Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
Hacking around in the recovery console to add another administrator user worked, but then I couldn't reset the original user's password because it was tied to the Microsoft account and you can't change the password locally.
I don't need Copilot managing my inbox through AI, nor do I need a more exciting widget experience.
I just want an OS where if something like the above happens there's a way to fix it without having to reinstall. It doesn't seem like much to ask.
Edit: yes, I can use Linux but I have decades of Windows muscle memory and I do a bunch of DirectX programming. I shouldn't have to switch :)
I see a likely inversion of motives here: you earn your living coding or otherwise are deeply vested in Windows, so you are committed for survival to Windows and to fixing the absurd account problem that MSFT has inflicted on you.
The expression "muscle memory" here just means the cognitive load of working with a technology. MSFT has added a hard-blocking piece of stupidity to your cognitive load.
I am sure this is not the first time! Registry problems, update problems, and now for pity's sake account problems.
As a long-time user of both Linux and Windows, I'd say my OS cognitive load with Linux is almost entirely related to efficient actions, whereas with Windows I have a quiver of stupid arrows to shoot at all the problems that MSFT inflicts.
When people advise you to switch to Linux if you can, they are giving solid advice.
Let's not pretend Microsoft has a monopoly on idiocy in the software world. All major Linux distros are hell bent on repeating the mistakes of Windows. Especially since the people in control of the stack (minus the kernel) are the rejects who couldn't make it in Microsoft and Apple in the 90s and 00s but really wanted to.
Meanwhile my small happy place with OpenBSD and Guix just works.
They absolutely are not. Switching operating systems isn't like switching toothpaste. They are declaring, without evidence, that you don't need Windows, without knowing if you do or not. They are avoiding the problem that the person is having entirely and asking that the user replace their single problem with a whole new class of problems that the user has no idea how to solve. And there will be problems, because someone who has never used Linux before isn't going to know how to do anything in Linux. They aren't going to know what software to use to do anything, they aren't going to know how to install software or update it, they aren't going to know what to do when any problem comes up at all.
"Just switch to Linux" is a malevolent and self-serving recommendation, is absolutely not realistic, and is not ever intended to actually help the user needing help with a problem they are having.
I don't necessarily even have a problem with Windows occasionally needing a bit of hand-holding, either. It sucks, but it's IT so meh, unfortunately it still comes with the territory.
What I'm mostly pissed off about is the fact that I have a perfectly useable machine but since I'm unable to login due to vague Microsoft nonsense and there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it I need to reinstall. This seems wholly unnecessary.
Even having some sort of repair installation that doesn't blow away all installed applications would have been somewhat ok as a last resort, but that doesn't exist either.
I am forced to use Linux at work and I dread updating anything because the result is usually a broken system. I never have that problem with Windows.
So YMMV is as always valid here.
Maybe there is a Linux language similar to DirectX you might transition to? Maybe test code in a VM? (Although that gets you right back into Win11.)
Yes: DirectX. Just make sure that it runs in Wine or Proton.
Nit: DirectX is a bunch of APIs and libraries, not a language. Same for Wine and Proton.
You're in for a bad time. It's been three days and they still can't get updates to work.
Get Debian if you must. Use something sane like Guix and OpenBSD if you can.
The level of disregard for quality from MS is just obnoxious. We are really crossing some kind of line here, I think, where taking the pain of migrating once seems easier than dealing with all this nonsense.
(I had to clean install Windows after that infamous update with system check infinite loop at boot time).
While it would, yes, likely avoid the problem happening again, it shifts the responsibility to the party that should not be at fault.
Meanwhile the harasser is like “what’s wrong? I took an anti-harassment class?”
Understood. However, your choices are:
1. Keep complaining while paying $$$ for the privilege of complaining.
2. Switch to something else.
My tolerance level is much lower than yours (I switched my daily driver around 1998), obviously...
paying $$$
And yeah - I gave up on DirectX programming to do it. I do like Metal...
So TFA is really "we've spent the last two months monkeying with the crap that no-one asked for or wants, and Update is mildly less annoying". That's not really much of an announcement.
Also just debloat the Windows install, why are you suffering with Co-Pilot? I have a VM running on Proxmox and I rdp to it from Linux when needed, but daily use, no way and honestly there really is no reason to put all your eggs in the Windows basket in this day and age.
Not sure what's so confusing here... When Windows is online, it checks your password against the cloud and updates the local store. When Windows is offline, it checks your password against a local store. By previous password, Windows just means the password you used on the last successful login for the user on that machine.
The thing is, I was online, I had a working internet connection (and confirmed this by doing the 'utilman' hang to get a command prompt and getting a working ping command). It was just that Windows corrupted some kind of internal Microsoft Account connection and was locking me out.
It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts. I can skip it, which is nice, but just don’t show the screen. If you’re installing linux you either know what you’re doing or you don’t: if you do you know it’s possible and don’t need it jammed in your face, and if you don’t you’re probably not quite tall enough to understand it isn’t needed and you probably don’t want it anyways.
My Microsoft Account email is "contact@<my-domain-name>". If I set up a new Windows 11 computer using this account, Windows picks the first 4 letters of my email address and sets that as the username. So my username becomes "conta", and the path to my user directory becomes "C:\Users\conta".
I know this is a really small thing, but I find it incredibly irritating. I can't be typing that into the terminal all day long! It's not the end of the world, but it speaks to a lack of polish and care across the whole product, not to mention a disrespect for their users' intelligence.
