't competing with Linux and Mac, it's competing with Android and iOS, and it's losing.

That's correct. Furthermore if RAM prices keep going up and staying up, many people won't buy a new PC and they will switch everything on their phones. So the current market could be the undoing of Windows.

Only if you mean gaming on PlayStation and Nintendo, or mobile devices.

Valve is dependent on Windows games market, and Apple mostly cares about iOS games.

I've been using MacBook at work for years and I still perceive UX as fundamentally broken - I'm incapable of doing basic operations in Finder or changing basic system settings, and random shit I didn't want to press pops up when I'm doing other things. I feel like my grandpa trying to adjust to new phone. I will never ever recommend anything Apple to anyone.

Having said the above, I think that KDE is almost there to have a functional UX that can replace Windows. Not there yet because of random bugs, but almost almost.

Once gamers actually switch to Linux, which is a viable thing, they'll teach their family members. Home users will switch to Linux, and Windows will become an exclusively enterprise and government thing. But once average person is comfortable with Linux because they have it at home, those institutions will start switching to Linux too. And that's how Microsoft will fall. Just like most other corporations - through their own greed.

> I'm incapable of doing basic operations in Finder or changing basic system settings, and random shit I didn't want to press pops up when I'm doing other things

Why?

Because the interface is very counter-intuitive. I don't have any other explanation. In Windows, KDE and Gnome I eventually "get there" with Gnome being my least favorite, while MacOS feels like vibecoded "my first UI".

Also, the Macbook keyboard is fucked. I constantly press buttons I didn't mean to. This literally never happened to me on any other device. And that's after years of using a Macbook.

I’m sure you can learn how to use it

For the AI frontier, I find my windows PC just about useless unfortunately. Too much tooling and package doesn't adapt to WSL+windows host well. I've shifted my entire dev experience to my mbp which used to be my backup. Can't imagine the new generation of vibe coder will even consider a windows box.

> Too much tooling and package doesn't adapt to WSL+windows host well

Curious about this, what specifically?

+1 for Total Commander mention, its bizarre how many otherwise smart folks completely ignore this productivity enhancer. I keep showing it to colleagues but they all anyway revert back to basic clunky File explorer and variants.

Doesn't matter if I show them that I can be easily 10x faster, do stuff simply impossible otherwise, has tons of plugins etc. its just ignored.

I don't know about Total Commander because that appears to be Windows-only, but twin-pane "Commanders" (named after NC) do seem more popular in certain circles. They're still in wide use in Eastern Europe. Commanders have also influenced Dolphin, which has a built in twin-pane view (but it's not a commander because it lacks the typical keybinds) and there's a commander called Krusader that is a better fit.

Double Commander. It is awesome.

The only negative side of Total Commander is I'm extremly used to it - been using it since mid 90s. When I compare alternatives on Mac I'm searching for exact keyboard commands, navigation patterns, etc. I'm using Crax Commander, but it's not the same.

TC is probably one of the reasons I don't care that much about problems in newer versions of Windows, I don't use Explorer, I don't use windows search, text is viewed with Lister and not Notepad...

I'm the same way except with command prompts. So long as I have a decent shell (bash and PowerShell are both good enough) with the ability to open files and some reasonable form of tab completion, I mostly only open up Windows File Explorer windows to use context menu items, or with Win+E to quickly check free disk space, and Mac Finder windows to drag and drop files into file picker dialog boxes in GUI apps.

Also a big plug for Far:

https://farmanager.com/

Another die-hard user of dual-pane commanders, including Total Commander for over 20 years, reporting in.

The best part about Total Commander is that my license from like 20 years ago is still valid, and every update that comes out still works with it and never pushes for upgrades, etc. As much as new software has dark patterns and upsells everywhere, Total Commander is wonderfully frozen in time in that regard.

And then there's me, hoping they don't realize that Windows is in danger. The world needs less Microslop.

go freely on Linux. did that switch myself few years back. Double Commander is an exact copy with the same (and configurable) shortcuts.

The year is 2050. Desktop operating systems are a relic of the past.

Windows collapsed inwards on itself in 2031 when MS realized telemetry data was 10X as profitable when sold directly to nosy exes, neighbors, priests, and so on instead of advertising agencies. This practice was highly illegal, but the MS legal team unanimously ruled that SCOTUS's ruling on it was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, society barely survived.

Windows XP lives on quietly powering ATMs. We also still have Surface Tablets. They don't function anymore, but they hide the paunch of aging sports commentators well and NFL players and coaches greatly enjoy using them to bludgeon each other on the sidelines.

I’ve got three monitors on my MacBook plus its screen; I know all the keyboard shortcuts and then have automation with various other things. It was hard at first back in 2010 when I moved from Windows. It became second nature within a year and I’ve never looked back. Windows is fucking awful.

The weird thing about this is old Microsoft understood that ordinary users are not cash cows, companies are.

Microsoft built its empire because of SMB and Active Directory, and other enterprise features, where actually these things are important.

Ironically orgs hate MS Accounts just as much, as they have to give up a degree of autonomy, control and security compared to how Windows used to be.

>> It has to be a decision from the very top

Satya is incentivized to maximize his own pay package, not whatever it is that customers whinge about

This is maybe just that I switched to Linux years ago and haven't touched Apple hardware much, but what strikes me is how little the OS matters anymore. So much of the tooling is cross-platform now, so many of the applications are web based, and so much of the native platform can know be emulated, that part of why the market share isn't guaranteed is a level of portability that didn't exist a decade or two ago.

Everything from Edge as a cross-platform Chrome derivative to .NET as a cross-platform open-source toolkit to their React Native builds and experiments with Android suggest that MS itself understands this. The Linux side demonstrates it with things like Proton and the forthcoming Android desktop mode. The Web demonstrates it in general as it expands in capability and more applications skip shipping native entirely in favor of technologies like Electron. And not that I don't personally sob in system RAM, or have extreme reservations about how we got these things (see: Google and antitrust), but I can't say I hate the ease of switchover.

Ecosystem lock-in didn't go away, but it feels like it's changed a lot.

Yeah but it's one of those cases where even if an alternative works 99% of the time, it still isn't worth it because of that 1%. Same with web browser compatible - that's why even Microsoft switched to Blink. Same with electric car range - "it covers 99% of your journeys!" isn't as persuasive as proponents would like.

I mean, relative to IE, everything else was the alternative.

Whereas in more recent years, keeping a closed-source rendering engine that was no longer competitive in implementing the spec, wasn't being used when people had a choice, and was being used as a dependency for core components of the OS, probably wasn't winning many arguments.

(Edit: yes, I know Chakra was open source. I meant Trident.)

> from the very top

this kind of thing happens with the founder, but follow-on CEOs very very rarely have the leadership and vision.

I wonder how leadership can be the same for someone who initially folloed others when they joined.

Unless Apple decides to make computers for the remaining 80% of the less fortunate population (Neo isn't it), or OEMs decide to finally support GNU/Linux, Windows has many years to come, regardless of the pain points.

I know this is going to be unpopular on HN. They basically need to stop thinking Windows as a profit milking centre but as a moat to capture business and enterprise customers. In order to do that they need Windows to offer one of the best experience possible, or at least so good macOS and Linux is not much of a threat.

But I never thought Apple would venture into $599 category. Other than Education I am pretty sure large enterprise customer can get Neo for $499 as well. This completely shift the dynamics. And I guess it wakes a lot of people inside Microsoft, if they don't fight, the collapse of M$ might finally be numbered.

That would improve things.

Over the weekend, a family member could not log into their laptop any longer. Turned out to be “a problem with Teams” that required an unscheduled update which was marked as optional. Needless to say that they never used Teams on that machine.

When the login worked partially, their files weren’t accessible because they accidentally saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only. And OneDrive was also affected by the Teams bug.

Spent a good part of the day cursing in the direction of Redmond.

That must be the free version of OneDrive that forces cloud only.

It doesn't force cloud only. It defaults to cloud only. This is for both free and paid versions.

It has been this way for 3 years.

Default = Effectively Force for most users, I would think.

> saved it on OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only

This is why local backups should always have the highest priority.

Storing online can be useful, but people should never forget that local backups are the best.

Fully agree.

The problem is that on a fresh system with a free MS account, OneDrive shows up as the first choice as “$User - Personal files”. No notice that this actually only stores it online and offers only a fraction of the 1TB local drive.

Truly deceptive and my mistake for not noticing when I helped to set up that laptop.

Don't feel bad. Even if you noticed, It is likely that during the next "security" update, one drive would be re-enabled, as the default - and possibly everything moved there.

lol wtf

> OneDrive which now defaults to storing online only

Holy shit that's nuts!

Makes it easier for them to mine your files for personal data they can use to push ads I guess.

All they (all big tech companies) have been doing for the past decades has been mining data for ads. Yet, they still are pretty much stuck on the same level:

- I search for and buy something, they keep showing me ads for the thing I don't need anymore.

- I check out some random product, they all think if they just show me one more ad with that product, I will surely buy it.

While I am not immune to ads and they help with brand recognition, it can sometimes serve opposite purpose than intended.

- You started watching videos about farm equipment and how repairable it isn't. Now you get ads for farm supplies. You haven't been on a farm in 25 years.

I view it as a change in philosophy that does allow more ads indeed and goes deeper into how microsoft view themselves and by extension their customers:

You have an account that exists on Microsoft - on being somewhere, multiple places at once, even in location and function, in a ocean of Microsoft but whose existence and ownership of existence is finely permissioned.

vs.

You own your device(s).

One drive. On a server in one of Microsoft's datacenters.

Worse, when Microsoft made this change, One Drive actually deleted almost a terabyte of files from my Mac.

Uninstalled, restored from a recent backup, and haven't used it, or any other cloud sync application, since.

This happened on my work machine. One day I noticed tons of important files had been deleted without my permission after being migrated to OneDrive online only. At no point did I authorize anything like this and it took some time to copy them all back and disable everything I could access related to this.

Utter insanity that this can happen in a major OS. I switched to Linux for personal use years ago and have only gotten more grateful for that decision over time. My head would explode if a Linux distro tried any number of things that Windows regularly does to abuse their users, it's unfathomable.

So now 'cloud' is a reason to need local backups. Full circle!

Since forever, I've been pretty stubborn with managing my tech/digital stuff myself, even if it's kind of a pain, and this kind of shit reinforces that belief. Other entities, especially big companies, cannot be trusted with your tech. The best place for my hardware is in my house; software, in my own git repo; data, in plain files on my hard drives. The fewer hands that touch it, the better. Just let me have it my own way, please.

