I don't think Microsoft can pull this off, I think as mindshare is shifting it will continue to do so and its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back and right now its only talking about doing some minor things. Now Nvidia is developing the drivers on Linux seriously there is every chance this transition snowballs and nothing Microsoft does will be enough.
I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows, the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen, and windows search no longer searches your PC.
Deleting "Product" might save windows, short of that, I am doubtful.
Although, surprisingly, built on top of absolutely incredible silicon.
To me that's because thats a capital E "Engineering" driven task that Product can't get their grubby little mitts on and ruin.
The first is coercion. Installing without a Microsoft (Outlook) account is more and more difficult. An attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic. And there would be an easy control to disable all Copilot integration. Microsoft is coercive towards their customers with these and other actions.
The second is incompetence. The Windows update process is intrusive, lengthy, and prone to repeatedly bricking unlucky PCs. Linux updates are far more pleasant.
These are big problems, and I agree, it will take great institutional change to curb these abusive tendencies. I don't know if they can.
Man..., its 2026 and just yesterday I did "Update and Shutdown" only for it to "Update and Restart" instead. It would be funny if it wasnt that sad..
Now, don't get me wrong, what the hell is so special about Windows that it needs to reboot for every little update operation?
Put a clippy skin on copilot and people would probably install it voluntarily.
I install Gimp one time. I like to casual draw on autopilot, usually while doing something else, talking, watching a movie, listening to a podcast etc. For some reason half the icons were missing and the existing set was replaced with the hipster horrifying flat single color monstrosities. This would have been a waste of their time if it was only an option for no one who wants this some place buried deep in the settings where it would only clutter the nesaserily complex options.
With MS it feels more like intentionally trolling the user
The best spot for the applications sub menu is to not make it a sub menu. The second best is to leave it wherever the fuck it was before. I want to struggle remembering what an application was called and wonder why they are organized so poorly. (Not by file Association) In stead they have me wonder where they even are???
I'm not sure what this sentence means. Perhaps you already knew that Gimp's monochrome icons can be replaced by colorful ones by going to the Gimp settings under Theme -> Icon Theme, and unchecking the "Use symbolic icons if available" checkbox. That may be what you meant by "some place buried deep in the settings". But if you didn't, at least now you know how to get the colorful icons back.
The reason I'm making this comment, though, is to contrast it with Windows. A comment by chasil, left shortly after your own comment, said that "[a]n attentive steward of Windows would allow older gui themes (xp, Win7 Aero, etc.) to be applied for the nostalgic." Gimp has done just that: in Icon Theme, you can choose the "Default" or "Legacy" icon theme, so if you got used to the older icons, you can get them back. And you can still use the newer icon set if you like, but get the icons' colors back by unchecking a (confusingly-named, the name definitely needs improvement) checkbox. Windows doesn't have any built-in way to get the older themes back; if you want Windows 11, or even 10, to look like Windows 7 or XP or whatever version you trained your visual memory on for years, then it takes third-party software to make that possible. (And it may not even be possible, I haven't checked).
When even one of the most infamous-for-confusing-UI pieces of open-source software (I mean Gimp, of course) is doing a better job of providing good UI than Microsoft is, Microsoft has a problem.
BUT
I don't actually understand your sentences for the most part. I really had to work to glean what you were talking about.
I'm not trying to be insulting here; sometimes I write in inscrutable ways too. But - could you reword a few things so I know what you're trying to say?
The general point was that "Improvement" that ruin muscle memory usually aren't. It should be the most basic UI design principle.
One should be able to instinctively click on the Gmail icon while focused on the task at hand. If the icon isn't where one expects it to be you are no longer doing email things. Same goes for having the user search for the inbox inside the application. If they can't find it they are unproductive and feel dumb but they aren't to blame. Some bad designer came up with the brilliant idea to call it "all mail". The inbox is expected to live at the top of the menu. You can't improve it.
It's such basic stuff. It's like someone used your tools or your kitchen and put everything in a new spot. Eh, I mean the wrong spot.
I could give 1000 example inside windows but it seems everyone is trolling their users. They all want to create the new and improved slashdot, now without threaded discussions! - Hurray!
It doesn't have to use different window layouts, just differently themed decorations. Changing the default wallpaper is a simple way to do it.
Non tech people don't care about control panel etc. they just go through the pain of entering the WiFi password. Done.
- gamers. Double click install - go on. I know very few gamers that have moved to Linux.
And corporate. Most normies that I know DON'T have own computers. Everything can be done via smartphone these days.
It's doomsday if Linux starts outperforming Windows. If SteamOS for PC still required me to dual boot - which I already do - but guaranteed is get 100% windows performance or better, then that would be the official end.
It's not clear to me this couldn't happen either: I am very willing to hand over the entire PC configuration if the promise I get in return is "your games will run as fast as it is possible to run them".
Greatest strength. Greatest papercut.
Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.
Absolutely baffling, when the perfect, magical, instant, high performance search tool has existed for a decade at least: "Everything"
One of THE BEST windows apps.
And yet somehow none of them are as nice as https://eartrumpet.app/ lol
This is about the MacBook Neo coming for the budget laptop market. At 500$ it's an easy choice.
My uncle runs one in Bradford on Avon and they are slapping on an OS for you whilst you supp tea and chat. Often, the user-agent is set to something Microsoftie in the browser. If necessary Edge is installed but that is frowned on 8)
I have not heard of this MacBook Neo thing ... Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang around on HN.
1. The usage statistics don't reflect your anecdotal Linux usage; Linux desktop/laptop usage share has not grown that significantly in 20 years and Windows remains quite dominant.
2. MacBook Neo was widely discussed on HN not very long ago, and I'd think if anything an owner of an IT company would be more aware of it than an average HN user. It's definitely going to shake up the market for lower-end laptops.
2. Missed it or perhaps blanked it. It really will not shake up the lower end because anyone wanting a lower end laptop (whatever that is) will insist on it running Windows and not Apples.
There is a really good reason why car manufacturers run multiple marques - the budget, standard and premium ones. Attempting to put the Apple "premium shine" on a budget effort may backfire spectacularly (and devalue the entire brand) or maybe they will somehow manage to re-invent marketing.
I’m not sure what market you are in, but this thing will absolutely upend the low end market in North America. This is a MacBook which handily competes with used/refurbished M1 airs for performance, but sells for less. Hell, it sells for less than an iPhone.
They have managed to keep the build quality without really sacrificing anything you would expect on an entry level computer.
My experience with the low end of laptops is that people can’t even tell you what OS they have (chrome or windows). People are going to see this and think that apple makes good phones, good tablets, and now good computers for affordable prices. The existence of the c model iPhones never “cheapened” the high end models. The existence of the iPad does not cheapen the iPad Pro. All the reviews and media basically are people wondering how they managed to create such a high quality product at this price point.
Apple made a significant number of tradeoffs to reach $500, but for a budget user, they're reasonable tradeoffs.
I guess you might be able to order one or something?
I can not walk into my local best buy and get a computer running Linux.
It's a moot point anyway, since you'll usually have to pay more for a Linux laptop vs buying a Windows one and installing it yourself.
Earliest Macintoshs in the 1990 launched a tutorial on first boot until you explicitly finished or skipped it. This was a wonderful experience as a kid and still warm my heart today thinking back of it.
Today's Mac only display "tips", "what's new" after first boot or major update because people are generally more computer literate. But (unless Liquid Glass changed that too) they never gave on this mantra that the OS should guide newcomers.
So yeah I think Linux distro have room to do better.
I hadn’t tried Fedora until late last year, and was very impressed. Came across as highly polished and complete.
Hadn’t tried Pupply Linux until a couple months ago, and it’s now my new favourite. I’m now running it on a small form factor desktop HP with no internal drive.
.. which might need a bit of tinkering to install Linux on. Just because it runs a kernel doesn't mean it will be usable out of the box.
For example this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1nc1jui/how_to_actua...
That's a problem right there.
Imagine a plumber talking about how much better his toilet is than everyone else's - bc everyone believes only a plumber can install it (which was truth for most of Linux history and general PC users).
Nobody took it seriously bc they took it as mostly an odd humblebrag for niche Windows haters.
"My favorite toilet is the Ultramax by TOTO." , "Its model number is "xxx-xx-etc" - that man definitely believes in Ultramax!
My personal favorite is a lightly used Thinkpad, you can get a nice Linux machine for under 400$. But it's still a lot of work for most people.
If a Ubuntu update does something weird, what do you do with your 1700$ System 76 laptop ?
With your Neo, you go to the Apple store and they'll sort it out.
When I called them, they had already set it up and was playing Risk of Rain 2. They started streaming for me on the Discord Flatpak they installed from the app store.
I say this as a decades-long Linux user (who has tried to evangelize it many times).
Honestly for your average home consumer, there isn't much need for a Windows PC now days.
This doesn't mean if someone gave me a manual car I wouldn't try to learn.