I'm not a Windows user—I only use it for gaming—so I don't really know how to get around this issue. Maybe there's a secret keycombo I can press during install? Or some unrelated checkbox that I can toggle that will do the magic? I just know that I login via my iCloud account on all my Macs, and Apple has always allowed me to choose my own username and home directory.
I don't think this is high on their list of issues to fix so I'm not very hopeful that this will ever get addressed. Maybe I should just change my legal name to Conta?
I don't quite understand what you are saying here. If you're talking about setting up an account to use the system, it's the same idea as setting up a local account on Windows.
If you're talking about online accounts, I believe you are referring to a convenience feature offered during setup. Ironically, it was put there to guide people who are coming to Linux from Windows.
I blame Nadella. Gates or Ballmer had their own deficiencies but they would never have tolerated the absolute bullshit going on at Microsoft today.
woulda been nice to know before hand that it was going to do that, so i could make sure those other accounts werent so reliant on that finger reader working
No idea what you guys are doing.
I can also now run and install over cmd powershlle with choco, scoop and winget.
Get Firefox, VLC, MPV and all that.
Get Powertoys.
Run Christitustech utlity for tweaks.
So even less usage for Linux imo.
A friend of mine has been running the same Arch install since 2009. Does this mean Linux is problem-free and people who struggle with it are doing something wrong? No, it doesn't. Same with Windows.
I have tons of Windows experience (starting off by manually installing windows w/o installation floppies and manually editing win/system.ini, through win32 to current day nonsense), yet I find the command line interface of linux a lot more powerful.
I am not aware of the exact use of directX, it should be possible to run Windows through virtualization just for this task. (unless wine is sufficient)
All this fluff about the insider program seems to be very ignorantly missing the point.
What's needed more than ever is No BS instead of more BS.
Namely get Microsoft Accounts back out of the picture unless opted in.
Along with curtailing Bitlocker, One Drive, Copilot, and things like that.
Now to make it really good again, there needs to be no further disk activity after Windows has booted, other than user-initiated saving & loading. Plus of course no network traffic other than user-directed bandwidth usage.
Along those lines I think it goes without saying that as soon as Microsoft has any legitimate commitment to open-source efforts, we'll know by the way they document & release everything they know about NTFS.
I remember first seeing this during a Win install and instantly looked for a way around it, I think they even have removed a workaround to make it even harder for people to work around this BS.
The computer on my left uses Windows (Win10) so I still use Microsoft-related software. I switched to Linux in late 2004 or so. Linux kind of spoiled me here; every time I transfer files on Windows and notice how slow it is, I wonder what the heck Microslop is doing here. Why does it waste my time and my computer's resources so much? That's one example of so many more. It would be kind of great to be able to abandon Windows completely. For that Linux has to improve a lot, so that Average Joe also is able to use it just fine.
At least notepad has rich text, AI, tabs! /s
What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is.
Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user base.
The incentives are alomost perpendicularly misaligned.
Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. People are looking for the exit, finding there is indeed a door, and stopping them will take far more than just some reassurance from the DJ boot.
The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
I wish this were true, but unfortunately, I've seen enough evidence otherwise to strongly disagree. MBAs weren't born evil, they were made that way in business school. The same corrupting process works on engineers and can happen outside of business school contexts (one common corrupting force is Hacker News comments). An MBA-brained engineer as a manager is orders of magnitude worse than a regular MBA.
Microsoft sells software. They turned office into a service but it's still software. Nobody really wants to use their store. Their hardware is a cute little side hustle.
Microsoft's strategy for turning into Apple is kneecapping their own software.
Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.
Google does this too. I don't have photos backed up to my Google account on a Pixel and every few days if I open the photos app it prompts me to backup to the cloud and I always have to click "maybe later", "not now" or whatever they decide to name it.
It's messed up because if I were to accidentally ever click yes to that it would fill up my Google storage and I would no longer be able to receive email since I'd have 0% storage. I don't get how something so dangerous can be shoved in front of you so frequently. I know it's marketing / advertising to constantly remind you of something even if you don't want it, but I would have thought customer happiness would outweigh that.
Microsoft, your users include developers and power users. We are not all someone's tech illiterate relative who needs constant reminding to check that backups are on, nor do we want to use OneDrive.
If we turn it off, it means off. Updates off = they stay off until turned back on, don't worry, we'll remember. Backup off = it stays off. Edge off = it stays off. Ads off = I don't want ads.
The battle they are fighting is that by using Google, tech illiterate people have found buttons like the ability to disable updates, but don't understand what they're doing, and then leave them off and now their OS becomes part of a botnet in a few months. So Microsoft believes that they are doing a greater good by not offering a real option to actually turn certain things off. But this babysitting behavior is annoying as shit when you want to leave something running that is going to take 6 days. Sure yes put it on a cloud vm. But if I was still using Windows as my OS, why should I have to? Just because your OS can't handle a developer doing something else than using Outlook and OneDrive to store pictures of aunties family get-together?
Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.
We're at such point in the software history that perhaps this should be regulated. I know that such idea isn't particularly welcomed among hn but what else there left? A blind hope that some wind of changes will do the work? I don't think so.
Truth is that nearly every commercial software and service operates with compromising user privacy by default. It's the same constant nagging up until user surrenders. All of this so someone on the top of the corporate structure could get higher bonus from statistics.
This shouldn't be tolerated.
When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work either directly on Linux or at least via things like Proton (courtesy Valve Software).