On Linux, I have my backup script that syncs the data to two local disks + Cloudflare R2. I run it when I want to even though I can schedule it to run automatically. I also use Syncthing which syncs the important files between my main computer and phone. So I have 4 copies of the data and I'm paying only for R2 (which I deliberately opted for). The setup works exactly as per my wishes and my needs. I am so grateful that Linux has given me that freedom.

I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in).

Guess what? With Apple's new Neo laptop the price is also way way wayyy out to lunch.

If MSFT gives a business a huge bulk discount to buy their laptops + Office360 + Teams... OK? But as a "consumer" it really sucks.

Want PC gaming? Steamdeck or Steambox.

The neo is the Chromebook for education revolution. It’s cheap and better than 98%+ of windows laptops. I’d not be surprised to see further Mac penetration to the business sector

13 inch screen though.. it's really small

And with 8GB of RAM you are quite limited in the business sector as you say

I'm seeing a lot of "8GB ought to be enough for anybody" here over the last week....

I think it’s worth mentioning also- 8 GB ram on a Mac is not the same as 8 GB on a windows OS machine, given the poor state of windows as an OS as of the past few years.

I forgot about magical Mac memory.

Just keep it under one browser tab, bro.

It actually is magic Mac memory. No joke. 8GB on macOS is good enough for 80% of people.

Do browsers and Electron apps magically take up less memory on Macs? What is "good enough?" I never notice problems on my 16GB Windows laptop, so just for fun I closed all of my 6 always-on Electron-type apps, all of the 10 browser windows I had open, a couple other ever-present apps, and it looks like without anything else Windows 10 takes about 4GB, which I think is in the same ballpark as OS X. And I probably have some stuff running that I didn't close, this is very unscientific.

Anecdotally also, my one laptop that I've upgraded to Windows 11 is a lot snappier. As a rule I haven't noticed memory pressure on any device I've owned ever as a "regular user," it only really applies to gaming and heavy development with lots of VMs, especially these days.

Swap on macOS is incredibly good. Not sure how Apple does it. Maybe hardware compression?

> Not sure how Apple does it.

They do it by prematurely wearing down the soldered SSD just in time for you to buy a new laptop.

As far as I know, there is no M1 8GB SSD wear down complaints in 2026.

There are - people are complaining about SSD health

Source? Is it SSDs breaking down or people are just looking at SSD usage and then get scared?

It's no different from NT in that respect. macOS is significantly worse at handling OOM events than NT (even NT4, for that matter).

I don’t see much “for anybody”, but I do see a lot of “for students / people who browse the web / word processing” which is still a pretty large set of people, and the Neo handles those workloads just fine

Literally two comments above mine in this discussion:

> The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people.

I rest my case.

"students / web browsing / word processing" == typical people, but maybe that's my own biases

Steam report is a good thing to look at:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=mac

For Mac, 30% are at 8GB, 43% at 16GB.

Windows has nearly nobody below 16GB (27%) and the biggest is 32GB (58%)

13” is not really that small. It’s a screen size many people choose.

The Neo is also not a play for businesses directly. It seems pretty clearly a play for students who will eventually enter the business world with their personal laptop preferences.

> The Neo is also not a play for businesses directly.

This really is the key point.

The Neo is not a work laptop (At least, not for engineers). It's a low-end laptop designed to compete with Chromebooks.

I spent one year using an M1 8GB Macbook Air as a professional developer during covid. The A18 Pro flies around the M1. You can definitely use this as a dev - especially when we're just prompting AI nowadays.

The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people.

I have an RTX 5070TI laptop. 95% I use it with Tumbleweed.

Unfortunately with work I don't have too much to play with LLM training and such.

The ultra poor person system is a used 200$ Thinkpad ( something about 2 years old) + your Linux distro of choice.

200$ ThinkPad...? The current best sellers on Amazon US are two 180$ brand new laptops. Intel Celeron N4020, 4Gb ram, 64 GB storage, 1366x768.

This is what the average computer user is using to try to run your apps and websites. And remember - a cheap laptop bought today is going to be in use for at least five years.

Used, on eBay you can find something very capable for 200 to 250.

Around 300$ it gets better, specifically if you're open to Dell and other brands.

The only things I recognize on that are the CPU brand name (there have been times the Celeron has been good bang for the buck), the RAM, and the storage (I guess and the resolution).

To me, all of those seem woefully underpowered, but $180 is $180...

The Neo is probably the best laptop for typical people.

I don't think traditional desktop operating systems are best for most people. I believe a Chromebook, or an iPad with a keyboard, is best.

The Neo costs $200 more than a comparable Windows laptop, but with half the RAM and storage as said comparable Windows laptop.

They're fighting to seize the very specific market segment of "I don't like Windows and don't want to use Linux or a Chromebook, and I'm also poor, but still want to pay a premium price for an underpowered tablet with keyboard glued to it."

Please, by all means do post a link to a comparable new Windows laptop for $400, including a fast GPU, reasonable amount of fast storage (and not counting an SD card or such), a high-DPI monitor, and non-embarassing build quality. I'd love to see this.

The GPU in the Neo isn't particularly fast...nor is the storage. Neo makes loads of compromises to hit $600 with some of it's features. Even for $400 you can get Windows PCs with TWO whole USB 3.0 ports. $400 quickly hits diminishing returns territory.

Like here's a $500 PC:

https://www.amazon.com/Aspire-Copilot-WUXGA-Display-Processo... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-14-AI-review-Basic...

Twice the storage, twice the RAM, comparable GPU. CPU is a slower in single core, but comparable in multi-core. Faster storage. USB 4, HDMI, multiple USB A ports. Supports more than 1 external monitor. Yep, chassis and screen are worse but it's better in many other ways.

You're proving the point. The computer you found wins on the specs page for sure. But the proof is in the pudding; Apple makes money hand over fist because they focus on reasonable specs, and quality. The thing that kills a modern laptop is not a slow CPU or RAM on the chip; it's a cheap chassis that breaks. That's what makes people change their computer.

Apple wins on the perception of being a luxury brand. That's it.

That, and having a machine at this price point that people aren’t horrified to use.

What makes it horrifying? Plastic? Is the only thing that's important the material it's made out of? I think there's many use cases where the Acer would be less horrifying to use than the Neo. Which device would be better for running a Linux VM for CS class homework for example?

Hypervisor.framework on the Mac, personally.

With half the RAM?

A vanishingly small number of end users (both PC and Mac) care about how much RAM they have. I'd be willing to bet that at least 75% of PC and Mac laptop owners couldn't even tell you how much RAM they have, or they mistake hard disk storage for RAM or vice versa.

Why bother with a VM for Linux on the Acer? Just run it natively. There's almost nothing that actually requires Microsoft anymore, and you'll get better performance.

Its ok, your laptop is best, just go buy it already

It’s not just about perception. Apple doesn’t load your computer up with crapware and ads from the five different companies in the supply chain.

They got away with it forever because at $600 there was no competition.

I would say it’s more that Microsoft will make your $600 feel cheap, Apple will make it feel respectable.

> Apple doesn’t load your computer up with crapware and ads from the five different companies in the supply chain.

No apple prefers to have a monopoly on ads and crapware but they're still there. The internet is filled with annoyed apple customers who want to debloat their systems:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254337272

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/414682/how-can-i-r...

https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/5gb-pure-bloatware-apple-...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-debloating-thread...

You didn't read any of those, did you. They're asking about things like, literally: How can I delete the Chess app? How do I disable Spotlight? How do I remove Siri?

Those are not in any way comparable to ads or Candy Crush in the start menu.

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams (kirkville.com)

1178 points by cdrnsf 49 days ago | 564 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911901

Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results (9to5mac.com)

618 points by ksec 67 days ago | 514 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680974

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463180

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46325114

What is the difference between a chess app and a candy crush app exactly? They are both "Games I didn't ask for, but were preinstalled"

Ads aren't as intrusive or annoying on a mac yet, but they aren't not intrusive or annoying either (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256235494)

I haven’t used chess, but does it have IAPs?

Not directly, but some features require the Apple Games app which I believe requires an account and does have IAPs.

Amen to this.

I still haven't figured out how to remove Microsoft Store apps from the Start menu in recent non-LTSC versions of Windows 11, even on Enterprise with the Enterprise-only "disable consumer experiences" Group Policy key set.

Suggestion for any Microsofties listening: give me an easy way to override Windows key press-and-release to open the PowerToys Command Palette, and I'll never complain about the Start menu again.

I have thirty years worth of old laptops in a closet. The macs all have hinges that still work.

It’s nice to own things designed to not fall apart after a few years.

Will you be adding the Neo to the pile in your closet?

Because that's where it belongs with 8GB of RAM.

Look, sometimes Apple sucks and sometimes Microsoft sucks. The only thing that sucks 100% of the time is a monoculture.

Guess you didn't buy a PowerBook 5300 or a Titanium PowerBook G4, both infamous for hinge failure. Our 5300 didn't even make it to the four year mark.

So for $100 less, you get a markedly lower-DPI screen that's 40% dimmer, a slower CPU, hotter running, and a worse chassis. Almost no one's going to be slapping multiple external monitors on either of these. If they did, they might run into the problem where the Acer is often limited to 640x480: https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/733442/have-a-new-a...

That is not remotely in the same category as the Neo.

You get twice as much RAM, twice as much storage. 4x faster storage too. You get a full sized HDMI port. You can do multiple monitors if you need to. It has a fan for better sustained performance. You can plug in a flash drive, mouse, monitor or other external peripheral without a dongle. Oh, and it's actually COOLER running than the Neo.

The Neo costs a $100 more, needs a $30 dongle to connect to 90% of the stuff people have, has half the RAM, half the storage, slower storage. Has considerably worse I/O. But has a better screen and build quality comparable to a MacBook Pro from 2007.

It's different compromises. Personally I'd rather have more RAM, storage and IO than a prettier case and better screen.

You don’t need to buy Apple adapters. You can buy a $10 usbc to hdmi adapter off Amazon and it’ll work just fine.

Same thing with the USB A ports. Not really selling point imo.

Apple's official HDMI adapter is $70. I was already talking generic.

Or just use a Thunderbolt cable to send video, power, and USB to a newer monitor with a single cord. That’s my work setup and I’d never go back.

And yeah, USB A? I got a cheapo C-to-A hub for my dwindling number of legacy devices. There’s no remaining upside to A.

On the Neo that doesn't support Thunderbolt? Or on the Acer that supports USB4 and might actually work with the hub?

It's a weird choice to pair with a budget laptop since monitors that support that are usually several dollars extra...