If your around a bunch of car people then it's much easier to over estimate how many people will want to drive stick.
Well I can agree with that, but that's not the same thing as being incapable of doing it. Both of my parents could easily install Linux, it's infantilizing to argue that they can't fill out a user wizard and select a drive to wipe.
You are vastly overestimating the percentage of the population that knows what a "drive" is. Not saying that's a good thing, but it's the reality.
In my experience most people who use a computing device may be able to tell me “this is window” or “this is Mac” by virtue of the branding being all over the stuff but for all intents and purposes these things are appliances.
In the same way most people except ambitious DIYers don’t rip apart their 500-1000 dollar washing machine to replace a worn belt the call a repair guy. Or in your case, have a buddy who knows how to do it.
I think this is in response to slightly abnormal people trying Steam OS and other user-friendly Linux distros as they grow increasingly annoyed with Windows 11 antics.
> dangerously close on performance
sometimes more performant.
That's usually due to:
1. Converting directX into Vulkan (potentially very large performance gains)
2. Less OS overhead (usually minor gains)
That's not at all how that works. DirectX12 isn't slow by any stretch of the imagination. In my personal and professional experience Vulkan is about on par depending on the driver. The main differences are in CPU cost, the GPU ultimately runs basically the same code.
There's no magic Vulkan can pull out of thin air to be faster than DX12, they're both doing basically the same thing and they're not far off the "speed of light" for driving the GPU hardware.
The performance benefits of Vulkan and DX12 come from tighter control over the hardware by the engine. An engine written for older APIs needs to be adapted to gain anything.
They won't actually move back to a user-focused OS at all. It's nice for them to declare they will, but their culture and business pressures will prevent any kind of sustained effort. (Their users aren't their customers.)
You're right. It can't possibly be bad leadership and poor decisions. Sometimes you just slip on a patch of ice and that's how you lost your business.
They can throw money to tweak some stuff but I doubt they'll fully back off from pushing for software+services or all this recent conditioning for Copilot. This piece is a damage control but wording shows they won't change. I doubt that in last 26 years we had a company that truly admitted its mistakes - that's not in the "nature" of such entities.
Two factoids: Azure runs more Linux VMs than Windows VMs and AWS runs more Windows VMs than Azure.
Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably as on Windows. For nontechnical users who would never figure out which incantations to type into the terminal to fix it -- because they have their next meeting in 15 minutes.
How many hours have they put into the Linux client?
My guess is the answer to these questions indicate more of how it got there than anything the distros or upstream components can do.
Users don't really care, do they?
My game controller worked, my BT headset, the media keys on my keyboard even worked.
Lots of stuff was mildly broken but no more so than it was on Windows. It is just differently broken.
It works fine (tested on Arch), but at the very least you should run that kind of malware as a separate user, or better yet, in a VM.
It's just that we accept windows issues as "that's how computers are". While Linux is expected to work
A business exists because its shareholders invest capital with the expectation of a return. As a result, nearly all businesses go through similar lifecycles. The stages are launch, growth, maturity, decline, and sometimes renewal. There is a lot of capital injected in the early stages and to capture market share the firm often produces the best product it can.
Once the market share is acquired, the business puts up moats if it's able, and then it enters the MATURITY phase. That's where the Windows business is. In the maturity phase a business focuses on TAKING PROFITS wherever it can find them. This includes but is not limited to cutting back on its investment in product, as much as it can. If it can cut budgets and quality and give that money to the shareholders it will. If it can inject ads into the product or resell your data it will.
The very purpose of a business is to reach maturity and then take profits.
That's capitalism. The investors provided the capital. In the end, they gets what they wants.
Now if a company leans into this dynamic as hard as Microsoft has, you should know what's coming. No one should be surprised - maybe they're scared of the Neo right now and there'll be a few years of reprieve, but they're a mature firm, they're in profit taking mode, and the goal in this phase is not to make Windows as great as possible, it's to squeeze as much money out of it as they can.
The next stage is decline -- where the squeeze gets so hard that the business actually collapses. All businesses fail sooner or later. Everything becomes lawyers and accountants slicing it up, selling it off, and sometimes it gets restructured and reborn, sometimes it doesn't. This can take years or it can take decades but it's basically a bumpy downhill road from maturity to that point. If you stick around at this point and keep using Windows, keep in mind that's what you opted into. There isn't really any other way. It's just business.
Intriguingly, free software in its more elemental forms doesn't appear to follow this lifecycle. It's not for profit and there are no investors to satisfy. Contributors who build the software do it mainly out of self-interest: they build what they want to use, and as a result they may come and go at any time. But the software remains there, and you are welcome to tinker with it, too.
And it really comes down to $MSFT. If the stock keeps dropping, how long do you think any real commitment to “quality” for a boring, low(no?) revenue product will last? Very little when the ad/partner revenue really starts flowing for “ai focused metrics” that can directly tie to windows surveillance (ie recall).
Enterprise users are.
Ideally you'd spend at least a day or so trying them all, and about a week reading and watching about their differences, pros and cons.
Unless you are using nVidia for gaming or have an obscure hardware configuration, chances are you're supported wonderfully well at this very moment, by at least 2-3 distributions (Mint, Manjaro, Fedora, Ubuntu, Bazzite, SteamOS, PopOS, CachyOS -- you'll also have a choice KDE/Gnome).
All you need is pendrive. For the super easy transition you'd want an entirely separate system drive (nvme for example). I know, its expensive. I said for the super easy transition, its not necessary. Slow portable disk to store your current documents and game saves should be enough.
We live in the exciting times.
No doubt it’s starting to show its age but it’s like watching a lion die. Win32 amenities just being automatically available is quite sick and I wish there was something similar for Linux.
It’s like windows devs and users live in alternate realities, I’m sure a lot of cool things can happen if they bring some of that dev love over to their UX.
.. yet. The absolute roll-over I've seen regarding OS level age verification is concerning and disheartening.
When I first tried Ubuntu decades ago it was like an awakening and I started seeing every developer using Windows and Mac as brainwashed fools. That's not to pick on others because I also started seeing my former self as brainwashed.
For a developer, Linux is far superior for many reasons.
Moving from Windows to Linux reminds me of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
A lot of times, with software, you could be severely constrained but not realize it because you don't know better. The effect is very strong in this industry.
This is precisely why Microsoft created WSL2
It's been fantastic. People always find an excuse but really they are doing themselves a disservice.
I am curious whether they will "suddenly realized" this after the community feedback process they initiated because they supposedly care so much about their users. Then, out of nowhere, they discovered that users do not want to be spied on or treated as the product. They just want to use their fucking operating system in peace without Microsoft constantly forcing its own products on them.
I wonder when that realization came and why. Maybe they started losing market share to Apple or users just prefer phones to pc even more?
Linux is better than Windows on the desktop because Windows got worse, not because Linux got better.
Unless you mean for gaming. That was Valve's exit strategy from Windows.
I personally will never forgive them for uploading the entirety of my users dir to OneDrive without asking for permission. They're --still-- doing this. Whatever decision making process they have in place that not only cooked this scheme up, but allowed it to continue for years must be broken beyond repair. It's contemptuous, backwards, and hostile to users. It cannot be condemned enough.
This blog post talks about taskbar positioning and vaguely gesturing at quality, which is whatever. I'm not mad about removing features or even a higher incidence of bugs. I'm mad about hostile dark patterns that they have consciously chosen to employ at an ever increasing rate. I don't think you can fix this without drastic company wide changes.
For as long as I live, if I have a choice, I will avoid Microsoft products. They cannot be trusted.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: > Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace.
Yes. Not being able to reposition the taskbar is definitely the biggest problem that users have been complaining about. They don't care about Recall trying to store screenshots in an insecure database, or OneDrive uploading copies of all their data without asking permission. It's being able to put the taskbar on the side of the screen that they care about most.
(To be fair, people do care about this and it's not at all a bad thing that they're giving more options back. It's just not deserving of the #1 spot).
> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus: > You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows, focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted. As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
Notice this does not say "You will have one checkbox, prominently placed in the Settings app, that says 'Turn Copilot off entirely, remove it from my computer, and never mention it again until I uncheck this box'." Nope, they're still going to push Copilot in unnecessary places, they're just going to be more subtle about it.
> Enhancing Search: [...] Clearer and more trustworthy results, with results from content on your device easy to understand and clearly distinct from web results
So yeah, you still get web results in your search bar, a feature absolutely zero people want and which is just there to fake Bing success, just with a little divider now next to the applications the search failed to find.
Switched to cachyos - I've spoken with at least 5 people who have had the same bsod after updates situation in the last 6 months. If windows at least embraced proper update techniques like with immutable Linux - and enough polish to make the random bsod loop after updates impossible to accur without hardware damage id likely go back for my gaming rig at least - but right now, it feels like garbage ngl
I've used Windows as my primary desktop for ~35 years and I do my absolute best to housekeep, but I still need to reinstall about once a year or so. I'm militant about installing almost nothing on my primary PC and putting all the janky apps on another PC via RDP too.
edit: oh, here it is!