The only reason I still have Windows is the little screw securing the drive into the enclosure is in the wind and I can't be bothered to find it (for backup of all of my things so I can delete windows and install linux)
Until it happened to me last month. The ads in Windows somehow popped up during important Zoom calls and I couldn't find a way to skip or switch off immediately. In addition to that, my paid version of Minecraft stopped working.
Using Windows home edition has now become rage inducing. I had a lot of patience for incompetence, but the intentional disruption of my work for making a few bucks is really something different.
I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.
I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.
Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.
What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.
Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.
Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.
The majority of bells and whistles (which Windows Hello falls under) were not baked into the OS, but instead implemented as system extensions that the user could disable and prevent from loading into memory at will.
This meant that even with the last release of Classic Mac OS (9.2.x), if you disabled all extensions you got a desktop reminiscent of the 1985 System 1 except with color and modern resolution support.
I think it should be more of a goal for desktop OSes to try to emulate this. If a Windows user wants a quiet no-frills Win2000 like experience except with choice exceptions like Hello, they should be able to have that without having to resort to messy hacks that impact stability and undo themselves if you update.
You had Windows ME which was a terrible, buggy OS. I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose all their data on Windows ME.
Shifting personal windows to the Windows NT foundation provided a massive relative boost, but even that took until XP SP2 to reallt settle in, which was followed by the disaster that was Vista.
Then Windows 7 came along and it was genuinely really good. Probably peak Windows.
And then you came to an actual straitjacketing of windows in Windows 8, where the entire desktop Windows ecosystem was relegated to being a single app no better than calculator in the mobile first, completely undeveloped Windows 8 interface.
Windows 10 got us back to sanity, and barring a few minor UI mishaps Windows 11 was originally a nice refinement. This was the longest stretch of Windows being decent as a personal computer. The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop.
That was nearly a decade of enjoyable and productive Windows. Unfortunately, now we have AI, and Windows is once again being destroyed to serve the its AI master.
But there needs to be a way to turn something off that you don't want, and to not get nagged about it repeatedly thereafter. But for that to work, there has to be a clear, easily findable way to turn it back on later.
The answer is: make the OS extremely modular so that the user can have configure whether he wants an absolutely minimalistic OS or something with "batteries included".
I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is.
The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc.
For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.
The truth is - it's more complicated than that. People want three contradictory things:
1. To not be nagged for things like setting up cloud backups.
2. To not have data sent to the cloud without consent.
3. To be able to get their data back, if their hard drive dies.
Microsoft picks 2 and 3.
I loved working in Windows for a long time. I could get what I wanted done and move on.
Now Windows feels pointed AT ME by someone who wants to decide what I’m going to do….doesn’t care that I want to do other things.
The perfect OS/Desktop is one you don't even notice, or know is there; it just works. Macos used to be invisible, but then then some ego-driven developer decided to push Apple Glass on to everyone. HEY LOOK HOW COOL I AM!
Although at the rate of LLM improvement, I'm thinking the Next big os, will just be a really good API (gui/sound/graphics...) , you boot to a prompt screen, and then you just tell it what you want to do with the computer and it builds the apps you need from scratch.
Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point.
Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy.
Of course, for most people things that are “parallel” would seem to be in close agreement.
Unless you are trying to screw your loyal users in 3 or more dimensions which seems to be the case here
I do believe the OP meant to say that the incentives are orthogonal (i.e., misaligned, or 90deg to each other), and perpendicularly misaligned is a close fit.
Not sure why folks felt you should be downvoted for an heartfelt comment, an explanation is a much better feedback. Downvotes are counterproductive, IMO, if you're trying to have a debate or come to a meeting of minds, so I almost never use them anymore, except for where I detect ill-intentions.
Citation needed. “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc.
Even interpreting that as “all the functionality, but limit applications to utilities for managing the hardware”, I think there people who want that, but I doubt that’s what people, in general, want. Having to choose (and, likely, pay for) a photo manager, a simple word processor, etc. is just too much of a hassle for many.
Also, why would any commercial entity develop such an OS? The margin is in the
I will not stop using a demanding tone for my expectations towards companies which can't deliver on them, because they shat their bed years ago and have to now deal with that. The fact that your uncompetitive practices caught up with you does not constitute a reason for me to shed a tear for you and to tap over your shoulder in sympathy.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.And then there is the whole world of nearly impossible to avoid 'services' you realy do not want but will keep popping up regardless of your wishes ('Telemetry', Onedrive, Copilot, Edge, Recall, Bing adds in the start menu ffs...).
Let us also not forget being forced into a Microsoft account against your wishes ... does it still feel like it's your computer?
There can be other equally valid interpretations than your own, it's probably best to not have dogmatic views like this.
People who want to save their work by moving to a platform without those issues need to be willing to either do the work or pay for it.
It's a fair point. Organizational and personal inertia is a real thing.
Maybe think of it as going through a divorce and entering a new relationship. You do it mostly because you want to, and sometimes you do it because you have to.
OS as a digital spouse analogy? too far-fetched? think of how much time you spend with it in a day :-)
I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consumers becomes even more important, but the first attempt will be at improving reputation without changing business strategy (ads, data monetization, ai are the future revenue drivers). And only if that fails will the business strategy change.
Posted this originally as a reply to a comment, but I think it should be its own top-level comment.
Yeah. Worldwide Neo sales at 5 million units + production raise to 10 million? [1] Even if only 50% of those are US consumers, add to that the number of folks switching over to linux [4]; and suddenly that's not small potatoes, considering there are only about 162 million working folks in the US.