I can see exactly one, and it's niche: the ability to safely leave tiny USB-A peripherals like flash drives, wireless dongles, and SFF YubiKeys connected while not in use (not that I'm recommending a YubiKey be left connected to a laptop when not in use).

Hubs are mostly only relevant for docking or increasing the number of ports, given that USB-A to -C adapters are so cheap (assuming they're not bundled with the peripheral in the first place) you can reasonably leave them permanently attached to larger form factor USB-A peripherals.

As for full-sized HDMI, assuming you're not talking about the hellish mini or micro HDMI as alternatives, I'll take USB-C, or even mini DisplayPort, over full HDMI, as both have decent connectors and provide more and better inexpensive options for display connectivity (though admittedly finding good active DisplayPort-to-HDMI dongles can be harder than it should be because chroma subsampling is a thing that's not frequently touched upon in product descriptions).

The quibbling about ram is strange only because Apple is much better positioned to utilize ram since they are vertically integrated. I produce music and occasionally compile Haskell on my 2016 MacBook with an i3 and 8gigs of ram. So I’m in the 99th percentile power user and a 10 year old machine works great. I bet the new Mac would be even better.

It doesn’t have 8gigs of ram to cheat the consumer. It’s because this company can do 10000 hours of user testing to see what people need to do their normal people things.

No, they're not "better positioned" to utilize memory.

NT has a far better VMM than macOS does and handles OOM significantly better than macOS (and Linux, for that matter).

Look no further than the various Mac subreddits for applications such as TextEdit, Calculator, Safari, and other first and third party applications leaking like a sieve to the point of OOM for multiple versions of macOS at this point.

Not to mention, Macs are sharing that precious memory with the CPU; on those 8GiB machines, leaving 7.5GiB or less (depending on what you're doing) for the kernel to use for non-graphics services.

> NT has a far better VMM than macOS does and handles OOM significantly better than macOS (and Linux, for that matter).

That's one of my great frustrations with Windows. NT is a fine kernel. The userspace on top of that is fucking terrible though.

When people compare "operating systems" they're not comparing the kernel. They're at the most technical comparing the userspace tools shipped with that kernel, and at their most general the "ethos" of the developers that build the ecosystem. The terrible experience on windows of every programing having an installer that pokes around god knows where in the registry is just as much an experience of the Windows operating system as piping curl into bash is on Linux.

> NT has a far better VMM than macOS does and handles OOM significantly better than macOS (and Linux, for that matter).

All of them handle OOM the same way: paging to disk with subsequent thrashing. How can any OS be better than any other in that respect?

If your computing experience leaves much to be desired it’s more-often-than-not the fault of the fact more and more applications are eschewing (admittedly neglected) efficient native platforms and using Electron/WebViews.

…looking at you, Balena Etcher. No-one needs a 200MB front-end for `dd`.

> It's different compromises.

Completely agree. In my current role, I work with a lot more "normal" computer users, and it's helped me have a better understanding of many consumer technologies from different perspectives

I have seen the survey results and work studies for our large enterprise of Mac users, most (not all, but most) have zero change in satisfaction or perceived or objective work performance with 8GB vs 16GB MacBooks. Most users are swapping between outlook, teams and chrome, anything more than an M2 8GB MacBook Pro would be a waste for these users. Disk performance is similar, anything in the M line is more than good enough for 75%+ of our users. Mac screens and keyboards have very high customer satisfaction in our org. Just like 16 GB of RAM, it does not translate to a measurable increase in work performance, but subjectively people report higher satisfaction.

As for cost, the MacBook has a lower total cost of ownership in our organization than a Windows PC at a similar purchase price because: 1) longer OS support timeline from apple means they can be used longer and 2) at the end of their lifespan with us, they have much higher resale value than comparable windows hardware.

Just a different perspective as to why 8GB MacBooks make sense for some users.

Can we please not have The Verge-tier PC/Mac slap fights on HN. Thanks.

The screen is also much worse. 60% SRGB coverage 1920x1200 300 nits vs 97% 2408x1506 500 nits. I'd pick the macbook neo for $99 extra.

Should be at least 4X the RAM and 4X CPU cores, just to run Windows at a comparable speed.

The specs may be comparable, but not the end result : my $2000 Windows 11 laptop is slower and laggier than the Neo.

Is it your personal or corporate PC with corporate junk on it?

So… the contention is that Windows isn’t good for work use? That’s not a compelling argument in its favor.

No, the contention is that corporate junk has a tendency to slow down PCs and equivalent software would do the same to the Neo or worse.

Huh, guess I’ve never worked at a Mac shop big enough to suffer Mac-ruining software. My biggest shop only had about 15,000 employees, so maybe it’s only the large companies enduring that.

You never had GlobalProtect take a multi-Gbps connection down to <20Mbps due to all that userland processing of packets thanks to Apple's lack of vendor kext.

Indeed, I have not.

Personal PC. Fresh install from the official ISO with the least bloatware. It's still a nightmare.

You must have some broken hardware.

My $600 2022 corporate laptop is faster and smoother than a $600 Neo, and that's with the corporate spyware crap installed.

I had a Dell Latitude 7320 from 2022 as a corporate laptop. New it costed well over $2000. It was thermal throttling like crazy and it was even worse when I was on calls. It’s battery wouldn’t last more than an hour and even when you put it to sleep the fan would keep spinning. It would take more than 15 to restart and another 10 for most of the apps to open. It was literally unusable. Meanwhile my M1 MacBook from 2020 is still going strong.

I have a Dell Latitude from 2010 that is still goes strong (albeit it has no more battery). None of my classmates' Apples from that era, or the replacements, or the replacements for those replacements, or the replacements for the replacements of the replacements, are still working.

I also have a Thinkpad from 2000 that still works.

I double checked, the hardware is fine. It's a mix of catastrophic Nvidia drivers and Windows 11 famous lack of optimization. I'm much happier on my 3x cheaper laptop on Linux that can handle three 144hz displays flawlessly on the iGPU.

Can you recommend a Windows laptop in the $400 range? I'm interested in a craptop for various Windows things that still pop up from time to time.

Used T model Thinkpad probably? That's the least original advice you're going to get if you ask a bunch of nerds, and these guys know their computers ;)

Just go on eBay and find whatever ThinkPad fits your budget

if you're in the US/Canada, you could do much worse than going on the "windows laptops on sale" page of bestbuy, e.g. this one is 330: https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-vivobook-14-14-fhd-lapt...

i don't think it makes much sense to recommend specific craptops, every manufacturer seems to have a bazillion SKUs they reset every six months in that price range... buy whatever's on sale :p

or buy used of course

You are right about the first part but I think you're overestimating the number of people that see Apple products as status symbols. Maybe that was true a decade ago but I don't think it is anymore. Enough of the products have found their way to every country imaginable over time that an Apple laptop is... just another laptop.

A fun, brightly colored, relatively inexpensive, Windows-less laptop that you can use for doing your taxes while watching a movie has appeal. The performance isn't that important, so long as it is as responsive as the owner's phone.

People do see a high quality build laptop as a status symbol or a piece of luxury. Not having keyboard flex or general creaks really makes a laptop more enjoyable to use.

I was at Costco and ran browserbench speed test on the Neo vs several of the windows laptops. The neo beat them all, even the $1199 laptop. The $500 windows laptop for sale actually performed worse than my 2011 27" iMac running Linux Mint.

The internet is full of these comments that go for ages in Mac vs PC discussions, but with the Neo pricing the arguments are breaking apart. Seeing the PC arguers bring up the being poor argument against the Mac buyers is showing how disruptive the Neo actually is.

The irony of your last line. The whole thing of the Neo is that it feels distinctly not glued together—- not true of the $400 “comparables” you have in mind. I’m convinced the people who make these sorts of comments have either never experienced a non-terrible trackpad, or simply don’t care to.

I kinda agree with you but consider that the perf on apple silicon is so much better that you’re probably still better off using the gimped tablet thing.

Meanwhile every MacOS thread is filled with people complaining how everything is broken and only getting worse.

Not that I'd know, I've probably seen <10 apple laptop devices in my life and never used one.

Apple is in the process of fixing Tahoe which was a regression from Sequoia the previous release. Tahoe is decent with 26.4 though from what I am hearing. Either OS version is far far better than regular Windows 11 though.

Apple’s real differentiator is their silicon. M series chips are just incredibly good and you get a full workday out of them on battery.

The M1 Pro I still have at work is easily the best laptop I have ever used. For side projects I use an M4 air with maxed out RAM and it has no issues with anything I have thrown at it.

I'm also still on my M1 and I just don't see a need to upgrade. I've never owned a laptop this long without even considering getting a new one. It's still so fast, so cool, great screen, biometric unlocking... it's just incredible.

> Meanwhile every MacOS thread is filled with people complaining how everything is broken and only getting worse.

Having been using Macs for work and home use for the last few years, I have to say you’re right. And yet, in spite of that, I’d still rather use MacOS over Windows. The fans on my Mac never start spinning up as soon as the login screen appears or randomly when it’s sitting untouched on my desk, I never find MacOS to have rebooted in the middle of the night without asking me, it doesn’t constantly nag me to use iCloud more, and it never shows ads for Apple shit in Finder.

When I use MacOS, the worst I feel is the developers are a bit sloppy. When I use Windows, I feel like the developers actively hate me.

Buying a gaming laptop is like buying have a sports car. Sure, it looks nice, and you may even be able to wheel it around a bit. But it's not the ideal experience.

I bought my mother in law a Lenovo Thinkbook for Christmas; I didn't know that the Macbook Neo was coming else I might have waited for that.

Anyway, I installed Linux Mint on there. She has been using it every day and at least according to her there hasn't really been any jank (and I told her to call me any time if something breaks and I'll fix it).

At this point, I think Linux distros have gotten good enough to realistically start stealing users away from Windows. Linux Mint is easy to use, runs fine even on modest hardware, and doesn't push a bunch of shitty ads at you. I think there is an option for telemetry, but I also think that disabling it actually disables it.

Wine and Proton have gotten so good that outside of modern MS Office, most Windows things just run if you need it, but if you're not using MS Office heavily then you likely can get by with web apps and/or the Linux alternatives.

Maybe it really will be the Year of the Linux Desktop!

Great, I did the same some years ago with xubutu. Did you set up some remote control software to log in if needed? Which one?

I actually have just used tmate to log into stuff since most things can be driven by command line.

We got her set up with Discord so she can screen share if she needs to.

Over here it is 800 euro for a 8 GB device, no thanks.

I would rather advise XBox, Nintendo or PlayStation for gaming.