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/can-upgrade-ms-dos-6-22-window...
Some reasons: Even as a low-level programmer fully capable of resolving problems, I want to spend my time working on my programs, not working on making my OS work, and Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues. Windows does a better job of managing memory/swaps, at least out of the box. Windows has a stable userland with 30 years of backwards compatibility. Windows makes good use of both GUIs and CLIs, letting you choose whichever is faster for the task, while Linux distros and devs have some kind of bizarre ideological purity culture and generally refuse to make good GUIs. Windows has a built-in tool for easily making full system images while the system is running, without requiring the image destination be larger than the system drive including unused space. Windows developers are not so in love with dynamically linked system libraries that dependency management becomes a pain in the ass. Windows generally has a polished UX with a lot fewer papercuts.
1) Somehow both GNOME and KDE got much better in the last 2 years. It's very smooth and polished experience that I now prefer to both MacOS and Windows. I only need to install 1 or 2 extensions and it's good to go for me.
2) AI! It's orders of magnitudes easier to fix any Linux issue now compared to 3 years ago. The issues that would take a whole afternoon of fighting are now just a couple back-and-forths with the LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini.
3) Valve and SteamOS. The large and mostly successful push by Valve to make Linux be the platform for gaming has cleared many Linux issues and hurdles on the way. I think this will have ripple effects in the industry. My prediction is that thanks to Valve and SteamOS we will see a viable, widely used Linux based phone in the next 3 years.
Isn't there already a viable, widely used Linux based phone OS called Android?
The happy path has improved a lot. When Linux is working it's reasonably usable. But once something breaks it breaks HARD and recovery is still miserable.
For reference I've been using Linux since Red Hat 5.2 circa 2000. I cut my teeth debugging problems without internet access. I ran an LTSP lab at my high school. I remember the hell that was XF86Config (I was there, Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago).
....and like the previous commenter I run Windows on my personal machines because I want to spend my free time using them, not debugging them.
....which is why Chromebooks took over the consumer market. Oh, wait.
I’ve certainly run into some odd situations on my desktop Linux machine over the past 6 years since I started using it full time, but I think most of them were related to the nature of how I use the machine more than inherent instability. I think I’ve spent many more hours of my life unwinding piles of malware and bloat from non-technical folks’ Windows machines than debugging this one.
They don’t know what Linux is, and know nothing about tech, they just know that we had a 30 minute lesson on “here’s Firefox, this icon means you need to install updates, here’s how you print”.
Oh and this was Linux Mint back in ~2016
Things have only gotten easier since then
I have been using Linux since 2000s as well. I do remember the rpm hell, dealing with x config issues etc. It is NOT the same experience now a days. I don't have the time or inclination to mess around so I use Fedora + KDE and that basically stays out of my way. I don't rice my desktop or do any hacking around beyond basic automation and I have had zero instances of the system just breaking.
* I wanted to update a Raspberry Pi from Ubuntu LTS 22 to LTS 24. Turns out this is basically impossible. Ubuntu themselves tell you not to do it and their recommended solution is to wipe the system and try again. I ignored them and tried to do it anyway and my Pi ended up refusing to boot. Great.
* I needed to update a Raspberry Pi to change the list of WiFi networks it knew about. Except apparently there are two different networking stacks for Linux with different config files and I edited the wrong one.
* I built a new TrueNAS server. Turns out that you absolutely cannot configure the networking from the GUI. There's a section there, sure, but every time it refuses to save the information until you "test the changes" and that fails to reconnect every single time. You have to locally plug a monitor into the machine, boot it, and log in with a keyboard to get to the config there.
* Not strictly a bug, but I installed Debian in WSL and it doesn't include `man` by default. So I get a command line and no help for it. Brilliant.
* I want to install jj
* Its docs say to use cargo-binstall
* How do I get that? With cargo, so sudo apt install cargo
* `cargo binstall --strategies crate-meta-data jj-cli` -> `error: no such command: `binstall``
* `cargo install binstall` -> `error: cannot install package `cargo-binstall 1.17.7`, it requires rustc 1.79.0 or newer, while the currently active rustc version is 1.75.0`
* `sudo apt install rust` -> E: Unable to locate package rust
* `sudo apt install rustc` -> `rustc is already the newest version (1.75.0+dfsg0ubuntu1~bpo0-0ubuntu0.22.04).`
Apparently the guidance is to manage your rust versions with a tool other than apt that you install with `curl ... | sh` because no one ever learns anything about security
.....yep, just as user friendly as I remember.
The other path I can see (looking at https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/#windows) is that you could maybe instead use winget directly.
Though honestly IMO this is more of a failure on the jj devs to not provide something that can be installed straight using apt, I guess (looking at https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/#linux). For Arch for example you just install it from the official repos.
"Ubuntu themselves tell you not to do it" - you do see it right? Let us see how you forgive Windows for breaking things by ignoring Microsoft's advice and blame them anyway when it breaks.
> * I needed to update a Raspberry Pi to change the list of WiFi networks it knew about. Except apparently there are two different networking stacks for Linux with different config files and I edited the wrong one.
Why? Why not connect it to the network you want so that it just connects to that going forward?
> * I built a new TrueNAS server. Turns out that you absolutely cannot configure the networking from the GUI. There's a section there, sure, but every time it refuses to save the information until you "test the changes" and that fails to reconnect every single time. You have to locally plug a monitor into the machine, boot it, and log in with a keyboard to get to the config there.
And TrueNAS's shortcomings are somehow Linux's fault just like every Windows thirdparty software issue is Windows' fault?
> * I want to install jj * Its docs say to use cargo-binstall
No, they don't ask that as the first choice - this is what they say in https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/:
Installation¶
Download pre-built binaries for a release¶
There are pre-built binaries of the last released version of jj for Windows, Mac, or Linux (the "musl" version should work on all distributions).
Cargo Binstall¶
If you use cargo-binstall, ....
$ > curl -L --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall/main/install-from-binstall-release.sh | bash
+ set -o pipefail
+ set -o pipefail
+ case "${BINSTALL_VERSION:-}" in
++ mktemp -d
+ cd /tmp/tmp.8IdPJtQBlE
+ '[' -z '' ']'
...
+ case ":$PATH:" in
+ '[' -n '' ']'
$ > cargo binstall --strategies crate-meta-data jj-cli
INFO the current QuickInstall statistics endpoint url="https://cargo-quickinstall-stats-server.fly.dev/record-install"
Binstall would like to collect install statistics for the QuickInstall project
to help inform which packages should be included in its index in the future.
If you agree, please type 'yes'. If you disagree, telemetry will not be sent.
...
INFO resolve: Resolving package: 'jj-cli'
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-bisector is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-diff-editor is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-echo is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-editor is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-formatter is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN The package jj-cli v0.39.0 (x86_64-unknown-linux-musl) has been downloaded from github.com
INFO This will install the following binaries:
INFO - jj => /home/xxxxx/.cargo/bin/jj
Do you wish to continue? [yes]/no yes
INFO Installing binaries...
INFO Done in 7.549505679s
$ > jj version
jj 0.39.0-d9689cd9b51b4139d2842fcf6c30f65f4eed8cd1
$ >
Having said all that, none of this stuff you mentioned even remotely resembled an average user's workflow who just uses his computer for listening to music and browsing the internet with some occasional document editing thrown in. Despite its warts and shortcomings, Linux does a much better job today than it used to.
I'm not the guy who wrote that, but I had the same use-case myself. (Except that I happened to choose the correct networking stack so I didn't have a problem). I wanted to set up a Raspberry Pi in my parents' house that would run Tailscale so I could use it as an exit node. (With my parents' full knowledge and permission). I wanted to pre-configure it with their WiFi password so that when I showed up for Christmas, I didn't have to spend any time configuring the device, just plug it in and go have dinner. (Then they changed ISPs, got a new router with a new WiFi password, and I had to ask them to plug it into the wired network so I could connect to it remotely and change the WiFi password again, so I had to do that work twice. But thankfully, I didn't have to walk them through the steps, just say "Hey, please plug it into the router with an Ethernet cable until you get an email from me telling you I've reconfigured the WiFi".)
Not giving a supported upgrade path between version N and N+1 of your operating system is unacceptable, user hostile, and not something a home user could deal with. "Install from scratch, wipe all your files, and set everything up again" is not OK. You can upgrade Windows from 1.0 through 11 without Microsoft saying "nah, this is impossible": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwXX5FQEl88
> No, they don't ask that as the first choice - this is what they say in https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/:
"the binaries" are a tarball whose instructions refer back to the previous document, whose "Install > Linux" section starts "from source" and says "go obtain Rust > 1.88", so all of the previous problems still apply.