There are only about 50 million folks at 100+ employees, and 16 million at 1000+ employees in private firms. [2]
All these folks switching over? Once they get comfy with non-Windows OSes, they'll ask for those at work. And at the smaller employers - 100 or less employees or even 1000 or less employees, that won't be hard to support, especially if one or two management types make the switch and drive the change.
You have to read a bit between the lines, but an estimate is that 35-50 million have access to Google Workspace at work, and 25-40 million paid Google Workspace users. [3]
And Azure? same number problems, and there seems to be a general discontent with the way things are going with cloud.
Combined with the EU/Worldwide decoupling, suddenly that MS moat isn't looking so deep. It's easy to imagine an inflection point at which MS becomes the minority OS provider, even in the US. The Kodak-ization of Microsoft.
On Nadella's watch, no less. Should we expect a change in leadership soon? Either Nadella deciding to do something different with his time or the Board pushing for a change? They've both got to be seeing the same numbers we are, plus additional insight based on internal metrics.
A Perfect Storm, if you will.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/macbook-ne...
[2] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/susb.html
[3] https://expertinsights.com/saas-app-security/google-workspac...
[4] updated to reflect that [1] has global sales numbers based on feedback from responses below.
Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Linux on the same hardware. What are they going to do, somehow correlate my user agent string when I hit one of their websites or SSO endpoints? I mean, it's possible but I am wondering how much of this topic is wish fulfillment fantasy.
Monthly average user. Uptime for Win 11. Uptime not counting screensaver. Uptime for non-enterprise consumer. If you were a Win 11 enterprise user, then Uptime for enterprise users. Unique hardware indicators - number of distinct PCs in Win 11 ecosystem, separated from new activations. And I'm sure a few others that I haven't thought of.
Declining stats on these measures indicate a problem somewhere in the Win 11 ecosystem. Combine with competitor indicators like sales, and other Win ecosystem OSes.
A single person switching probably doesn't do much to move the indicators. But as a collective?
I am not a Mac person, I actually hate a lot of how they operate. Yet, if a tech-illiterate friend were looking for advice, I would likely steer them towards those computer appliances so as to avoid Microsoft's nonsense.
First of all, in many countries outside of EU/US it's just not possible to buy laptop without preinstalled Windows 11 (except Apple). For example, even if a model supports Linux in the US as many Lenovo Thinkpads do, in Singapore it's just not sold without Windows.
Second, Microsoft has broken sleep with pushing S0 sleep in UEFI. Bettery life is shit now, and hibernate is disabled by default in most OS. Also, hibernate in Linux is a complete disaster comparing to windows one (windows presaves memory to disk continuously, while in linux you have to wait until the whole ram (+ vram, if gpu) is saved/restored). It takes time. Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it. So linux is really a bad choice for laptop. But Windows 11 is much worse, especially if you don't really like ads.
Was it simply that getting every device and driver to properly support it was hard, so the easiest option was to remove it and have the machine always powered up?
Wipe and install something else. Previously you would just have been eating the OS license cost paid, and the benefit was taking control and supporting the free-as-in-freedom ecosystem.
But now the additional benefits are that you'll be preventing them from monetizing your data on an ongoing basis, denying data for training ai, and enhancing your privacy, so it's economically justifiable too.
> Sleep s3 is needed, but Microsoft killed it.
Would you or someone else here mind explaining this?
Part of this is that hibernation can't be cancelled mid way, which is dumb. Ideally a computer is like a light switch - you can turn it on and off instantly whenever. To get closer to that, if you turn it off, but then immediately on again, the hibernation should be cancelled and return you to your desktop.
Also, the whole idea of a 'hibernation image' which is read from disk in one huge 10+ second read is best for hard drives. Now that everyone uses SSD, it should all be demand-paged in.
Some people just enjoy testing and the pain that comes with it.
Feedback is there on their feedback site. They just wouldn't listen.
Sadly now I use Windows 11 just because manufacturer of my laptop didn't bother to ensure that their sound driver worked corrctly on Windows 10.
My mouse lags for seconds when gpu is busy, even with something as trivial as alt-tabbing from a game.
I feel this way, yet I've used Linux on the desktop for a decade before, even selecting my hardware for compatibility. Yet even when using "stable" distros like Ubuntu, it did require maintenance regularly. With more hyped distros like Arch it was constant. Sure I was always able to fix it, but I had to do it.
I installed Windows back when I started having kids. I just don't have the time and mental space anymore to dedicate to fixing the OS regularly. I need to be able to let updates happen and not wonder whether I need to have 20 minutes free afterwards to fix something.
Great! We've progressed back to Windows XP of 22 years ago.
It's baffling that a company like MS can leave this kind of obvious problems lingering for months.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-fixes-update-and-shut-d...
What's the other way around? "Updates decide when you happen"?
Sounds like part of a Yakov Smirnoff joke.
I think all this was a response to severely outdated Windows machines being infected with worms and what not. Microsoft got bad press for this and went (way) overboard with trying to force users to install updates as soon as released.
Windows 11 today is a spectacular example of customer disrespect and disregard. MS believes it can manage with enterprise customer revenue alone. Well, best of luck with that, even enterprises are getting fed up.
I had to restore Notepad, Calculator and Paint from Windows 7. What the hell Microsoft?
You would be correct. It uses a wrong tone curve (piecewise-sRGB vs gamma 2.2/2.4) which makes the darks look off: https://github.com/dylanraga/win11hdr-srgb-to-gamma2.2-icm
This was true at least as of 2023-25 when last checked, having been super annoyed by HDR just looking flat out wrong on my PC vs my Mac (which is probably the only OS that gets everything right given their large audience of Creative/visual professionals and mobile experience).