> I would never advise anyone buy a Microsoft Windows laptop these days — between the forced updates, the account and service-fee thirst, ads, and consumer unfriendly product release process (forced opt-in).

Buying a Windows laptop is a default even for a lot of Linux users because the alternatives are mostly too US-centric. In Asia, Framework only delivers to Taiwan - which is astounding given the technically advanced population of consumers in South East Asia. I'm not aware of System76 etc having any sales channels and after sales service setup in Asia either.

Until Asahi becomes a stable choice on Macs, if you want to run Linux on a laptop of a reputable brand, a Windows laptop is basically the only option (even though you may just wipe it). I kept mine dual boot not because I actually use Windows at home but because I paid for the bloody license, even though against my wishes.

I think the decreasing fondness of Windows can mostly be blamed on Microsoft forcing their internet services on users; with the need for Microsoft accounts being the most recent & damning of the bunch.

You had gadgets in Vista & 7, but they could easily be disabled. 8 had live tiles for things like the news (effortlessly removable) and introduced the Microsoft Store (which increasingly needs an account). 8.1 added Bing Search to the start menu (requires Regedit to remove nowadays), 10 added news & current events to the start menu, and in 11 they want us to register Microsoft accounts to use the OS.

It's ridiculous how much control we've lost over Windows so that Microsoft can tell shareholders more people are doing Bing searches and signing up for Microsoft accounts than ever before.

FYI, Microsoft Store doesn't need an account. You can install apps without being signed in to the Store.

Source: I work on the Microsoft Store.

Microsoft store try's to dark pattern you to think you need to log in though. Or at least it did.

It no longer does.

Yeah but it really looks like you need to, are they still showing the login modal dialog that you have to close before it installs?

How? When? Every time I tried to use it I was prompted to log in to a Microsoft account.

If it is in fact possible then you’ve done an excellent job hiding it.

Yep, the continued moving of the goalposts for how much internet integration is required was really why I bailed on it.

That is putting it kindly mind you, it has become increasingly user hostile software. Distrusting you, the owner of the computer and software, whilst also exploiting your information and usage telemetry, hoovering up private files into the cloud, pushing their online services into every crevice. MSPaint connects to the internet now, like back it off just a little bit you greedy sods. Can't a man draw some pixels in peace?

And things like the Copilot app that can't be uninstalled and send regular alerts to the user.

Microsoft lost me, longtime windows user, when they started fucking with the start menu. I play a lot of games, and was willing to tolerate a lot of abuse to avoid the hassle of changing platforms, but they literally injected MSN tabloid news article results and aware like candy crush above the local applications I was clearly trying to open.

There are definitely concerning trends with the direction of macOS development, but I still maintain a Windows 11 PC in a closet that just runs steam to play games and holy shit it makes Tacoma feel like the pinnacle of UI design and consistency.

Too little, too late. I switched to Linux and I'm never looking back. Good riddance, Microsoft.

I've done this several times over the last 18 years or so. The most recent was a few months a go. And my steamdeck persuaded me. Unfortunately I ran into the same WiFi networking issue I've never managed to resolve. Even on different hardware. Pings to my default gateway are ridiculously slow compared to windows. I spent countless hours trying to resolve. I gave up and have gone with windows 11 ltsc.

What is the constant? You have something that is unusual and that has not changed for 18 years. Is it specific to your home network?

I have not had any issues I can remember with Linux wifi for as long as I have used wifi.

Like what sort of response times for each?

This is the type of thing that AI is actually good at diagnosing in my experience. Haven't had anything similar happen but seems more of a router issue upstream.

Maybe worth checking what Steam Deck's connection has configured differently given it's on the same network?

100%

With ssh access to the underlying arch/fedora fork, it'd be an easy fix with AI

Do you mean access to the source code?

That is a very good point, what on earth was I thinking, I didn't try pinging it from my steamdeck. Actually, I'll try that, but now I'm back on windows the ship has sailed.

Good point about AI too.

This is on mint Linux and unless I'm remembering wrong years ago it was mint Linux that had the same issue completely different hardware and network

You can mess around or go buy a $10 gbit USB dongle that you know works like a tplink.

I was thinking same thing. But it is a tplink pci card, with the right drivers.

Interesting; I haven't had wi-fi issues in Linux for more than a decade, but admittedly I sort of selection-bias towards laptops that are known to work fine with Linux.

I had a problem with a Realtek wifi card, where it would become slow for a few seconds every couple of minutes, had to disable a setting , maybe it helps you: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Network_configuration/Wirel...

I would have looked at this if I hadn't already jumped ship. It sounds like the problem I was having.

> Pings to my default gateway

You have a non-default gateway in addition to a default one?

To fair I'm using windows terminology when I say default gateway, I just mean the router supplied by my isp

The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux. Until product people start getting involved, it's damned to it's eternal ~5% consumer market penetration.

I actually hope “product people” won’t be involved as long as possible. “Product people” is mostly a reason of our current state of enshitification of most of the products. I would actually try my best to gatekeep.

You really think it's product people pushing enshitification rather than the people who want to financialize every aspect of our lives?

Every product person I have worked with was just a SME in their domain, and pushed for a cohesive piece of software that solved their (users) needs.

"Product people" have long been involved, it's called Ubuntu and SteamOS.

Do we think these companies aren't selling anything??

Ubuntu is a good example of why you don't let "product people" near the thing, Ubuntu is not even remotely the most noob appropriate distro but costs on marketting. As for SteamOS, Valve does many things which everybody else fails at, so they're not a good model for typical outcomes.

> The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux.

I think I'd probably say that the problem with Windows is it's made and maintained by people who own macbooks.

I am convinced that nobody at Microslop uses any of their products.

Which isn't really a problem because that doesn't stop anyone from installing it. Next year could be 6%, the year after that 7%... That's quite a lot!

The problem with Windows and MacOS is that they are hostile to the user, and that's because they serve a "product" manager who is trying to maximize business value for a massive corporation, not serve you a good OS.

We don't need three garbage corporate operating systems mismanaged by MBAs, we already have two!

Windows is arguably philosophically user-hostile.

Anyone who's ever tried to get support online with a question about Linux will quickly meet *actual* user hostility as they're asked why they didn't know to check for the config file in the filing cabinet in the basement behind a locked door saying beware of leopard, how dumb they are, etc.

Not my experience at least. You can go to the forum of archlinux and see the replies. They tend to be quite useful and in a good tone.

Within the last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463982

"But, a Raspberry Pi isn't supposed to be a replacement for your desktop; it is meant as a device for experimentation."

"why couldn't you read the self-contradicting docs and pick the right option?" (paraphrased)

"just because you don't know how to follow the instructions, doesn't make the OS bad."

" By now, you should see that years of experience != knowing how to use things."

"Yeah. Maybe just stop using Linux. You'll never be happy with it anyway. Most its-never-my-fault people aren't."

This has been my experience with the Linux community for 26 years.

Half those aren't even remotely harsh. Saying the raspberry pi wasn't designed to be mained is totally reasonable, what possible objection do you have to somebody saying that?

That my complaints trying to install software have absolutely nothing to do with it being a Raspberry Pi and the experience is identical on any Linux machine.

> Half those aren't even remotely harsh.

....and the fact that people consider this to be the case is more evidence of the Linux community's hostility.

Linux is like Rick and Morty: I don't mind it, but I never want to be associated with its fans.

If you can't take the mildlest of implied criticisms without feeling offended, this isn't a Linux problem, it's a you wandered out of your safe space hugbox problem.

A community that prides itself on insults is not a welcoming or user friendly community. "Get good" and "you're holding it wrong" drive people away.

I understand pointing out that an upgrade failure should be expected when Ubuntu tells you that upgrades won't work, but I don't agree with calling the Pi a "device for experimentation". Not only it's used for serious applications in industrial settings, but some products are sold as... personal computers:

> Raspberry Pi 500

> The refined personal computer.

> A fast, powerful computer built into a high-quality keyboard, for the ultimate compact PC experience.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-500/

Isn't the standard OS for that platform not Ubuntu? From that link: "... Raspberry Pi OS is made to get the most from your Raspberry Pi 500."

Yes. Perhaps the fix for @Arainach would be to stick with the official OS.

> This has been my experience with the Linux community for 26 years.

I read through that post that elicited those comments that you have a problem with. At the end of a long list of complaints, it says: ".....yep, just as user friendly as I remember."

Nowhere does that post request help, and with that last comment, is clearly intended as a disparagement of Linux, not a request for help.

Then, you are turning around, and cherry picking responses to highlight the negative responses to a negative post, and disparaging the Linux community while ignoring the helpful responses.

I have to ask, what's going on here?

That's how it has to be. Volunteer community doesn't have the bandwidth to make everything maximally user friendly. Users have to do their share too, by accepting the responsibility to learn about their system. Otherwise the model isn't feasible. If you want an appliance experience where you have zero responsibility as a user, you can go to the commercial vendor, but they will also have power over you and abuse it.

Linux is indeed for people who can love linux. For people who don't like computers, there's basically no solution.

>there's basically no solution

Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS.

Ironically, 3 of the 4 are unix based with product people in the loop.

Linux can work as the savior of computer users, but it's not going to happen with a bunch of people who fetishize using a computer like trinity in the matrix.

> The problem with linux is that it is made and maintained by people who love linux

To specialize that statement a bit, Linux is made and maintained by people who showed up and contributed. These two facts create a vicious cycle. The people show up to add things they love to Linux, and Linux becomes something that only those exact people love. We're deep into this spiral where Linux has become specialized for ultra-nerds who enjoy solving puzzles to get their wifi to work.

If you look at old Linux magazines, the community is completely different. People were focused on "beating Microsoft" and democratizing computing. The people who took those goals seriously have left the scene.

The people who take that goal seriously get burned when, having persuaded a normie to install Linux, they realize they just volunteered to provide free tech support to that person until whenever time they give up and buy a Mac.

The last two people I handed Linux to were not tech literate. I offered them tech support from the beginning. They have been happy users for well over a year now that have not once called me for help. The story for normie Linux use really is pretty good now.

A few people installing Linux on their friend's PCs is nothing. They can check their email, do their taxes, and play games from their iPad. It's an illusion of accomplishment. The entire Linux community, including people who actually build things, used to be focused on making Linux usable by EVERY class of user, including engineers, doctors, and lawyers.

I think that's a fair criticism for issues where Linux devs might be blind to the friction a lot of Linux distros come with, but I don't think it's universal for all devs and for all features, all the time.

Personally, although I'm not a Linux maintainer, I am a dev and I love doing work that makes UX better for everyone.

Yeah, I could agree to that.