Again with the assertions without checking things. This is the path of "the binaries":
https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/releases/tag/v0.39.0
I downloaded the file myself and extracted to see:
$ > ls -l jj-v0.39.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xxxx xxxx 10373711 Mar xx xx:xx jj-v0.39.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
$ > tar xzvf jj-v0.39.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
./
./README.md
./LICENSE
./jj
$ > ls -l jj
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 xxxx xxxx 27122184 Mar 5 02:33 jj
$ > file jj
jj: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), static-pie linked, BuildID[sha1]=70d48428bc2100069e6813aff97e3dce8d2bb4a0, not stripped
$ > ./jj version
jj 0.39.0-d9689cd9b51b4139d2842fcf6c30f65f4eed8cd1
$ >
Not "figure out how to extract a tarball, find somewhere unspecified on your path to put things blah blah" but "to get started go read this doc whose first step is to install rust, which your package manager isn't capable of".
This is a fairly standard Linux experience, not one reserved for developer tools.
On Windows, if you're not going through an app store you get an EXE or MSI installer that you double click and it does everything else necessary. Every time.
I note you also dropped the line of argument about the OS updating, where you were chiding them, saying they did need to follow instructions in that case. Of course, the instructions in that case are indefensible - you cannot seriously suggest an OS is production-ready for the real world if the instructions are "this cannot be updated. Seriously, don't even try.".
Yes, because as per the poster, they are not a novice:
> For reference I've been using Linux since Red Hat 5.2 circa 2000. I cut my teeth debugging problems without internet access. I ran an LTSP lab at my high school. I remember the hell that was XF86Config (I was there, Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago).
No one is expecting a novice to know how to run curl, untar and compile. This is not that situation by the very admission above.
> For somebody who just started using it, "following the install instructions at the top of the page" is a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing. It is not the user's fault if those instructions are bad and you could totally get it working more easily if only you already knew what you were doing.
Did you actually go to jj's github which the poster mentioned? This is what is literally the top of the Installation page:
Installation and setup¶
Installation¶
Download pre-built binaries for a release¶
There are pre-built binaries of the last released version of jj for Windows, Mac, or Linux (the "musl" version should work on all distributions).
> I note you also dropped the line of argument about the OS updating, where you were chiding them, saying they did need to follow instructions in that case. Of course, the instructions in that case are indefensible - you cannot seriously suggest an OS is production-ready for the real world if the instructions are "this cannot be updated. Seriously, don't even try.".
I admit that I was shallow on this point. I did research further and Raspberry Pi situation isn't great when it comes to upgrades. Most people are using separate SD cards to host the OS and doing a hard upgrade. I admit and apologise to @Arainach for not checking further on this point and ignoring it.
Edit: I guess today was the day I couldn't ignore Linux bashing from an experienced user and got somewhat carried away. My tone could and should have been softer.
As a separate point, it seems quite feasible to run Android apps in VM on Linux based phone and make the experience fairly seamless. Something like what Waydroid provides.
But why?
The premise of Waydroid seems to be to bring Android apps you want to your Linux desktop. But why would you want the phone in your pocket to run Desktop Linux so that you could then run Android apps on your Desktop Linux mobile phone instead of just running Android on your phone?
What desktop Linux features do you want on your phone that would justify this complexity?
My hope is that installation of the Android apps on Linux phone could be made seamless.
I’m sure Google would deny Google Play Services to any popular fork that didn’t follow their rules. But they would do the same to any Linux desktop or whatever that didn’t follow their rules, too, if it became popular.
There are open UI shells from KDE and GNOME, multitouch gesture support, Android emulation... it's all there.
I don't know what it is, but UI on Linux always feels too disjoint from the rest of the system.
It's a bit like how Windows 3.11 was just UI-on-DOS. I get the same feeling.
Don't get me wrong - I love Linux for all its CLI use but for some reason I've never been able to primary drive it without going insane after a week.
Windows just seems to feel more put-together and I guess that's because the kernel probably has hacks to support Office, and Explorer probably has hacks to support the kernel, etc.
The only other system I've felt this level of unity in is FreeBSD with its userland+kernel harmony.
Maybe I need to try a Linux desktop again as I haven't done it in ~10y but the other comment here about Fedora not feeling production ready doesn't inspire much hope...
Any ideas?
Many Linux users seem to like upgrading (if you can call it that) to the latest eye candy every time Gnome or KDE or whoever puts out a new release. I'm the opposite. I do think much of the UI work in Linux has done more harm than good. But that's the nice thing about Linux: I don't have to care, precisely because of the lack of such close coupling between the GUI and the underlying OS. I can't stand the GUI that comes by default with Ubuntu, but I just don't use it; I use something else instead.
I felt the same as you, up until quite recently, although I was using Xbuntu which uses a very barebones desktop environment. Since changed to CachyOS + KDE Plasma late last year and haven't booted up Windows for 3 months other than to extract a few files. I"m a MacOS laptop user, Windows desktop user, but these days I much prefer CachyOS for speed, responsiveness, easy customisation. You may still find you prefer Windows but it's worth a revisit I think and easy to try via a USB Boot as you know (although running it off USB is way more sluggish I find).
I can’t place my finger on it, but Bazzite feels more “coherent” despite using the exact same GUI.
I had the misfortune of using a Windows 11 machine the other day and I didn’t even recognise it. They’ve taken a huge misstep with the Copilot rollout.
You really should, yeah. I've given up Linux as a daily driver in favor of a MacBook but I do have a work mandated Windows machine and I hate that thing with a passion. I cannot think of a single thing that's better on it than on my MacBook or any Linux distro I've ran as a daily driver.
In fact, most of the time I want to do any tasks which are not directly Teams or MS office related I find it easier to just use WSL.
But every Linux distro has its own UI, and pretty much every distro makes it easy to configure it to look how you want, with tens of thousands of themes out there developed over the past 20 years by people wanting their os to look a certain way.
The most glaring inconsistencies are going to be user-inflicted. If I spend a weekend tweaking defaults to look just right I need to be ok with possibly tweaking any new software I download to fit my theme.
But even from a non-power-user perspective, if my mom runs into problems with her computer it's much easier to walk her through a fix over the phone if she's on Windows or a Mac.
My dad, who is very tech-literate, once tried Linux and all the trouble shooting guides required him to open a command prompt (because there isn't a consistent GUI you can use to fix things across distros). He never forgave it.
You can run KDE but depending on the app and containerization you open you'll get a Qt environment, a Qt environment that doesn't respect the system theme, random GTK apps that don't follow the system theme, random GTK apps that only follow a light/dark mode toggle. The GTK apps render their own window decorations too. Sometimes the cursor will change size and theme depending on the window it's on top of.
Right up until you try to access any settings menus.
I installed Linux instead, Fedora specifically, and everything just worked. It actually cleared up some weird hardware issues I had on Windows that I could never manage to track down. I'm pretty sure I didn't need to do any CLI or config file tinkering for anything that wasn't getting an actual CLI app I wanted to use running. Beats the dozens of different registry hacks and powershell scripts downloaded off random Github repos people kept telling me I needed to do to make Windows 11 work and not be too annoying.
I want to have a computer with stable vendor supported OS so _I can do my stuff_ not tweak some os level configs.
I _don’t_ want to spend my time playing an os systems programmer.
OS is a _component_. Like the wifi driver. I think it’s great some people love developing wifi drivers but personally I just want network that-just-works because there are billion other cool things you can do with a computer.
Similarly I want an OS that just works! Without asking me to do a anything! Because _i don’t really care_. (I mean i care it works but i expect the engineers actually developing an os offering to have a far better idea than myself what is a good stable default config for the system)
This is exactly why modern Windows is problematic. MacOS is better. A right Linux distro (e.g. Fedora Silverblue) on right hardware (e.g. Thinkpad T series) also just works™; this basically the same kind of limitation as with MacOS.
I wish they issued a Windows Rock Stable edition. Ancient as rocks (Win7 look, or maybe even WinXP look), every known bug fixed, every feature either supported fully, or explicitly not supported. No new features added. Security updates issued regularly. It could be highly popular.
That is an unforgivable sin in my eyes.
I think it’s the role of the software vendor to offer a package for a modern platform.
Not the role of OS vendor to support infinite legacy tail.
I don’t personally ever need generational program binary compatibility. What I generally want is data compatibility.
I don’t want to operate on my data with decades old packages.
My point of view is either you innovate or offer backward compatibility. I much prefer forward thinking innovation with clear data migration path rather than having binary compatibility.
If I want 100% reproducible computing I think viable options are open source or super stable vendors - and in the latter case one can license the latest build. Or using Windows which mostly _does_ support backward binaries and I agree it is not a useless feature.
Enterprise Windows config that comes eg in Thinkpads is more ready out of the box than the consumer OEM configss.
proxomitron is a rewriting proxy, which I always thought was a very nice approach to webpage filtering. again, I remember it having very good UI/UX as well as being fast and capable.