This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked that way.
(propaganda - Windows 11 default widgets are "offering" a lot of russian-biased media, because Microsoft is too dumb to recognize that and they take any news source - and russian connected outlets are happy to use this delivery vector that most gullible people leave turned on)
Once you've switched to tiled window managers, examples like these sound like Stockholm Syndrome.
DirectX 12, better SSD support, HDR, restoring window layout when reconnecting monitors, WPA3, DNS over HTTPS, WSL2, Windows Sandbox, per monitor DPI scaling, QUIC, dark mode/tabs/previous session/better encoding in Notepad, Windows Terminal.
All these sound really nice to be honest. The things I want my OS to get.
The only problem is: these are the improvements what this OS got in the last 20 years, not last year. Microsoft is a $3T company.
I can’t tell if this is serious or sarcasm.
Better to just go straight to what you actually want, which seems to be a proper Linux distribution, everything just works as expected then.
Debian itself is a superpower.
WSL 2 is supposed to be a VM ... all problems solved ... until they aren't.
Hint: try to use normal USB stuff natively (Linux) in WSL 2 ...
I can't believe it took them 20 years to add them, but at least they're finally here.
Even occasional need for Adobe things stopped. I would still really like to see Adobe suite on linux, but if they don't want my money that's cool too I guess. I suspect the software tools people use for work is what's holding them back mostly, like Altium, CADs etc. Funnily enough, Microsoft office is just fine without OS native version most of the time.
- Dark mode
- Tabs
- "Continue previous session" (restore after restart)
But they also made a HUGE regression which isn't talked about enough:
- Previously, if you delete the underlying file, Notepad didn't "notice." Meaning you could Save to recreate it. The file existed in an ephemeral state, as long as the Notepad window remained open. Right now, if you delete the underlying file, Notepad notices immediately, errors out, and closes that tab -- content gone.
VSCode handles this correctly, it puts a line through the filename in the tab (and red-font), but doesn't close the tab on you suddenly. Ephemeral state retained.
In my ideal world Notepad needs exactly ONE new feature:
- Right Click Tab: "Copy Path."
Then just REMOVE: Spell Checker, Formatting, CoPilot, Markdown(!), and Autocorrect. Completely inappropriate functionality for Notepad, and the Vibecoded Markdown implementation already added a security vulnerability(!) to freaking Notepad. Branch off into a product called "Wordpad" and then create all of that garbage in there.
It seems uncontroversial that the state of web browsers is improved since Win 7
Snipping tool.
Some WINKEY+arrows combos for arranging windows.
The new terminal.
I tried to get notepad and mspaint from an older Windows 10 build -> Windows 11 on a surface pro, but gave up after a few hours...
Installing Tiny11 and then running a debloat over its corpse results in a much faster and less memory hungry default clean install.
Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late.
I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consumers becomes even more important, but the first attempt will be at improving reputation without changing business strategy (ads, data monetization, ai are the future revenue drivers). And only if that fails will the business strategy change.
Given how that strategy has gone, that sounds like a great idea.
So basically: - recent changes are all crap - so why did you make them?
1. Microsoft accounts. No. 2. Ads in my OS. No. 3. Slow copying of files. No. 4. A maddening mix of UI/UX paradigms and implementations. No. 5. AI deeply embedded in my OS. No.
I don't know wtf their design team is doing.
They're doing what management/business-strategy is asking them to do.
Finally, like seriously, so many times I have to "shutdown" (aka restart) for an update before going to bed. I don't want to have to babysit my desktop computer when I want to finish up for the night.
Multiple times I've wanted to shutdown my laptop so I can go home and Windows says no, sit here for 5 minutes.
I don't trust sleep mode to not keep running and overheat, so I wait.
Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day. Music production on Linux isn't really practical. A lot of this stuff barely runs on Windows/OSX.
Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.
I consider myself an advanced Linux user, and it still took me an hour this morning to figure out how to get a VPN to work on Open Suse.
People have been expressing their dissatisfaction at Windows Updates strategy for so long - Modern Standby was so badly implemented it basically cooked laptops in bags and while leaving users wondering what was happening. I had to reflow a laptop because of it.
> Macbooks with 1TB drives are getting cheaper every day.
Also high-speed external storage is very accessible now - so having large built in storage for your DAW isn't really necessary. The 1 USB 3 port on the MacBook Neo is more than fast enough for this.
> Music production on Linux isn't really practical.
I would somewhat disagree with this. Linux has much better low-latency, multi application audio support than Windows & Mac now (via JACK) and some pretty incredible native DAWs like Bitwig - so the moat certainly isn't as large as it used to be. I would say it's practical if your workflow doesn't require features of Mac/Windows or tools specific to those platforms.
As impractical as it would be for normal users - even Ableton works pretty well under WINE.
> Competition is great. But this is about the Mac Neo( and left over M4 Macs crashing in price ). Desktop Linux is still a challenge.
I think between this and they've maybe had a bit of a scare from Valve and SteamOS - because that's historically been one of their other big moats. They kicked off a similar initiative to make Windows nicer for gamers back in December.
I agree that desktop Linux is still a challenge - it's better than it used to be and you can get away without a terminal now if you're just doing basic Internet/Office tasks. In a lot of places the UX can get pretty gnarly.
I hate external drives with a passion. Unless the computer itself is stationary, like a Mac Mini.
My current setup is a 400$ laptop plus a 2 TB I brought for about 100$.
It's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.