If I could wave a wand, I would reduce the number of Linux distributions down to 10 and absolutely no more.

It is a ridiculous waste to have this many duplications of work and bugs, along with the lack of collaboration.

Frankly, I hope Linux keeps the product people out. Product people always turn what they touch to shit. It’s the product people who made Windows the ad ridden mess it is today.

No, the problem is that windows is in schools and come pre-installed with majority of computers. Another problem is kernel-level anti-cheats mentioned earlier.

I recently changed my distro to Bazzite expecting it to work well on a laptop since it's supposedly optimized for handhelds. While it "just works" and I had no hardware problems, it still required tweaking to get the battery life anywhere close to what it would be in Windows. "Normal people" would still need someone to support them with the installation to get it to work well for their machine.

The website of Bazzite says it comes with 'cpu-governors that are optimized for gaming'. A governor basically decides when and how to change the power level of your CPU. If a core is experiencing high load, it might increase power and clockspeeds to compensate. Of course this draws more power, so 'optimized for gaming' kind of means unoptimized for battery. I think most distros come with a 'power-saver' governor by default. This option should be available in power settings called 'governor' or 'power profile' or something like that.

Also, I recently switched from KDE Plasma (one of the Bazzite options) to xfce4 and I've seen massive gains in battery life, about 1-2hrs extra. I don't remember how many hours I used to get on win10 on this laptop, but I'm sure it has never been as good as this.

The only two moats MS has for desktop OS usage are:

1) Kernel-level DRM for multiplayer games (looking at you, Marathon)

2) Intentionally nerfed MSO 365 apps on web and macOS

You could make a strong case that MDM (which InTune uses as well) negates the AD + GPO advantages of the past 20+ years in enterprise.

I found virtual files support also somewhat critical. This is not really stable on Linux yet and makes using Nextcloud with 8TB and Million of files pretty difficult.

What are you using for virtual files? I definitely found it to work much much better when I added Nextcloud through Gnome’s settings rather than the Nextcloud client

You mean via WebDav? That is definitly an option, but then it is not possible anymore to mix working file directories within Nextcloud. E.g. I have a long list of ignored files for nextcloud [1], such as .git folder etc.

I would need to create a separate file tree, splitting my work between nextcloud maintained files and working files. That feels cumbersome. On Windows, I could directly add my whole drive to nextcloud as a virtual file system.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/Sieboldianus/280afdb2f994fae6e5f6b18...

> 1) Kernel-level DRM for multiplayer games (looking at you, Marathon)

This finally forced me to quit League of Legends (this is a buff)

Welcome to the superior MOBA side.

Come! dota and deadlock welcome you

Dealing drugs like this in broad daylight. People have become so brazen

There's also a bunch of software that only runs or runs best on Windows.

> Intentionally nerfed MSO 365 apps on web

Don't get me started on that. Outlook PWA is so stupid that I can't delete invitations without sending a decline response. Run all rules on the inbox? Tough luck, no such option. I use a Linux VM at work and the only Microsoft thing I am forced to run on my Windows PC is Outlook. That PC is basically the VM launcher at this point because everything else I need to run is on KDE inside the VM and I couldn't be happier that I get to use KDE both at office and home. Microsoft deserves every ounce of hate that it gets and much more.

Now this is the type of comment to farm upvotes on Hacker News!

Apple makes a nice distinction between their "app layer" (iCloud drive and Messages, etc.) and the OS login. This would work fine for Windows power users, and for the most part Windows has already had this (your "store" login). But to require the cloud to replace your login, the cloud has to be essential to the functioning of Windows and you have to explain the security implications clearly, and it's not clear that any of these things happened.

For instance, almost none of the useful settings from win32 apps sync - migrating to a new PC is painful, your apps don't move, your settings are all missing. It takes weeks, you don't just login to it. So this idea that it makes all your settings sync is maybe 10% true.

The argument for this online account (vs just a container for apps) is that you think a few Windows appearance settings must be synced always, or that you want to save things like your BitLocker keys in the cloud (which probably makes them visible to FBI or whoever else). And the security implications need to be spelled out in plain language. And in the end, it's a pretty bad argument - Grandma doesn't need BitLocker, but the people who do want a clear explanation. A lot of the rest could live in a "Microsoft apps" credential layer: Edge, OneDrive, Office, etc.

I want to feel like I can login to a recovery console and fix a bad partition. I want to keep using the same username across Linux and Windows. I want to recover a router with the old laptop that has actual ethernet, and who knows if it has cached credentials? My Microsoft account is my least used one, and who knows if it is secure?

One last thing: logging in with biometrics is amazing, but why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password?

Please fix it all.

why must I use a low-security PIN in place of your pre-existing password?

FAFAIK, all characters that are allowed in a user password are also allowed in device PIN codes. Knowing Microsoft, I'm sure there's domain policies to alter/restrict this. And the idea behind it is sound: that PIN is tied only to a single device, meaning that even if someone watches you enter your device passcode (or uses a keylogger), they can't go to a different machine or online portal and re-use the captured credentials there.

Because nobody would use the same pin for different devices. This is a farcical argument.

Those are some strong words and nothing to back them up. Please, feel free to explain to us in your own words what threat model this device PIN is defending against and how it fails at that.

The argument presented was that a pin is better because it is only for that device. Which is false for 99% or more of users.

When setting up the PIN you pick for it to be alphaneumaric (There is a option for it) and it acts just like a password field with a silly name.

The reason why it is tied to device isn't to protect against over the shoulder watchers, it is that the resulting key that is stored in the system is unique from system to system so you can't lift the key from one machine and use it on another. Maybe not as useful for a PIN but does make it harder to use a stored key to replace a biometric key so a compromised key doesn't leave every system you've ever logged into vulnerable to a key-auth attack.

I was a MS-DOS 2.0 user as a child. I have always preferred windows to OSX. I used WSL for years at companies where every other engineer had a MacBook.

Last weekend I finally started dual-booting Arch Linux as a trial. Yesterday I deleted my windows partition.

Too late, Microsoft.

I’m still on the Linux Mint part of the transition from Windows and I just for no reason see going back.

I’m dealing with sub-par Office on my work machines. But as MS moves/forces Office into online modes and I’m hoping that it’ll just be an electron app I can pull up.

Deleting the partition is a good strategy to commit yourself. It might take some effort to get back to you productivity (and autonomy) levels, but then you will exceed them.

Are people inside apple fighting to drop the mandatory apple account for iOS and various core apple features?

I can buy a thinkpad and install linux on it without once creating a microsoft account. I can buy an android phone supported by GrapheneOS, and use it as a perfectly fine phone without ever creating a google account.

I cannot buy an iPhone without creating an apple account, without getting ads shoved in my face by apple, without them deciding what I can and can't install on it, and them charging me for the privilege of writing my own software.

Microsoft doesn't deserve as much shame here as Apple does since MS isn't requiring their hardware vendors to lock down the hardware to only be able to run Windows (even though they very well could). Apple, with iOS, is.

I use both, almost on a daily basis, but spend most of my time in Linux (Arch btw).

Both of them deserve equal amount of shame because they're both trying to do the same, force you to have an online account associated with a local user profile, either directly or indirectly.

Not sure why it has to be a contest who "we should shame the most" or whatever, how about saying both of them suck when it comes to this?

Does iOS truly require it? I thought that was only if you wanted to use the store.

Being unable to install an alternate app store or sideload my own apps means I need an apple ID to use the computer I purchased.

Again, android phones with GrapheneOS or windows machines with linux let me use my hardware fully without creating any advertising-ridden-evil-corporate-company's account, including building and running my own apps.

I can't even build my own code for iOS, let alone run it, without an apple account (and paying apple money).

> windows machines with linux let me use my hardware fully without creating any advertising-ridden-evil-corporate-company's account

Does Windows machines with Linux here mean WSL2 on Windows? I think the problem people have had with Microsoft accounts is exaclty that they need to use a Microsoft account to use their computers and they don't like it.

If it instead means Linux machine (not sure what Windows has to do with it), then I think people are genuinely happy to have the freedom to use their hardware as they see fit without asking for permission or updating Microsoft or Apple.

You can use an Apple computer without an Apple ID and build your own code on it, but that does seem to be a holdout from the old days when Apple had products like the II Plus and System 9. It feels like they're moving towards the Microsoft model of /mandatory/ accounts even for their desktop OS.

I mean installing linux, not WSL. I can install linux without ever thinking about a MS account on most windows laptops.

Apple restricts their iDevice computers to only run iOS, with no option to install linux.

Microsoft _could_ require that lenovo or dell lock down secureboot such that linux cannot be installed, but they don't (not to mention microsoft surface pros can run linux), so apple is clearly doing more to restrict my freedom with their devices than microsoft is with theirs.

Ok, that's all I meant, you can use the phone without logging in. Yeah you need it for the App Store. Well even if the App Store let you download as guest, the real problem would be that the phone doesn't let you download from elsewhere (mostly).

There is also the ability to build code on your Mac and run on your phone without paying, but pretty sure at least one step in that requires a free account. Guess you could download, build, and run open-source apps that way.

> I cannot buy an iPhone without creating an apple account

You can both buy and use an iPhone without creating an Apple account. You are limited to the built-in apps, but those built-in apps cover most common use-cases.

Most people wouldn't want to do this, of course. But you can.

> cover most common use-cases.

It absolutely does not.

Most common use cases (bar social media): - Navigating - Emailing - Texting - Browsing internet

All this is available without an account.

Most common use cases are social media, messaging (WhatsApp, Messanger, Telegram, no one is using SMS anymore), ID apps, payment and banking apps.

You could skip social media, but without the others you would basically have to carry around a second phone or be severely handicapped just trying to live a normal life.

Beside all of that, the idea that a $1000 iPhone is usable without an account because you can SMS and check emails is laughable disingenuous.

I know the logic on what I’m about to say is not that tight, but… For some reason, creating an account with Apple doesn’t feel like opening a can of worms like it does with Microsoft.

I know exactly what I’m getting when I open the one with Apple, and I have visibility into it from the settings of every device, feels secure and I never get emails or spam associated to it.

The Microsoft account is another story. It’s a black box, I don’t know what they are collecting, I know that even if it looks like a square today, it’ll be a hexagon tomorrow, and a triangle the next day. They’ll change the product name, merge with some other crap, etc. to access it, you’ll have to remember what the service was when you created it. Live? Hotmail? Outlook? Are they the same as my windows account? Who knows.

It’s just not trust worthy IME. I don’t have an issue with creating an account, I have an issue not knowing why I need it or what I get from it.

