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Comment by grujicd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!"

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?

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.

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.

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?"

Nice. Now do the same thing with "as someone who lost a loved one to a drunk driver, I think harsh penalties and license revocations are a good policy." You can probably find a similar straw man to apply?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> [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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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?

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.

*> 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.

Apple did introduce one this past fall as part of Spotlight

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

...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/

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.

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

And an IT department vetting updates before they go out.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

Where?

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

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

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!

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+???

>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.

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.

>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.

"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.

> 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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.)

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

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.

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).

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

>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.

ios gamer and pc gamer are different kind of gamers

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

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.

> 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.

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.)

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...

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

It takes thirty seconds to remap anyway

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

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

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".

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

+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.

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.

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.

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.

Also a big plug for Far:

https://farmanager.com/

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.

> 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...

> 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.

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?

>> 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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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’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.

> 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.

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