If I move on from this, it's straight to a 1TB Macbook. You have a degree of assurance things will work on a Mac.
On Windows and Linux no one knows why your audio isn't working.
With Apple ONE company is responsible.
Most people never install an OS. So unless valve or someone comes out with a $400 Linux book, Linux is going to remain a niche OS.
However, I do believe Linux can grant a lot of "obsolete" Windows laptops a second life. I'd love to donate to a charity that rehabs old Windows laptops with Linux.
For light programming, and email, a 100$ used laptop off eBay is probably enough. At 250$ I've seen a lot of very capable machines.
Yep, that's marketing. You don't care about your users.
> a broader shift to make AI in Windows more intentional and realign the experiences to those that provide the most value to users
To be fair they are claiming a shift away from their previous policy of not aligning the product to provide value to users...
Or perhaps this should be read as proud of the whole Windows up until this time - if so, then there's even less to be proud of.
Translated: We fired our Quality Assurance. You are the QA now.
Using a local group policy, you can change when "Preview builds and Feature updates" and "Quality Updates" become available in Windows Update.
By delaying those with 30 or 60 days, you will never have preview updates applied to your system, and feature and quality updates will have at least 1 or 2 months' worth of fixes before you get them.
start > run > gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Manage updates offered from Windows Update >
1) Enable "Select when preview builds and feature updates are received". Set days to 60
2) Enable "Select when quality updates are received". Set days to 30 (max value)
Careful, it's over 1k comments there
With AI features, the most annoying thing has to be the Copilot key on my laptop keyboard. If you accidentally hit it it opens a Copilot window, interrupting your typing. The Settings app for this key only allow you to specify whether it activates search or copilot, it doesn't let you turn it off. There are other workarounds like installing an app from the Store, but all those workarounds come with unwanted excess baggage.
Pausing, postponing isn't a solution here.
That's because it's not your computer, it is Microsoft's ;-)
Seriously, though, there will be quirks like with almost any OS. OS devs make choices that abstract some of the complexity in order to make it useful for a broad audience.
With Linux or the BSDs, you have the freedom to take it to any level of detail or customization that you wish to, with all that entails being outside of an externally maintained OS. Ask me how I know :-)
Disclaimer: I switched to Linux last year.
Since this isn't the Reddit comment section (I hear people here prefer a bit more elaboration and argumentative nuance with their $BEVERAGE), I feel compelled to add some of my own personal experience.
I don't think Windows can be fixed anymore. I think the choices Microsoft have been doing for _decades_ now, with only the _mechanisms_ coming and going, have become endemic to Windows, a part of its identity. Copilot, for example, is just another gadget Microsoft simply cannot not put in. In '95 is was Clippy, but the deliveries never stop, and frankly I feel like an old man that finally decided to kick a bad habit because I truly see now all the empty talk from Microsoft I've heard countless amount of times before, wrapped in different packaging, and that Windows is like it is _by design_ and that it's bad for my health (in a different way than Linux can ever be, I feel).
Ever since Windows '95 the addition of slop has been accelerating, admittedly Microsoft _were_ much different then, but it's the _curve_ I am referring to, not that they were always _as bad_. Frankly, the "churn" is insane now, I think it's one or the other adage I can't recall where "available operating system" fills "available resources" and Microsoft are there to prove it.
The problem is also they are experimenting on their users to no end. I don't mind being part of the "user experiment" for "user experience" but how many decades do they need to arrive at the same fundamental conclusions -- that people prefer less bloat, and fewer interruptions in their face? Occam's Razor tells me it's rather that Microsoft is pretending to care but their agenda is their own alone (surprise).
Just the other day I had to spend 2 hours trying to "fix" some very-background OneDrive update because I suppose I am sucker enough to use OneDrive -- one of the least liked of Microsoft products I've had the misfortune to use -- with Windows using my laptop as a BitCoin farm, wasting cycles in some infinite loop produced by what evokes comparisons to those monkeys with typewriters. Half a dozen Powershell commands and 3-4 reboots later the `wsappx.exe` process finally was healthy enough to idle. These things happen constantly to people everywhere and there's little Microsoft can or wants to do anything about. It's a cost they're willing their users to pay.
To stop rambling, one of these days -- summer vacation perhaps -- I will remove the blasted thing finally (after decades of using both Windows and Linux) and grit my teeth through Linux, which I have tried avoiding only because I am on a Thinkpad and there's always another tweak that's needed for the whole thing to work as well as Windows does on a _good_ day. To be clear, I prefer Linux by and large, it's just that I want to avoid spending weekends configuring sleep, power states, Trackpoint, full-disk encryption, the docking station, etc.
The fact I am going to do it anyway, just to rid myself of the Windows experience that's just been getting worse and worse, says it all really.
Abandon windows, and abandon any software that runs only on windows. It’s the only way out.
Yeah, I wouldn't bet on this.
Rebranding Copilot in Notepad is the kind of thing I expect from a modern day Microsoft, where they can't possibly understand what people mean when they say the word 'no thank you'. The actual change here should be a global toggle somewhere to just turn it off, forever, with no arguments from the OS. But of course we can't have that because engagement for a product no one wants might fall off.
I so, so badly wish this team would pull their head out of their ass, but if this is what their idea of improvement is, then I guess I might be done with Windows when I can't use W10 any more.
I don’t mean this in thee sense you should warm to them I mean it as in they’re on the back foot.