I have used Microsoft operating systens for 30 years. I started moving servers onto Linux 5 years ago. The desktops on laptops stayed on Windows (10). I have started converting those ss well.

Windows had a good thing going (if you ignored some bad releases), but them pushing it too far with 11 and the Linux desktop making great strides, sort of put the nail in that coffin for me.

Not sure what they can do to make me reconsider. It's a trust issue now.

replace Satya Nadella?

he will just be replaced by Sandeep Dicksheet

My 30000+ person Windows centric company has discovered that Macs are not only cheaper to order (than the 2.5k HP laptops they’ve been fed) but people don’t complain about the fans as much, batteries last longer, speakers are better and screens are brighter, so there has been a massive wave of Windows to Mac transition.

It went from web devs and designers to now HR, admins, anyone. I don’t think we’ll swap Active Directory just yet but I would’ve never thought we’d do this. We’re an old school slow red tape wrapped industry.

Cloud too, Azure could not secure our business even though we’ve been Microsoft everything. We’re in AWS.

For what it’s worth, `start ms-cxh: localonly` after Shift+F10 during installation still works. Another way is to prepare a custom installation image. Of course, such workarounds shouldn’t be needed, so this is nevertheless a good fight.

I use Rufus boot to change downloaded ISOs to allow local accounts and bypass other nonsense. Like TPM and other crap. This allows me to use 11 on my PC I built in 2015.

I've always understood why they do this. Its data collection, its a really weak lock-in to their ecosystem, it gets users embedded into Windows more. Its just not very compelling, just another hoop to jump through. Also I don't really see Microsoft accounts as a major SSO offering on many sites, its usually Google/Apple/Facebook and maybe some other related sites. Seems logical to call this one done and just focus on making a more enjoyable experience in Windows.

Serious question: why is this not a problem with apple products?

How do you mean?

people remember creating an Apple Account login and using it on their laptop, but don't understand that it's connected in fundamentally different ways.

The answer is: Because the Apple Login is not calling out for every service, including login.

I also think that's what they meant. Alternatively, the person could've been asking why Apple hasn't made the same boneheaded mistake as MS. I wasn't sure how to interpret their question to know how to answer it.

I don't recall macos forcing it. They definitely over-suggest it and the ecosystem (especially for dev) is very full of it and I consider that a problem, but it's limited in scope. If you don't want the Apple ecosystem, as far as I know you never need an AppleID.

I had to make one to download Xcode from the store. I couldn' figure out a way around it, but admittedly I have about 4 hours of macos experience.

Yes, I was bunching up Xcode with "Apple ecosystem". I presume you can get clang/gcc without AppleID (but haven't actually done it myself), and for sure many other dev tools.

I'd definitely much prefer if even for "ecosystem" the companies would not require online account except where truly necessary (purchases?), but for operating the OS itself, I do feel there's a line in the sand where online account requirement = no.

Xcode needs an Apple ID for download but the macOS SDK and toolchain does not.

Try to run any developer tool or "xcode-select install" and it'll download the command-line tools independently from Xcode.

(and then bring your own IDE)

It’s impossible to install XCode without an Apple account. It’s only distributed through the Mac App Store, and downloads from Mac App Store require an Apple ID. And even XCode beta downloads are locked behind an Apple login.

You can install XCode CLI dev tools without an Apple account, which comes with clang and swift for example. With this, you can build most Mac software, but I don’t think you can run Swift tests without a full XCode.

As the sibling comment notes, you can install GCC/llvm and whatever other open source tools and build Mac software without full XCode.

You can also install Apple container support without an Apple account.

Xcode is also available as a standalone download from developer.apple.com, which requires an account too, but at least it's way more reliable than downloading from the store.

To add to it too, they only gate the download behind developer.apple.com or the app store. But the .app file doesn't phone home when installing

The key difference is that you do not need an Apple account to use a Mac.

Most people DO use one, though, because that's how you access the iCloud services that underpin the Apple ecosystem. But it's not MANDATORY.

My understanding is that you cannot even log into a Windows machine without an MSFT account. That's a big difference.

Also people probably have more of a problem with MS accounts because they don’t really have an ecosystem that provides clear value.

An Apple account together with an iPhone and MacBook let’s you share clipboard, passwords, notes etc., a no brainer.

Windows laptop and iPhone? I guess an Apple account still is more useful here too, actually. So the average user does not really need an MS account, hence the annoyance.

If you own more than one computer, the microsoft account syncs your desktop contents and other parts of the environment.. desktop background is one I've noticed. That can be nice

You certainly can log into a Windows machine without a microsoft account. It's actually still quite common in businesses that you log in with an account managed by your organization, although this is changing as more and more businesses migrate to MS Entra ID. This still isn't exactly a "microsoft account" but its similar.

You can also still log in with a completely local account as well. It takes a few extra minutes to set up but once configured it works fine.

The system is full of dark patterns and roadblocks that steer users towards an MS account, but you don't have to use one.

Fundamentally, I think you are driving at a legitimate complaint and it should be a concern with Apple products.

The direct answer, though, is largely one of execution. Microsoft isn't just pushing this heavily. They are doing so poorly.

Mac doesn't require an Apple ID to use. iPhone only needs one for installing apps, and my only complaint is it's the strictest auth check on the entire phone besides disabling the account. Shouldn't need to input the Apple ID password just to install a free app, shouldn't even ask for passcode.

Setting up an iPad was rather obnoxious on this front, though. So, fundamentally, it is still very similar.

> iPhone only needs one for installing apps

So you can't have Firefox, Organic Maps, good ad blocker, popular chat and video apps and numerous other things without it. Do you consider that normal?

Yes. Considering that Apple created the smartphone as we know it, and it had this limitation from the start, seems normal even though I don't really like it. This wouldn't be acceptable on a PC or tablet (hence why iPads suck).

An iPhone without an Apple account is about as useful as brick because you can't load your own software onto it without the store.

You can if you have the source code, but I think that requires at least signing with a free account.

Apple does not tie the local account to the cloud account the same way. On a Mac you create a local account and you can (and almost certainly will) create a cloud account to link to it. But they are separate accounts. In fact I’m pretty sure Apple blocks you from setting the passwords the same on both, presumably with the intent of reminding you that they are not the same entity.

But what about our phones? Why are people so OK with an online account for their phone or tablet but not laptop?

I don’t entirely know. It’s not something that especially bothers me.

I will say that I think the forced linking has encouraged other unpleasant behavior like the profile folder hijacking to OneDrive. I rather like having this stuff in OneDrive. I do not like that it is pushed so aggressively. “We moved all your stuff to OneDrive. You need to subscribe so we don’t delete it.” This feels hostile. So some of the distaste with logins tied to the cloud is probably more about the surrounding ecosystem.

How would the answer to this question illuminate your understanding? People using windows at their job also don't care. "Caring" does not need to be consistent across a group of people.

What kind of answer is this? This seems condescending and literally provides no answer.

Why even post this?

You read what you want into the message, but have you considered turning your own perspective onto your own post?

An Apple account also isn't required on an iPhone. They certainly encourage you create or link one on device setup, but it's not required to use the phone. Though one IS required to download apps, so you could argue it functionally is required.

Because I get benefits from it. With Apple I get a way of managing my devices, seeing location, remote erase, sharing services with family, storage, all integrated in a way that is there if I need it, out of my sight if I don’t.

What benefits am I getting from a Windows account? Syncing my profile picture? OneDrive is a mess I rather not have, is never happy.

Apple is a hardware company -- their software exists to support their hardware.

Microsoft is a cloud provider now -- their software exists to support their cloud business.

you can totally use macOS without an Apple account

No apple product REQUIRES an iCloud account. I have an iphone without one and a mac without one

> No apple product REQUIRES an iCloud account

Except an iPhone and iPad,to install apps people want and need. The number of people who use an iPhone without apps can be rounded down to 0

People that don't want to use Apple products are not forced to do so. They can use Android (which has alternative stores, at least for the time being). Though I guess almost everyone logs in anyaway. Generally both major OS have good support from application developers, while on PC almost every one ends up being forced to use Windows at some point (to use Office, to play games).

And phones have been little spying machines from the start, people are more used to their phone spying on them than to their PC doing the same. I don't think macbooks require an Apple account for example.

I moved from windows to Linux a few years back. As of now the only thing I've not been able to do is update my Chinese gaming mouse's firmware. I'm afraid to brick it if I upgrade using wine.

Honestly, for anyone who's on this site, switching to Linux isn't hard or problematic. Go for something like fedora silverblue and you get a similar experience where you don't have to control the operating system yourself.

The only thing would be if your company wants you to be on windows.

The other side of the coin is also funny: I've used Linux for 15 years. There's always been a little voice in the back of my head that says "ah, but one day you'll be forced to admit that these hobby OSs just can't compete with the reliability and product investment offered by a commercial backer like MS".

And then every few years I have some reason to boot Windows and I go "ah, here it goes, I bet this is gonna be slick as hell".

But you already know how the story ends - every single time it's a confusing, hostile, slow and ugly experience.

Also, it used to be that you could say "actually, if you really take care to set it up, Linux is usable for nontechnical people". But nowadays Linux is actually the obvious choice for non-Apple hardware. There's really no reason to leave your family on Windows. Specialised applications are the _only_ remaining reason to use Windows, and most people don't need them.

The irony of needing to fight internally for something users have been asking for since day one. Local accounts should be the default, not a hidden workaround

Too little too late. I've been a Windows user since 2.1. It hasn't always been my primary OS but I've always had it running somewhere. Win 10 LTSC is the last Windows I'll use. I still have it on my desktop but will be moving completely off to Linux.

My dad has also been primarily a Windows user since it existed. A few weeks ago he switched over to Linux, his first time running it.

MS is killing themselves with this mess.

I dropped Windows when Microsoft first added ads. My last Windows 7 machine was turned off last year.

It's just better without Microsoft.

At this point windows should be classified as a public utility and regulated as such. Microsoft has turned the most popular operating system on earth into an ad riddled and dysfunctional joke. Satya Nadella destroyed what would’ve been a stellar legacy as CEO of Microsoft by allowing all this crap to go on, chief among them is the war on local accounts.

My "favourite" with this is the new Windows app (terrible new name for the remote desktop app). You now have to sign in to use the app but then as soon as you connect to any corporate resources (ie remote PCs/Cloud PCs), you have to sign in again! It seems like the perfect opportunity to SAVE the user some hassle but instead it's adding it.

That new Windows app didn’t even work for me at all. Could not connect a Windows 10 box for example.

Using Windows these days feels like "you're the product" in a way that's really annoying.