This is one of the points where people have vastly different experiences. I'm one of those that has fewer issues with Linux, and I definitely don't spend hours fixing problems. And this despite the fact that I use Arch, which is supposed to be an unstable distro. Why is that different users report so different experiences I don't know. I think that this might be partly due to perception: we tend to forgive more the OS we like. But your case doesn't seem to be just about perception. So I wonder how much the hardware could play a role here. I think Linux has quite good hardware support nowadays, but maybe I was just lucky so far.
You don't have problems with Arch presumably because you've avoided building your system into a neutron star of corporate shitware, while that's the default state for most distributions.
I'm not blaming anything on the kernel (other than memory management). The userland ecosystem is part of what makes an OS, a perfect kernel with no userland is of no value to the general populace. You don't really get to discount everyone's complaints about the Linux experience because they aren't complaints about the kernel, or at least you won't convince anyone by doing so. It is clearly possible to solve many of the issues I have on top of the Linux kernel, because Android used to be decent, but it seems the desktop ecosystem is just locked in to too many bad choices at this point.
The vast majority of complaints about Windows have nothing to do with the NT kernel, either, which by most accounts is actually quite good.
Not sure I can buy that one
MS has made hacking out the BS harder and harder with each new version of Windows. Back in the Windows XP days, yes, I could avoid a lot of the BS on my home Windows computer (although I still had to deal with it at work because work computers are usually locked down so employees don't even have admin rights to them--if I have an issue with my work computer I have to put in a support ticket to the IT department). But even then there was enough friction on my Windows home computer to make me start using Linux at home. For a few years I was running both OSs at home, but even that got to be too difficult, and I simply stopped using the Windows computer at home, at least for my own use (see below). I've never looked back.
I do still have one Windows laptop at home, because some of the Python programs I write (I write them on the Linux computer) have to run on Windows, so I have to have a way of testing them. Even that is clunky compared to how easy it is to do things on my Linux computers. That laptop runs Windows 10, and if I am ever forced to upgrade it to Windows 11, I will probably just stop testing my programs on Windows (fortunately my livelihood does not depend on being able to do that), because Windows 11 is a nonstarter for me; the BS level has just gotten too high.
> Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues.
As someone who has been running Linux at home for well over twenty years now, this has not been my experience. Back when I still had Windows computers at home, I spent more time dealing with issues with them than I have spent dealing with issues with my Linux computers at home.
I would make similar comments about the rest of your post.
The hardware is great and it's impressive Asahi Linux works at all but it's not for everyone.
macOS though, that's getting worse each year.
But it has regressed so far from where it was 25 (or more) years ago that every day I'm still infuriated and depressed that I've had to return to it for work. The idiotic UI blunders alone must waste hours of my life per week.
Aside from the absolutely baffling functionality removals, there are the hateful petty ones. Great example: the removal of Remote Desktop. I erred in getting my parents Windows laptops, thinking they'd benefit from the familiarity. NOPE. And when they encounter some defective bullshit that stops them from doing what they're trying to do, they call me for help but I can't log in from 2400 miles away because MICROSOFT REMOVED THAT ABILITY. Disgraceful.
1. Lots of rough edges "yeah it almost works if you tweak it a little" yeah thank you but no.
2. CLI is better for doing the thing you want, but GUI is better for discovering what options you have in the first place. The fact that GUI is an afterthought on Linux says a lot.
"Claude, change the libre office file picker to the system default"
"Beep boop it is done"
Linux has a big leg up over windows in this regard because all the GUIs are essentially wrappers around CLIs and text files that LLMs can deal with quite well.
Unless the GUI buries what you want to do in five or six levels of menus and options--and then changes where they're buried in the next release, so you have to re-learn everything all over again. That's happened to me with work computers more times than I care to remember.
By contrast, my collection of shell scripts on my home Linux computers is still serving me well after more than twenty years.
Every time my swap is full the entire system freezes for a good second, sometimes it stays stuck, no way out besides rebooting, I've never experienced that in any other OS ever
It's impossible to get more than a few days of uptimes, it's like the ram is never ever freed, last time I had to reboot my mac I had close to one year of uptime.
A friend sent me a png to print, every time I open it with the image viewer it uses 100% of my memory instantly (10+gb), causing the system to freeze. The image is 700kb and opens fine on gimp
I completely understand why people stick to the alternatives, it's way too easy to "hold it wrong" with Linux
I have the same experience on Fedora, and most distros. Arch is the only distro that it's 100% smooth for me.
OpenSuse comes second.
The OS is definitely stable and perfectly fine to use.
And do you mean hardware issue or hardware incompatibility?
The former would most likely manifest itself across many operating systems, but if you mean the latter... why would that matter in terms of a given person deciding whether to switch to Linux?
Yes the hardware you chose or is given will heavily influence your linux experience. I kinda wished the community was more proactive making lists of "certified" hardware that is likely to cause the least amount of problems...
I don’t know that i’d expect windows to be much better either, but that’s my experience.
And of course when I look up the problem, the threads I land on don't point me to a thing to toggle in the UI. No, instead one of them directs me to create a config file for pipewire while another says the remove a specific package entirely. And they're not presented as a set of clear steps to follow, so good luck to your average person trying to fix the problem for themselves.
So the only superiority is that it runs the apps most people want to run?
And this is why geeks are always the “Less space than Nomad. No Wireless. Lame” types or the HN equivalent when talking about DropBox:
“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
Even Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier.
But even if all most people want is browser, why go through the hassle of running Linux?
I usually recommended a Windows PC to most people because on the low end, they are cheap, disposable, and if the one odd program they might want to run isn’t available, I didn’t have to hear about it.
If they know what they want, I didn’t have a problem recommending an Air and now for a lot of use cases, a Neo.
Chicken and egg problem.
Valve is making enough headway that game makers take Linux seriously. We’ll likely see a lot more native releases over time. (once the worry about anticheat subsides).
When it comes to games, Linux has an OS/2 problem.
If Steam Deck, the new Steam Machine etc take a significant part of market share, I think it will be more enticing for game developer to release a native version for Linux. Providing a native version should still be more robust and performant.
Why? The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.
There is a new game with no support? So sorry. Can't be done
If you've ever used it before, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that web only Office is only useful for someone writing essays for school.
The moment you need to do anything more complex than that, the document renders completely differently on web vs app-- not to mention there are tons of critical features that aren't even available on the web version.
I meant that Microsoft is intentionally removing their own moat.
That the tools are awful is just the standard microsoft affair. (with some notable exceptions, which ironically include Excel).
My most memorable MS Word experiences are all the times I accidentally put my document into a weird state and didn't notice something was wrong until I've spent 3 more hours on it, at which point I was forced to re-create the document by copy pasting text into an earlier copy.
And the only reason I knew something was subtly wrong was because the weird VB extension I was required to use would stop working correctly. Basically this would happen when some random key element of the document had ended up with a very subtly different style. If I didn't have to worry about the VB extension breaking, I'd just have a document with some weird bug somewhere.
If I wanted a professional looking document, I would use some modern LaTeX variant maybe with Pandoc to generate most of it from something more restricted like Markdown.
If I wanted total control over the content of a page, I would use some kind of graphical publishing software with text and vector graphics.
I have zero idea what kind of Stockholm syndrome you must have to think that Microsoft Office (or any other similar WYSIWYG editor for that matter) is power user software.
It has lots of features, that's for sure. But the features form a Jenga tower. That makes it a toy.
Excel is really The Thing. So many businesses and departments rely on it.
It’s true that most stuff is in the browser, but basically every user has a couple things that are native apps which don’t work on Linux.
Wine has come a long way for gaming, but my experience is for regular programs, most stuff doesn’t work. Even the simple apps are usually critically broken.
I feel like people dramatically overestimate their impact on "the world" by way of making niche software choices or consumer products or whatever.
But this is kind of like the 'great man' theory of history where you can also argue that the markets would have converged on this outcome regardless of what the specific device was that we attribute to it.
This was the same post he said he wouldn’t license Apple’s DRM. But if the music industry would license their music DRM free, the interoperability goals would be achieved an Apple would sell DRM free music.
One of the major record labels and some independent labels took him up on it immediately. It took two years for the rest to come onboard.
iMessage always supported SMS and now RCS. What more did you expect Apple to do?
Even the then CEO of Google used BlackBerry devices years after Android came out as opposed to SJ who used the iPhone before it was released and after it was announced, saw that the screen was easily scratched and publicly did a press release that they were going to change it to use Gorilla Glass from plastic.
So what argument could you give Joe Normal about how Linux is better than Windows ?
I think the reason Windows is so successful is because it's stable, bulletproof and easy. You don't have to burn an ISO to a USB and boot from it, partition a disk and install it. You don't have to grep grub at any time. You rarely have to use PowerShell for much of anything at all, including device management, managing services and even tweaking the registry.
The "desktop environment" is the operating system, not a seperate abstraction around it. There's no research required on what distro works best for you, what package manager is ideal, what file system to use, what window manager to use, what desktop environment to use. There's no messing with repositories either. No issues with drivers that require compiling from source, no marking an executable as "executable" through chmod.