A friend of mine recently bought a very expensive laptop to do some gaming. I helped him set it up and god that was a horrible experience. For example, we could not get rid of LinkedIn and other crap Microsoft wanted to force on him. Disabling copilot and removing Office required registry surgery. And the damn fans were always running because of some unknown activity in the background, maybe Microsoft is moving into bitcoin mining business?
He eventually got fed up, installed Ubuntu 26.04 as an experiment and a week later still seems to enjoy the experience. Games run fine on steam and his laptop finally feels like his own.
Most surprisingly, Linux worked fine out of the box. Windows 11 on the other hand needed a bunch of PowerShell and registry hacks to be copy pasted from various sources before it was even remotely usable. It's funny how it felt as if Windows was the OS for nerds with too much free time on their hands while Ubuntu was created for ordinary people. And my god, Ubuntu feels so much more fluid on the same hardware. The difference is *huge*.
The SAME as Windows 2000 in terms of what is installed. NO TPM REQUIREMENT.
Even better: when installing Windows, there should be a "install minimal" option, and if you select it then it should be so fucking minimal - so little on there, that all you get is control panel and a way to install new software - NOTHING more.
That's your win, Microsoft. I'm 2000% certain nothing even slightly close to that will be delivered.
But I’ve found my way on Linux long ago. Sure not all software is there and MS365 fully from browser has so many annoyances, but I love the OS minimalism, how clean it is.
My ideal windows in indeed win2000, but in a transparent VM so I can just do the Windows apps. I need LSW, Linux subsystem for Windows, essentially.
I live in Linux but still have some need for the Windows Runtime from time to time. If only Windows containers were at the level of the Linux ones, I’d flip the whole world up side down.
podman run ms365-full —license-key FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
I’d pay for that. But such a system only provides value, it does not extract it. It is a 180 of the way they have been thinking for a long time now.
I do not care what you give people who don't select "minimal install" - that's their problem.
Sadly, I don't think we ever see such approach.
I think since apple is looking at the lower-end consumer market, it must also be looking at the corporate desktop market. Supporting enterprise software/fleet is a whole different ballgame. But it does play well into apple's strength, in that apple is great at letting others experiment and learn lessons from their failures.
If the new leadership at apples even glances in that direction, it will be wild for the desktop computing industry in general. Perhaps microsoft will rethink things, but better yet, entire companies and governments might start switching to MacOS.
Linux desktop is not ready for mass adaption, but it isn't that far off either. My opinion is that people using more macs get them more familiar with the unixy way of doing things. But better yet, a lot of the tooling and libraries for macs is easier to port to linux than from windows. macs dominating enterprise and consumer markets can mean improvements in linux desktop, and the eventual reality (perhaps in a decade) of seeing GNU/Linux desktops in those same spaces as viable options (Android/Linux is already there in the lowest of the low markets).
Even if you do "get it", you ain't going to be allowed to deliver it.
I use WIN+R instead of the Start Menu Search/PowerToy's Alt+Space because it is INSTANT and 100% CONSISTENT. You just made my instant thing slower, great, thanks, mission accomplished!
Feels wildly out of touch, to almost a comical degree.
[0] https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/05/01/announc...
I think a dead-giveaway is the realisation that issues that come with Microsoft-specific software, is met with an increasing amount of complaints by end users. Thus, either we buy into the PR explanation by Microsoft, or we rely on what end users says. Now there is a question how accurate the end users are, but the amount of complaints is not static; it has increased a lot in the last some weeks, and even way before that. There is a reason why Microsoft is now called Microslop - the decrease in quality is one big reason for that. AI has not led to an increase in quality - Microsoft needs to acknowledge that. But they won't, because they already committed totally to AI without any way back now.
Well that and I have to be mindful of running too many resource starving processes at the same time including WSL. Otherwise performance will quickly degrade. But that’s not much different than my 2015 ASUS zenbook running Linux off of 8gb of ram. In comparison my work laptop runs on 32gb of ram with much more powerful cpu cores.
WSL is my favorite and most used feature of Windows 11. So I’ll be happy as long as they don’t screw that up.
Starting from web based start menu taking forever to launch, to everything resisting to you to be in control of your computer.
Some say the speed is fine, but forget that these machines are running at nanosecond level instructions and there’s no reason for a simple task to take milliseconds unless somebody is optimizing for service revenue and user tracking (to be sold later to advertisers, not for user experience improvements).
Microslop is just scared out of mind with the European and Asian countries moving to Linux based platforms to get out of their grip. Can you imagine the amount of intelligence they will loose, and how much harder they will need to work to compete for real after three decades of being the default in everything.
You’ve been busy.
Stop shipping features, ship stability and quality.
I just can't, gotta ask - what about c++ updates? What about integral os components that were migrated to the store and if you disable it, you won't get updates? What about defender updates (not definitions but app update) that won't get applied if you have another anti malware?
The thing I hate about windows updates is that microsoft can't even update all their own stuff with a single button.
edit: almost forgot - why is office not in windows update, and what the hell is wrong with teams and why it is seperate from office updates
Just updating windows is a complete and utter mess and every single Linux distro is 100x better
I've seen Tiny11 referenced but haven't seen a good guide for it.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/what-i-do-to-clean-u...
This will never not be funny to me. These clowns really did remove something that existed for decades and then spend more than a decade trying to edge their users to the fact that they were gonna bring it back. In 500 years when somebody looks up enshittification on Wikipedia, this should be the first example.
However in today's world if you expose an unpatched "anything" to the internet then it is very possible that it will be discovered and eventually used to (silently) do things you don't want. Think DDOS farms, illegal software distribution etc...