Like, I know that "I am the product" when I open Instagram or Facebook, but the overall experience makes me not think about it; using Windows I get constantly remembered that I am the product: ads, forced Copilot, telemetry making things slow/showing up in the Task Manager, more ads, mandatory account (more telemetry, yay!), Edge begging me to use it... I'm just trying to do my work and the OS gets in front of it!

This is (technically) a paid operating system. Ubuntu is free and doesn't do 1/100th of that (and Ubuntu isn't even the best distro in that regard). I tolerated Windows 7, tolerated 10 a little bit less, but Win 11 is impossible to use. And I haven't even touched the performance issues...

Ss it just me or did Microsoft never actually fix/figure out their account merge? I found that anyone who had a legacy skype/hotmail account basically got locked out once Skype/Hotmail/Outlook.com all merged. Multiple frustrated message threads online complained about this and from my personal experience it never got fixed. Basically two out of three accounts became inaccessable.

That was when I completely left that ecosystem, Office 365, everything. It was literally impossible to log in. Not surprisingly, the Office 365 bills continued to charge even though accounts were inaccessible. To this day, i'm far too scared to even attempt to use Azure on a personal account for this reason.

For a long time I used my Gmail account as my Microsoft account somehow. So my login ended in Gmail.com. At some point like 2015 I realized it had been merged with outlook or something and now I had an outlook mailbox that had a Gmail domain, along with my actual Gmail mailbox. I got locked out once and it took me days to figure it out. Got so confused about it I decided to close that MS account and get an outlook one. I don’t even know if it’s active or what it was for anymore.

Well you are lucky if you were able to dump the account. For me, I had Skype credit, monthly billings, and tons of contacts -- all gone in a botched post-merger integration. Definitely makes me never go back to that ecosystem ever again.

Totally random observation, but this site, Windows Central (I think it belongs to a company named Future PLC), is bloated as hell. So it was somewhat ironic seeing them publishing about how Microsoft should make Windows less shitty for its users

> People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop mandatory Microsoft Account

This is the minimum peace offering acceptable to your long suffering users.

My company is still on windows, but it's only because most of our users are over 60 and would stroke out if they had to learn something new. I predict within the next 10 years we will move to something else. The hoops I have to jump through to setup new devices without a Microsoft account are ridiculous. Every time we have a workaround they disable it and we have to do a deeper dive on it. The process right now requires using the command line to create an account with administrator permissions and no password and then create a password after logging in. Then we can create a non-admin local account.

No, they should leave it. Make it as onerous and tedious and annoying as possible to set up a new computer.

2026 is the year of the Linux desktop. It's time - Linux has never been better or easier to use than it is right now.

Chaos agent hahaha

>Windows 11 will still force you to setup an internet connection and sign-in with a Microsoft account during the out of box experience

One has to wonder if this change will occur, that is due to these state laws requiring various levels of age verification. I can see MS stating you need to have this account because of the Age Verification Law in your State.

In a way, California's law is a huge gift to big tech, and now it is being replicated to other US states with additional requirements.

Age verification just requires that one be able to provide an age when setting up an account. Like, for example, when you setup an account for your child on the device. This doesn't seem to require any sort of online account requirement as far as I understand it.

Yes, the law itself doesn't, but I guess online accounts will make it somewhat easier for MS to verify users.

I posted something similar the other day, but at this point it is too little too late. Using windows feels like actively submitting to a hostile user experience.

I look back fondly to the time I had using my Dell XPS when WSL first came out, they had me hooked. I've been using MacBook Pro for about a decade now and I can't even fathom going back to windows. Every time I open the start menu I feel personally attacked.

I used to obsess over reading xda developer forums and playing around with my android phone. I would laugh at the "sheeple" using apple products for not being customizable and giving away their freedom.

At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision.

> At this point in my life "it just works" is good enough and no longer a point of ironic derision.

I am the same. I used to fiddle and obsess on customising every last thing possible. Now I just want the damn thing to work, and MacOS does exactly that.

I remember the OG XPS 13 had what Dell called "project sputnik". To my knowledge, it was the first time a Dell laptop shipped with Ubuntu, if not Linux.

Really wanted one, but was a poor recent college grad at the time.

Of all the things wrong with windows, I don't feel that having a Microsoft account is the worst of them, or the one that needs the most attention.

Is the reasoning that if you don't have a Microsoft account, they'll do less of the ads nonsense which is baked into the OS? Maybe I don't get what the issue is.

I've tried linux, but haven't converted (though I'm tempted), but my mac has a mac account and nobody seems to complain about that, my android has a google account, why is a Microsoft account so much worse.

The things I feel it is more important for Microsoft to get rid of 1) the push for OneDrive everywhere - Mac is as bad if you don't have iCloud 2) updates requiring "set-up" and trying to trick you into adding services in the process 3) Windows Hello moving the "sign in" button down 10px once it recognizes you....WTF!! 4) ads, ads, ads (though if you don't use start button much or Edge, I think this is mostly avoided 5) letting apps add shortcuts to your desktop on an update.

What am I not understanding?

"Requiring an account" means leaning in the Apple/Disney direction - upselling, walled gardens and milking captive customers. Dropping the account requirement is a symbolic (and practical!) step in the other direction, towards using the product as a tool.

That's fair, so is the outrage focused on Microsoft because they are a "more" open system without the app store being the default method of installing apps?

I guess I'm wondering why Apple and Google don't get the same pushback?

You don't need and apple account to use macos

The lack of local account makes it so difficult to setup a PC for someone else, I wish they just used the same strategy as macOS.

I only deal with Windows during a little IT volunteering. The org's PC has an MS account, which is ok per se, but the nagging doesn't stop there. Like it randomly started asking for SMS verification at login, which looks like a real auth challenge, but you can actually skip it. So that's in their handbook now.

They might drop it for end consumers but I doubt it.

It's such a small niche right now they do not even care if they're in their cloud. Enterprise users are the absolute majority of their user base revenue-wise.

However dropping the requirement might force them to change some things. Like in Azure-related stuff such as OneDrive where you have to design/build/test it behave differently if the user is not constantly logged into the Azure account. This means that they might decide to continue to force the Azure account and if they lose more of the end consumers so be it.

Unless they decide to separate Home and higher versions of Windows even more and drop the requirement for the home version users. But it might be more trouble than it's worth.

Enterprise is where the money is.

The fact there has to be a 'fight' about this tells you all you need to know about the direction the company's leadership wants to take.

Get out before their terms allow them to sue your company and hold your data to ransom if you think about migrating away.

Satya Nadella's obsession with Azure and online services has basically removed all say for local development, if it doesn't use azure he doesn't care.

I think he needs to be replaced before his obsession kills the golden goose that is windows.

This entire article is based on a one sentence tweet with zero details provided.

"Ya I hate that. Working on it." - Could mean anything, which I would argue in this case, is equivalent to being meaningless. Does this mean Hanselman has a team with tickets lined up for the next sprint to allow offline accounts as a first-class workflow? Or does it mean he sent an email to the relevant stakeholders asking, "Hey guys, what can we do about this"?

I am not encouraged that we will see a change in momentum from Microsoft on this issue.

I’m a Windows fan, and I could see this being a pain for OEMs and installers / IT guys – but I don’t see why people are making a huge deal . Windows quality is a much bigger issue: latency, reliability issues, inconsistencies in the UI, etc.

Windows account login provides decent value: Bitlocker recovery, device management, Onedrive sync (even the free version), simpler RDP & remote RPC authentication.

You won’t even defeat telemetry with a local account. Windows TOS grants telemetry consent.

Why do you guys care so much about this? It feels like a bikeshed – something easy to complain about with little nuance. What will be won if MS concedes?

With it, can you use your laptop offline?

yes, as long as you signed in once while online. windows caches the creds locally and afaik they do not expire

What happens if you disable the account online, then, or change its password? I haven't worked through this before and I'm curious about it.

password changes or deleting the account will lock out the local credential .

How, if the computer's offline?

yes it would wait for the next online check. But what are offline computers doing these days?

I care about this because I don't want to have to get permission from a third party to log into my local computer. It seems like a fundamental part of owning a computer, to me. It's really that simple. If Microsoft made the default to setup or login to a Microsoft Account but had a pretty easy way to opt-out and make a local account, I don't think anyone would care (well maybe some people would prefer the default to be local, but then I'd be with you on asking why they care so much if the bypass is right there a click away). But, they don't let you do that. They require you to get permission to use your own computer, and that's a feel bad.

It's a fair concern. And I believe you can add local accounts once you init windows with your Microsoft account.

Try to think about it from a vendor perspective. How much more difficult it is to maintain support for local accounts, now that so many activities depend on online support. It's preferrable to have a universal/ online credential you assume to be authenticated, rather than having each app test for identity. This applies to consumer experiences (e.g. cloud storage, AI inferrence), and vendor service (telemetry, crash reporting, etc)

For your main PC, are you really using it anonymously (like you would with TAILS or other secure OS)? In practice most people are immediately logging into email (google), Microsoft, facebook , github etc the moment they set up their PC. So it seems to be overcomplicating things for Microsoft to deny them the credential, when it carries so much more value for both the consumer & the vendor.

It's fair for them to refuse to support local accounts. And that's why I left the Windows ecosystem. I don't demand they cater to my needs, I go get my needs met elsewhere.

Its not about anonymity. It's about control. I don't want to ask permission to login to my computer. It's that simple.

PLLLLLLEEEAAAASSSSEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

It just doesn't make any sense. Starts off the user experience with a kick in the nuts and a slap across the face. "You don't own this machine"

I hope they succeed, and this is from someone who loves Linux and hate Windows. I want as many positive general purpose computing platforms as possible. No, this won't make Windows perfect, but every step in the right direction is crucial.

Much like politics, you want sane, healthy competitors. Microsoft enshittifying as much as possible might bump up the Linux numbers in the short term, but I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term. You want a major power like Microsoft pushing back on some of these trends, which completely opens the door for small players to benefit from that pushback.

I hope the folks at Microsoft can roll back as much of the slop as possible.

> I think it would be unhealthy for Linux in the long term

Mostly agree until this line. MS enshittifying their ecosystem is the resting state and if you believe in the free market (I don't btw), customers voting with their money or data (since they're the product) should be applauded.

TBF Apple does this too on macOS and arguably iOS. I think a lot of their longstanding pushes to merge the two OSes is hostile to their user base who want stronger separations of concerns; a desktop OS has different requirements and capabilities than a phone or a tablet.

Would love to have a Neo with Sequoia which in itself is a step back from Sonoma, but I haven't truly loved any of their OSes since Mountain Lion.