I like Linux, but the Linux community overestimate how usable it is outside of their meta, and underappreciate their own mental model of what a computer is and how it differs from the layman. Most people want to open their laptop, double click a browser and watch Family Guy funny moments on facebook.com without having to troubleshoot PulseAudio because it's suddenly gone super quiet.
Android “won” as pyrrhic of a victory as it is since Android manufacturers besides Samsung make very little profit and every one who has money (again to a first approximation) buys iPhones. It won because Google gave it away, shared ad revenue with OEMs and it bent over backwards to the carriers and Apple wouldn’t.
And yes Linux would save OEMs maybe $30 on licensing Windows. But OEMs make mire than that on bundleware.
None of this has anything to do with the quality of the desktop of Linux or windows. If Linux had 75% market share I promise you all those things above would quickly become true for Linux as well.
There were so many things in previous versions of Windows that were done with thought and care. Probably the blogs helped make me appreciate it (especially Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing). Windows 11 feels like an insult created by people who hate Windows and never use it
I really wish we could keep the modern underpinnings with a prior shell
The right click menu never once showed me “loading…” when I just want to click “properties”
A not too overly flashy UI that made efficient use of your screen space.
It didn’t used to by default shove “news and entertainment” bing suggestions. Nobody wants to open their browser after an update to be greeted by tabloid rags.
The search used to work. You could find files instead of bing results. You could grep text files with the explorer search bar (across the network too) and it just worked. Good luck doing that today.
Search just worked. (It still works if you use ClassicShell / OpenShell). Now it's braindead; even if the start menu shows results, half the time if you click one, Explorer pops up and just sits there broken, contemplating its life choices that led it to this rock bottom
Today, people don't love the iPod or Dropbox. Both products became completely commoditized once consumers realized that there is actually nothing special about using MP3 files or hosted NFS. Windows is a commoditized OS, it's unapologetic post-desktop slopware. And it sells.
Steve Jobs himself said “Dropbox is a feature not a product”. Dropbox is the same cost for 5TB of storage as GSuite + 5TB of storage or Office365 with 1TB each for 5 (6?) users.
Saying the iPod was commoditized is like saying 8 track tape players were commoditized.
I don't really mind Windows that much for non-development use, once you disable all the bloat. But for development... It seems obviously a distant third behind Linux and Mac, and I don't think I've ever heard any developer say otherwise. And I say this as someone who is forced to use it at work, so it's not out of ignorance (thank god for WSL).
But that's why I ask what kind of development you do, because I suppose there are areas where Windows really is a good option.
VSCode with WSL and Docker Desktop was fine.
On the Mac side, either way I spent all of my day in VSCode and the browser - we use GSuite - Zoom and Slack. It wouldn’t make that much of a different either way.
The only integrations I use between my work Mac and my personal Apple life are my iPad for a second screen, shared subset of passwords. I have a separate Apple Account for my work computer and I share work related passwords.
99% of people buy a desktop and don't even consider what the operating system is let alone think about changing it to something else. I would imagine they don't even know that a difference exists between operating systems.
(Or just open Hyper-V Manager, then from the Actions pane choose Virtual Switch Manager then select the virtual switch and configure it.)
What is the benefit of 'GUI native' if things are broken and people cannot fix them?
The only computers they tend to own are phones, tablets, and maybe a game console.
Heck, my millennial sister in law got her first computer because of covid. Until that point the only computers she was using was her work computer and her phone.
I agree, a tablet isn't as capable as a laptop. However, a very large portion of the population doesn't need those capabilities. They just want something to watch netflix on.
I'm an older millennial with a ton of genz family (nieces and nephews, I have 50 total. Mormon family). Very few of them have or want computers. I see the same thing with my in-laws. They have family computers which the kids have no interest in. It's the Gen x and millennials, mostly, that are obsessed with it.
Edit: I've been looking for stats to back my claim and this is frustratingly hard to find. Perhaps because genz is just starting to fully mature. 14 to 29 is just a large gap in terms of life experience.
The best I can find is the vast majority of Gen z have phones and access to laptops/PCs. One study I saw absolutely backed up what you are saying that Gen z tends to own laptops.
Time for some Internet researching...
And I think this is one reason why, for those of us who grew up with "computers" modern UI trends are, to quote https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm, "like we woke up one day to find our Legos had been replaced with Duplos"
It's like asking why a non-mechanic would ever need to use a car.
I know more and more people who are editing photos and videos on their phone/tablet - not movie producers, sure. But lots of YouTubers, influencers, etc.
It was extremely common to get Q/A like:
Me: Who is your internet serviced provider?
Them: I just click the 'e'.
Translation: They were telling me they use internet explorer.
Me: OK, bring in your computer and I can look at it.
Them: (arrives some time later, plops their CRT monitor on the table).
It was always like that. It took me a while to figure out how to ask the right questions to get the information I needed from them. TBH, this was most of the job.
You can really sense the SF-centric bubble HN lives in.
Anyone with any illusions about this name quickly the top vendor for the third item in the materials itinerary of the first thing with a materials itinerary you get your hands on (for me it’s usually food. Who is the main vendor for citric acid? Or sugar. Or that red dye that causes adhd. I have no clue)
General consumers could not care less about open source.
It’s component.
Not a product.
This is just absolutely beautiful. My grandmother would often identify stitching on my slacks. I was, quite literally, blind to it!
I don't care about the hem on my pants. My pants either work, or I get a new pair. This is most people's relationship with their computer.
I'm telling myself that this is an intentional "blind hem" joke.
The problem is that I do not want to mess around to make things work. This is the power of Windows. Everything is built around it and it does not need or want you to keep hacking it.
Don't get me wrong I am working on Mac and my personal dev laptop is a Linux Mint, but sometimes it physically hurt to find something that sends me down a rabbit hole yet again on Linux. I just think the whole "you have to hack it because you can and otherwise you don't really own it" thing is a big hurdle on Linux that keeps mainstream peeps to stay away
Not sure if I made sense, but yeah basically in order to challenge Windows Linux would need to "just work" which is not the case right now (or ever was)
Having said that, I don't begrudge people from using Windows or Mac. As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, Linux has rough edges that most people really don't want to deal with. I'm willing to give Linux some grace because I believe in open source and want to support that world with my actions. But when someone complains about why their fingerprint reader doesn't work, all I can say is "yep, that can happen". I think the little niggles in Linux are worth it for having a free (as in freedom) OS, but as it turns out, most people don't value that.
The UX/UI of Windows 98 is far, far ahead of whatever Linux DWM we have today. It's nowhere near close. My KDE is usable but everything feels off, from icon shapes and sizes to mouse cursor icons, mouse cursor speed, the way settings are organised, almost everything. And it's not a matter of habit, as I've been on KDE for years, and I kept trying to make it work. Windows just clicks out of the box, it's more comfortable.
Microsoft, once upon a time, put an enormous amount of money into creating a user experience that makes sense for a maximum amount of people. Even though this experience suffered enormously over the last decade, it's still better than everything else, including OSX. And I'm not praising Microsoft, everyone else (including Canonical) is just that bad.
It's the easiest route. On non-Apple computers, Windows is already installed. (It takes a bit of effort to buy a computer without an OS.) Microsoft makes it easy for a user to get Microsoft 365. With that, users have the computer they have at the office and are familiar with. Most are just surfing the web and writing an occasional letter, anyway. That doesn't include people who are perfectly fine with a Chromebook or just their phone.
Finding a Linux distribution, downloading it, putting it on a USB stick (or burning a disc), then installing it is not simple for most people. (Don't even ask them to verify the checksum.)
I think that the market (though it is certainly irrational) is moving away from windows. It's very likely the reason why this post was written and they're now (4+ years after the release windows 11) addressing even the most basic complaints (like the taskbar). I have zero faith that the attitudes driving the fundamental problems that brought us to the point where MS has to be genuinely worried about the future of Window's market share have changed.
Microsoft still sees your computer as belonging to them. They still feel entitled to all of your data and the contents of your hard drive. They still want to use their OS as an ad platform. They're still deeply envious of Apple and want an app store with similar control over what you can and can't install on your computer.
Like you, they've lost me. The moment any meaningful amount of gaming was viable on linux they lost the only thing that could have kept me using Windows in any capacity (and even then my gaming PC would have been treated like a console. Almost zero personal info and mostly offline).
They fucked up badly and promises like "you can move your taskbar" or "we'll be less obnoxious with updates" is not going to being me back.
Especially considering you could move the taskbar until Windows 11 when they inexplicably killed it. It only took them 5 goddamn years to put it back.
To be fair, this does indeed demonstrate their "commitment to quality", just as they intended.
Pop! OS is definitely not ready for the average user in my opinion. Some common work-related apps I need like Citrix Workspace straight up don't work. Audio + Camera randomly give out in the middle of video conferences, only fixable by a complete reboot. Some things are only fixable in the terminal.