What is the middle ground? I don't think there is one. We need to have reliable, automatically updated OSes which don't suck and , much more importantly, run the applications we need.
That is definitely NOT Windows.
It feels like there is a committee and every Microsoft marketing group gets their changes that they want in Windows to help push their product.
Windows should have someone at the top - with TASTE - and the authority and strength and vision to actually make real change happen.
Real change isn't possible because assuming someone is in charge of Windows then they are weak and without their own vision to even understand all the things that are being said over and over and over in threads like this.
People would LOVE it if when installing Windows you could choose "text only/no GUI", or "minimal install" or "select the components you want" or "super special with the lot". Why the fuck can't Microsoft work out on its own to do this.
And for gods sake drop the stupid TPM thing which was required by the Microsoft new PC sales licensing division.
And NO ADS - it's an operating system not a billboard.
On the other hand, Apple still refusing to fix shit in macOS people have been asking for decades.
>You decide when updates happen, not the other way around.
Not... the other way around? Updates decide when I happen?
>Last month we said we would reduce where Copilot shows up across Windows, focusing on bringing AI where it’s most valuable. [...] in Notepad, we’ve replaced the generic Copilot icon with a clearer “Writing Tools” label that better describes what it does.
We've reduced AI by renaming the button?
MS is so cooked if they think they can fix quality issues with corporate culture slogans
The file system still uses drive letters. Can’t they scrap the old file system folder layout to something… organized?
There's no point doing so. Folder mounts are possible in diskmgmt.msc, and on Linux partitions end up mounted in /mnt/crap (and removables in /media/crap :D) anyway.
I can also now run and install over cmd powershlle with choco, scoop and winget.
Get Firefox, VLC, MPV and all that.
Get Powertoys.
Run Christitustech utlity for tweaks.
So even less usage for Linux imo.
Win 11 may not offer improvements for you, but it may be designed to offer big benefits for MS: ads, data monetization, ai, data for training ai.
The fact that some Windows games run better on Bazzite + Proton (/ Wine) is evidence in itself.
By now Windows, for me is more like a reality TV show than an OS.
If yes I dont care and I won't use w11
Still have w10 for steam, will switch to linux in the future
as to the naysayers, they were clueless back then, they're clueless today, and they will continue to be clueless as windows gets better and better.
The way I read this, it sounds like "We're not giving up on disabling local accounts, telemetry, ads in the OS and other things most people complain. However, we're willing to make some concessions in how aggressively the updates are pushed on users and a few minor points or things we planned to implement at some point anyway but didn't consider that important."
Prove me wrong.
I was always a taskbar top guy, because it simply makes more sense, this is not opinion this is fact. Browser tabs are on the TOP, your mouse hovers over the top of the screen WAY more, and It's stupid to have to spend miles in mouse travel time to the bottom of the screen. Window controls like close, minimize, fs are TOP. Most things are on the TOP. Whoever made the decision to remove that ability to move the taskbar while Linux basically offers EVERYTHING you can imagine and more is insane. I was using Explorer Patcher, but it was buggy for me, so I use Start 11 now, its works fine, but it should not need a 3rd party closed source software to basically just have what Windows always offered.
I use Windows only for gaming, everything else I do on Linux. I think It's too late to realize these things. M$ started by just buying software and building a monopoly they were never the good guys so I can not say the "lost it" but whatever this BS is they are doing now its worse. I also use AtlasOS to bring some sense into Windows, also something that should not be needed and be that way out of the box with few simple switches. It's just a bloated mess, at least its stable for the most part.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-new-run-dialo...
it's probably not a big dent in market share, but it's probably a good tipping point
Another is Windows Explorer, loses focus all the time, no hint to where it went, preventing keyboard navigation. Basic UI conventions are being violated, for no reason than having no clue what Windows is.
Windows is apparently being infested by young hackers who think Linux is the best thing since sliced bread and who just want to add tacky features using sloppy AI.
Honestly, I can live with Windows 11 being a little slow, and I can deal with File Explorer issues. I can write my own tools to manage some of that, and PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks. Those parts do not bother me that much.
What bothers me is Copilot being pushed into the operating system experience itself. I wish it could simply be treated as an optional feature.
Windows is an operating system. An operating system is the foundational layer that governs the user’s work. Because of that, AI should be an opt-out assistant, not a premise that changes the default behavior of the system.
When I move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, Copilot feels like something that damages the user experience itself.
If Copilot were at the level of GPT or Claude, I probably would not complain as much. But I do not understand why the quality gap feels so large.
Why accept mediocrity when Microsoft has shown to be capable of producing something better than their current iteration of Windows? Whether you prefer Windows 2000 or XP or 7 or one of the server versions over 10/11, all of those were in many ways 'better' than 11.
> I can deal with File Explorer issues
Again, why? It is not as if those issues are the result of Microsoft adding something useable or worthwhile, they're just the result of MS adding even more ballast to an already overburdened system.
> I can write my own tools to manage some of that
Yes, you can, and...
> PowerShell is simple enough for many tasks
...so you're getting to experience the power of the shell like *nix-users have been espousing for more than half a century now. Welcome to the club and welcome to the CLI. Here we use words to communicate instead of pictures, we outgrew those once we left play school.
If you want to use Windows just use one of the previous versions as long as you can while preparing to move over to the greener Wine-yards in Linux-land. Unless there is a big shake-up within Microsoft - unlikely - it looks like Windows as an operating system is a dead-end street. It will be turned into a straight jacket where you will comply with whatever the current business plan dictates. Escape while you still can I'd say, there are many alternatives on offer.