But remote account is just one of the many evils they cane up in the last decade or so. Honestly, not sure if the net benefit for humanity is negative if Windows gradually disappears.

If you can't set up without an account, this should work, no?

  1. Create an admin user "setup" with a throwaway Microsoft account on first boot.
  2. From there, create a local user "admin".
  3. Reboot into "admin" with internet off, delete "setup", and run a bunch of deshittification scripts to get rid of AppX(Provisioned)Packages.

Assuming you have internet during setup (can be a pain loading drivers via USB) and are fine with creating the throwaway to just not use it, sure - but that's precisely the kind of thing people don't like about the setup requiring an account. Getting rid of the preinstalled packages is a bit of a game of russian roulette for the install as you never know when the next incremental update breaks something because the machine doesn't match baseline or something else was built with the assumption certain crap would be there.

If you're going to go through all of this there are easier ways to just work around the install and crap limitations. They are also still annoying, but at least easier.

Why go through all that instead of updating the ISO to bypass all that?

I have Windows and Mac PCs/laptops. I've used Windows since Windows 3.0, for 30+ years now. In the early 90s I invested in Windows NT 3.5 as a college student and learned how to use that over Windows 3.1 or OS/2. I attended the Windows 95 celebration in person. I almost went into becoming a Microsoft MCSE because it would have doubled my pay but went the programming route instead because I loved it more.

I'm still on Windows 10. Fuck you Microsoft for making Windows 11 worse than Windows 10. The simple fact I can't stop them from updating my Windows 10 machine and it reboots my machine makes me so angry that's one of the main reasons why I will never upgrade. Microsoft Recall is a non-starter for me, even though they made it "better".

If they force me to upgrade, I'll move entirely to Mac and install Linux on my current Windows desktop.

With a few small tweaks, Windows 11 is just as good if not better than Windows 10.

Now maybe you shouldn't have to do those tweaks but it's certainly not a major hardship.

The OneDrive thing drives me crazy too. I set up a fresh Windows install last month and spent the first hour just undoing defaults and disabling prompts. It's weird how Microsoft keeps doubling down on this when the backlash is so consistant. At some point they have to realise they're pushing more technical users toward Linux.

Windows LTSC gang.

I made sure to have Windows 10 LTSC installed on every PC that I had in the past five years. Will never look back.

Yes and now win 11 ltsc! It's like the difference between browsing the internet with and without unblock origin.

I wonder how much pressure is coming from OEMs given the MacBook Neo is coming straight for them in the budget laptop range.

I was shocked to install Windows 11 in a VM today for some throwaway purpose I needed (specifically, proving that some piece of software that's 3 years old will absolutely not work on up-to-date Windows 11), and was not required to use a Microsoft account. Just prompted to make a local account and that was it.

Which Windows 11 sku did you use for that test?

I selected Pro. Downloaded the ISO from Microsoft yesterday.

Microsoft has, by far, the absolute worst sign-on experience of any enterprise vendor I've ever used in any industry for any reason. Try to log in to AWS and you'll either get authed or a clear denial reason. Google Workspace? You're in or you're out. Enterprisey MS service like Outlook or Azure? Well, if you've logged in from that computer before, you might get to log in, but you may also have to hunt around for your organization login. I recently tried to log in to an org but it ended up creating a personal account with an email address at the org's domain, and then I couldn't sign in to the org because that account was already taken, and it took something like a week for the anti-fraud cooldown to let me delete the account and eventually re-register it inside the org.

For giggles, I just logged into my charity's Outlook account. I tried to log out, but it's showing me a "Your privacy matters" popup explaining why my privacy doesn't matter, and the "sign out" menu item stopped working, presumably until I agree to let them hoover my data. (Aside: the "To adjust your optional connected experience, go to Privacy settings." link doesn't take me to my privacy settings. It takes me to a page telling me how to get to my privacy settings.)

You cannot convince me that anyone at MS actually uses their public-facing auth system for anything ever. MS gets love for backward compatibility, but I see it as laziness. Instead of making one system that "just works", like Google and Apple and AWS and every other large vendor on the planet has managed, they half-ass support all 537 different auth systems they've ever deployed, driven by what I imagine must look like a giant nested switch/case behind the scenes. "OK, the user didn't have an "@" in their username, so call `legacy_pw_auth_23(form.password)`. It did have an "@", and also a "@minecraft." in it, so call `minecraft_v1_real_pw_authorizerer(form.password)`, unless it also contains `foo@minecraft.`, in which case call `minecraft_migration_2014_null(form.password)`, except in February, which has 28 days most of the time, where we call..." Heaven help you if it guesses wrong and sends you down the wrong twisty passage.

I'm far from a Google fanboy. I use their stuff for work, and it's alright, but it does not spark joy in my day. Still, I bet if the Microsoft Account login worked anywhere near as clearly, reliably, and rationally as Google sign-on, then Windows wouldn't get 1/10th the pushback we're seeing. If I couldn't authenticate to my own desktop any more reliably than I could auth to Outlook, I'd want nothing to do with it, either.

This is so true. When you log in to their website it bounces around through about fifteen different domains before it concludes. I'm nearly sure passport.com is still in there.

Or how about if you're already logged in and switch tabs - returning to OneDrive / SharePoint lets you start doing something for a second, then it interrupts you to redirect through several pages for an auth flow before returning you back where you were.

Is this a reaction in part to the threat posed by the launch of very affordable Macbook Neo; and partly the rise of AI Agents like Cowork that will drive massive demand and scale of sanboxes and virtual machines and Windows OS is not a great fit for that today.

Why Microsoft is obsessed with accounts? Azure's managed identity for this for that drives me crazy. An integration that could be done in few hours takes more than a week. No proper documentation, buggy libraries, made up, non-standard behaviors, uhhhh...

I had to set up a Windows laptop for work... and you guessed it, it badgered me for a Microsoft account. No bypasses working since it was in S Mode.

Ended up just logging in on my personal account and then scrubbing it after. I also got rid of S Mode.

The only benefit I've seen to having a Microsoft account is that I don't have to remember a cd key anymore if I have to reinstall... other than that, what was it actually used for?

They use machine id, shouldn’t need the key to reactivate on reinstall.

But you can move your key across devices -- just de-register the old machine and register on the new one.

I bought a Windows Pro license a decade ago (maybe for Win7) and I'm still using the same license for Windows 11 on a new PC.

A lot of people are finding the Mac Neo very interesting given how unfriendly the whole Win11 experience has become. Either MS learns or the market teaches them the same lessons IBM learnt.

I run Linux. If there's something I'm missing out because of that, then I accept it rather than going through this hell.

The enshittifiers don't seem to understand inertia. By the time the enshittification becomes bad enough to do something about it, it's too late.

For that to happen, people have to be pissed off enough that it starts affecting metrics. Then, that needs to be detected, a decision to do something about it has to be made (we are probably somewhere around here), then that decision needs to be implemented step by step by removing all the enshittification... and in the meantime, the reputation as a terminally enshittified product keeps growing.

Even if most of the enshittification is removed, the reputation will stick for a while, just like the product was able to initially keep being successful despite the enshittification.

Nothing about intertia means it’s ever “too late”, just that there’s a lag between a change (positive or negative) and its effect.

People said the exact same thing about Linux ever taking off on the desktop, but slowly but surely it’s increasing. The effect always comes, eventually.

Ironic that the website that has this article also features similar bloat and ads that the article complains about.

Even if the good people fighting for this win, Microsoft will eventually enshittify it again. It’s just what Microslop does.

There's no future for Windows. I think most people should move to Linux, or to macOS if they still need proprietary software for work.

I'm reminded of people inside Google arguing with Vic Gundotra to drop the Real ID requirement for Plus :(

Maybe Apple will follow suit and won't require an Apple account anymore to be able to use a MacBook.

They do? News to me, and I probably shouldn't update then. I haven't booted my MacBook for a long while but it doesn't have an Apple ID logged into it. I last used my Apple ID when I had an iPhone back in 2016 or so.

I have minor inconveniences and hiccups with Linux.

I have a gut-level disdain for and distrust of Windows.

One of the most common things people still reach out to me for help with is when they are travelling with a windows laptop, go to a country they have been to and worked from before, and Microsoft helpfully locks the account.

I then have to make a judgement call wrt them being competent enough for me to walk them through the process of booting into recovery mode and prying this shit out.

The official support channels, if they respond at all, often take weeks to handle it.

And FWIW, I still see this happen to people with Apple products more.

Good to see there's some people fighting the good fight in the depths of Redmond.

feels like microsoft keeps optimizing for ecosystem lock-in while users just want less friction

requiring an account for basic stuff might make sense internally but from user side it just adds unnecessary steps

hmm MS killing off MS Windows by employing the Google AI and surveillance in everything push....who would have guessed that MS ran out of product ideas!

The start menu is a react app? What the hell.

You’ve always been able to install and use without an account (oobe\bypassnro). As long as power users and businesses can avoid it, they have no real incentive to change.

Note on Current Status (2025/2026): Microsoft is actively removing this command in newer Windows 11 updates, especially in 24H2/25H2 and Insider builds. If oobe\bypassnro fails, the command is not recognized, or simply reboots without enabling the option, you must use alternative methods.

The command (oobe\bypassnro) still works in 25H2. There was some talk that they're going to remove it, but so far it hasn't happened.

microslop can do anything, but I am not going to use their stupid OS anymore. Even enterprise window is full of bloatware.

Great - so even Microsoft is not convinced to force everyone into having a Microslop Account. We need to change Microsoft - its current culture is too evil.

lol. lmao actually.

Windows has an absolute onslaught of competition about to stream its way, and they're gonna be paying for every little enshittified user experience they've embedded into their OS. Hope they enjoy ripping that out just to slow their user numbers deathspiral

The people inside Microsoft fighting to keep mandatory accounts out are the equivalent of a crew throwing furniture off a sinking ship, hoping to buy more time. They're smart enough to have an innate sense of where things are going, and it might even help a little, but man... good luck.

And they have not yelled when they were implementing it years ago?

That sounds more like they were ok with it at the time and now they are seeing how much it actually backfired.

Alternatively, they yelled back then and were dismissed but now have some political ammo to push their case. I mean, if it was actually backfiring enough, they would not have to "fight" for it now, Windows PMs themselves would be scrambling to do it.

Macs are cheap now.

my win11 disk shit the bed and I had the local PC guys put in a new one (wiping all my data). they gave me the the machine back with a local 'user1' admin account. so that's me now. user1. hi.

Why Windows?

microslop

Another chill day on Linux..

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