I use it as much as I can, but there is still work to be done. I agree that Windows is on the wrong path.
The only winning move is not to play - leave behind all the Windows and Apples garbage, and life gets remarkably better. I'm almost 6 months in switching from Windows to Linux and it's so awesome that my computer doesn't fight me anymore. I've done 10% of the troubleshooting under Linux that I had to do under Windows, and that was just early on; once things work, they stay working, and there's no sense of dread about what was going to break next after every patch Tuesday.
For the masses, it's pure practicality.
My mother calls up geeksquad when she has a problem with windows. Who do you call when you have a problem with debian or ubuntu or arch setup to use kde or gnome or xfc using wayland or x11 with systemd or launchd or ...
When her printer dies, does she go to the store and buy a new one, or does she get online to research what's compatible with her distro?
The expertise required to cover the surface area known as "linux on the desktop" is going to make that a much more expensive call, and a "i can't help you with that" from anywhere she can buy a printer in person.
I honestly think there are many distros that are more than up to the task of handling normal users and providing an objectively better, easier, less hassling experience than windows out of the box.
Windows is horrifically awful. Everything it does is completely, thoroughly enshittified. User experience and quality control are a distant memory. If you're so jaded to it and just letting it happen, I highly recommend getting on Linux ASAP- it's not like it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago; the desktop experience is just good. If you absolutely need Excel or some other Windows software, look for the cloud version, find an alternate workflow.
>>Who do you call when you have a problem with debian or ubuntu or arch setup to use kde or gnome or xfc using wayland or x11 with systemd or launchd or ...
Any AI. they all have libraries worth of troubleshooting sessions and successful linux troubleshooting workflows and documentation and so on in the training data. Agentic training and operator training flows often include Linux environments, specifically. Any IT person worth half a damn is going to be using AI and will be more than capable of resolving anything it is possible to resolve. Support your local independent IT businesses, too.
But again, get the Linux PC working and I'd bet a good donut that it takes less work to maintain and is easier to use - even for our moms.
I think you're incredibly disconnected from how most people use computers, and how most people hate computers, because they're a means to an end that often just get in the way.
My mom isn't going to use AI, or go to a library and read books, or read documentation about who knows what, to fix her computer. She's going to do as most people do: if something goes wrong, you take it to a place to fix it. And, that's good. Computers should be boring things that help you get actual things done, with the OS being something that lets you open apps, just as all the subsystems in your car are just something that lets you push the gas and get somewhere.
> that it takes less work to maintain
What is "maintain"? This concept does not exist for the average user. What they see is that their system sometimes reboots, or takes a bit longer to turn on, for some sort of update. Who knows, it just does that sometimes. There's literally nothing beyond turning it on and off, and opening apps.
Look.
I guess we all care about software business here.
And computer? It’s what consumers buy from store. Preferably in cybermonday or similar sale.
To run the software they ran on their previous computer.
They hope slightly faster. But honestly? They couldnt tell. Anyway the new computer is shinier.
OS? What’s that? (They honestly could not care less)
They dont buy apple for the os. They buy it for the brand.
The context here is the average user, so you need to consider if this they share this perspective of fundamentally inferiority that is so obvious to you.
Here's a litmus test: Put your non-programmer relative in front of each, have them do some common simple tasks, like print an email on their printer, and ask them.
You are *NOT* an average user.
edit: people are focusing on the printer too much. my point was some arbitrary task they would be common to an average user. OMMIT THE PRINTER. After they use their computer as they normally would for a week, what is it exactly that so clearly results in their perception of "obviously inferiority"? My claim is somewhere between nothing and the very first thing to go wrong.
My grandma does this all the time from her Linux laptop. My grandpa needed help getting it to work the first time under Windows.
On Windows you often have to download and install drivers, which is always a headache.
Manufacturers selling Linux computers could attach little stickers with ""As long as..." Inside", to commemorate the official motto of "The Year of the Linux Desktop", for the last 30 years. :P
There's very little reason to install print drivers anymore on Windows.
*except HP
2. Linux has, historically, been fundamentally inferior for some purposes. Lots of (sometimes very expensive) equipment has proprietary drivers that only run on windows. You'll find old versions of windows running hardware in labs all over the world. This is minor though, compared to the mainstream office and home user, as well as gamers. If a typical joe uses windows and MS office at work, its only natural to do the same thing at home. Why learn a new OS for your home computer if you're only using it a few hours a week? Gamers, of course, are still locked into Windows for some titles despite Steam's best efforts. Some gaming hardware still doesn't support Linux properly (I'm looking at you, Razer). Linux is getting really close to Windows for gaming though.
3. Windows was actually a pretty nice OS for a while, until the recent slide into Microslop silliness.
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"Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus: You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows, focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted. As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad."
While mealy-mouthed at best, I take this as indicating MS has finally started paying attention to the growing backlash and is going to back off on trying to AI ALL THE THINGS. A lot of users simply don't need or want Copilot everywhere. Many users also now have a compelling alternative in Linux. Inertia keeps them with Windows, but a significant irritant could make them switch. If MS wants to keep those users, they need to stop pushing AI so hard and focus on keeping the rest of Windows in good shape.
For folks who use odd-ball hardware, e.g., the new generation Wacom EMR stylus equipped Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 I'm writing this out on (really, using a stylus to write this out) it's pretty much the only option, which I wish was not the case.
That said, I bought a pair of Raspberry Pi 5s a while back, and am hopeful that the Soulscircuit Pilet I backed on Kickstarter will work well w/ a Wacom One, and if it does so, I'll upgrade to a Movink 13 or something similar.
But since real users live at the level of the ecosystem, what's hard about understanding that they can't replace a lacking ecosystem with "inherent traits"?
I’m not seeing any brick and mortar stores selling Linux laptops or any mindshare for any Linux brand. Maybe if Ubuntu started selling hardware in supermarkets Linux would have a chance of capturing people’s consciousness outside of the power user / professional circles. But they’re years too late now.
To call an ecosystem superficial evidence is puzzling to me. The ecosystem is -everything- for an operating system.
Developers, apps, distribution, users; all of it is ecosystem.
My father is a 70-year-old software engineer who programs .NET Core in Notepad and builds using custom BAT files that build the project using csc (the outright compiler). He browses and copies files in the Windows Terminal. He is also accustomed to Linux since we deploy to it in our business, and he can do everything comfortably in the Linux terminal.
He trusts me almost blindly, yet I can’t convince him to swap to Linux even though every time he keeps fighting Windows. I'm actually fairly surprised since I'm certain he'd find himself at home almost immediately( he already is when managing servers)
I’m fairly sure it’s Notepad keeping him there, but I’ve told him there is also a Linux clone or Wine. I had been dabbling in Linux for 30 years, and it’s been about 7 or 8 years since I switched full-time and couldn’t be happier. But honestly, we're going to get there because it’s inevitable. It’s the only OS that's currently not wholly incentivized to "enshittify" itself and is actually improving at a pretty good pace due to Wayland's novelty fostering a plethora of alternative window managers.
But at home - I use Jet Brains Rider (free non commercial) for C# .Net projects on Linux machines (Debian + KDE or Mint depending on machine)
I wonder if you mean Notepad++ not Notepad - I find KATE on KDE is good enough, when I just want to edit a file, but I've run Notepad++ under wine before.
He tried textpad (the other included text editor ) at some point and hated it
If you mean WordPad, which was on Windows - that is a simple Word Processor , so not suitable for writing code in.
Not sure how he will get along with all the stuff MS is adding to I'd suggest getting to look at NotePad++. On Linux Mint Xed behaves similar to Notepad
He wrote a programming language for his master thesis, so obviously he used it to write all his software. His first project was the POS/management system for his father's music store (Now famous as the Mexican company that acquired Sam Ash). I believe they didn't switch until around 2005 or so (so about 30 years maintaining it or training a software developer on it as a side thought)
He then started a large sized customs software company with i that ended up getting acquired.. Everytime the language required a new feature the devs would just ask him (like when he had to write a graphical toolkit for it because it started as a text only runtime). There is no record of this language anywhere as far as I know.
I believe around the 2000s as part of the sale of the company he rewrote the whole stack in C#. And he's been using it ever since, including the company we started together in 2013 (together doing a lot of work here). Still with good old Notepad and CSC.exe just like year 1.He curses everytime the ecosystem has big required changes (async, nuget) though I've managed to coerce him into keeping up with the times, dragging and screaming.
I'm not a Windows fanboy by any stretch, but it is a remarkably resilient OS. Case in point: I took the OS drive (SATA SSD) from my old workstation and installed it into a laptop. This was a Dell 7910, with a dual CPU Xeon configuration, NVidia graphics card and ECC memory. The laptop the drive was transplanted into was an old T520. The OS was Windows 10. Firing it up, I expected a kernel panic given how different the drivers would be between the two and resigned myself to a couple of hours using the Recovery partition. To my surprise, it booted up to the desktop and automatically started installing the missing drivers. In the meantime, I could actually use the darn thing.
In all my years of using Linux, I have yet to see that work without a hitch. A chroot to modify fstab is usually the starting point, then comes the inevitable blacklist and driver removal. Linux LiveCDs come close, but this was a full fledged Windows install with custom swap file configurations, 10G network card, etc.
Barring all this user-hostile behaviour from MS, at the OS level, Windows seems well-engineered.
I also wouldn't expect a kernel panic on Linux... Maybe no video though.
For what it's worth, I used the same Arch install from 2014 to 2024, with it spending time in three desktops and a VM across that time.
I installed linux mint on a new drive in January
Firefox was tearing awfully on just scrolling
Surely I just need to install Nvidia drivers
Install drivers, but they dont work due to some secure boot interaction with driver signing, that made me jump through quite a few hoops (thx to AI for walking me through it fairly well)
I'm sorry but an average person is not ready for this level of bs in their daily life
This is the same with expertise in any field that requires decades of education.
Then check whether you prefer Gnome or KDE as the looks and go with what you find cooler.
I've used Ubuntu most of my career and it's solid, these days I'm testing Fedora at home due to some nitpicks I have, but both are good options.
Based on that, I'd say: go for a popular distro with KDE. I'm sure there are other very polished options out there, but my recommendation is Kubuntu, even though it's not the one I use today (I use Arch mostly), as it's very simple to set up and well supported.
The reason is simple: Microsoft has a lock on PCs used by corporate and government employees, so the vast majority of people who use computers at work use Windows computers. And so they naturally buy the same kind of computer for home that they're used to using at work. People like me, who run Linux at home even though I'm forced to use Windows at work, are outliers. And probably always will be. So the only way for the Linux desktop to really take off would be for large corporate customers and governments to switch from Windows to Linux. I would love it if that happened, but I'm not holding my breath.
If your biggest innovation of a decade is a carbon copy of a feature introduced in NT 3.5 in 1994 AND THEN it turns out most serious people disable it because you cannot even copy a feature without introducing new vulnerabilities - that's a sign of quality.
Technology-wise, Windows NT and it's APIs is well developed and designed.
I've completely replaced Windows with Bazzite since November and it's been great for me, but it's not been without issues. Those issues are doable for me, but if I put Bazzite, Fedora, Linux Mint or any of the other beginner friendly distros on anybody else's PC they'll encounter a roadblock that they won't know how to resolve and that'll taint their Linux experience. Not to mention spotty hardware drivers (I've had several wifi drivers just stop working with an update, which is infuriating if you don't have a reliable wired connection), volunteer software for many configurations (OpenRGB doesn't support my motherboard), nVidia drivers and finding alternatives to software people know and use like Office and Photoshop.
These might not seem like a big deal, but they're dealbreakers for many and they'd rather put up with some dodgy window resize behaviour or their OS spying on them.
The fun thing about the Mac is that technical people can do more or less whatever they want, while the out of the box experience is still super simple and easy for people who do not have a comfortable relationship with computing. This is a good thing.
Consider the easy integration you get with Apple headphones and Apple devices. Regular Bluetooth pairing is far more fiddly and annoying.
Consider how you'd set up easy use of a password manager across devices. This is "it just works" territory with the Apple ecosystem. It's awkward and weird on Windows. It's a giant DIY project on Linux.
This is why Apple succeeds. They think about end user experience far more than Microsoft does. Linux, as a non-product (this is not a ding), doesn't "think" about this at all, for the most part.
I DO think it's pretty obvious that desktop Linux would be much farther along had Apple not pivoted to a FreeBSD based OS a quarter century ago. That brought a lot of very technical people onto the platfor that would've otherwise gone to Linux. There was a time when any given tech conf was a sea of illuminated Apples on the backs of laptop screens, because getting your average LAMP stack running was trivial on a Mac and painful on Windows. It was an opportunity for Microsoft, but Ballmer couldn't see it, and so here we are.
You, I, and everyone on HN are all racecar drivers. Our view of Windows is heavily skewed by our technical knowledge, but it is exactly what it's supposed to be - the operating system of the masses. The masses will never love Linux...it's very philosophy is antithetical to what makes a good operating system for the average user. The idea that Linux could ever take serious ground from Windows is never going to happen. It is purely wishful thinking, but it will always have its place in infrastructure and for geeks like you and I.
All of that said, for daily driving, I'll take the Mercedes.
My next laptop will be a MacBook Pro.
My Surface Laptop 5 will be collecting dust in case I need it, but that’s highly unlikely.
I think OS level integrations that are opt-in, not opt-out, may even be popular. But they have to be done carefully and tastefully.
Do you know what you'll be moving to to replace what Workspace provides (email/IdP/calendar/Chrome policy management?)
The whole Gemini thing is just a massive embarrassment for Google I really can't follow their thinking, you'd think that after the Google '+' debacle that they would have learned their lesson not to cannibalize your old products to launch a new one.
The closest to useful it's been is in the GCP console, but it seems to decide at random to forget context, and it might just be Gemini Flash with minimal thinking, which tends to mean it's just repeating things it's already said.
Funnily enough, there's a bug that's affecting all MacBook users in my company (does not wake after lid down overnight). Apparently the culprit is windows defender installed in the MacBooks. Corporate, you know...
Of course this might change in future. And Mac OS has other popups where there is no “skip” and only “remind me later”.
I don’t use it often, but occasionally use the proofread option. Other than that, it stays out of my way.
Nobody can predict what Apple will do tomorrow, but as of today, they aren't really pushing Siri/Apple intelligence really hard particularly after initial setup. None of most of the above for example.
I don't know what happens with Home Edition, but I though the pushback was mainly from Insider Preview?
You can't even select a cell on notepad without a freaking copilot button pooping up every single time. Same on word, that's maddening !
You could argue that windows isn't Microsoft copilot 365, but then, why do people even use windows ? It's always because of the office, my bad, copilot 365 suite.
I actually trust the Apple Intelligence, when off, doesn't exfiltrate my data.
I too would not want any unprompted access to my files.
At the end of the day this issue is that we don't trust the OS and we cannot easily validate how it is designed to behave.
Baked into the OS implies that it's integral to its operation in a way that the two are fundamentally inseparable. Having a global off switch implies that's not true.
There are other irritating baked in aspects of the newest macos and other recent versions that are arguably less avoidable, like Tahoe's entire UI design, or the Settings app.
Maybe it's doing stuff that doesn't rise to my level of attention, but it isn't actively annoying me.
No, I don't need you to summarize a two sentence email. How about I move emails to folders and you start to learn the patterns? Or which alert emails I want to ignore? Or who asked me something last week and I forgot to respond? Or which emails I should look at first after a vacation? Etc.
Sure both have their quirks, but it's just wild how much Windows goes out of its way to be annoying. From a billion startup notifications to basic UI stuff to copilot and the list goes on.
However if your interests lie in indie games or games that require a keyboard and mouse interface (precision shooters, grand strategy games, RTS games, etc) then having a PC that can play games is completely necessary. (I say this as someone who runs linux btw, not a windows defender).
In fact, basically any feature added since Windows 10 is probably unwanted.
Edit: but I am somewhat surprised that it’s qt and not the typical react electron bloat that Microsoft is slopping out. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
Gen AI has even more power at task generation than at content generation. Imagine running Photoshop or Final Cut Pro via prompts. People seem squeamish because so far the Copilot entrypoints have been encouraging tacky text & image content generation, like Clippy. But imo that’s the weakest and most sensitive application.
V1 is often not very good, for any new application.
Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc.
I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.
The author of this commitment is the same person (Pavan Davuluri) spearheading move of Windows into an Agentic OS: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
My reasoning is from bitter experience. I saw too many these honest talks/commitments - it always this pattern when product/company starts to decline. Suddenly somebody with technical background shows up talks about past mistakes and what need to fix. Even sometimes holds discussion, which is usually very reasonable. But as time goes there only cosmetic changes with excuses like lack of resources, market wind changed this time, too hard make changes due politics and etc.
What stands out to me is the organization needs to be accept that change is needed and 'walk the walk', and also that those efforts take time. I've no idea what things are in motion in MS, but I wonder how quickly they can turn the ship, how much momentum is in their current direction and how much force is in turning. Moving the taskbar seems like addressing a loud persistent talking point, but it's one among many. What's the timeline (even though windows version timing seems like 'when they need branding')? Win12? Win13?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020204233701/http://www.comput...
The only thing I'd add is that not only did he tweet the infamous tweet that caused the backlash, Pavan ridiculed those in the backlash (since deleted). Also, Satya still spews the same "agentic OS" narrative as recent as last week.
So, I hope for the best, but I don't plan on taking them at their word.
Look where we are now.
Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus.
The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
perplexity keeps trying to get me to use "computer" and for the life of me I can't think of anything I'd actually do with it.
We've progressed an impressive lot since, say, the nineties when computers (and the internet) started to spread to the general consumer market but the last 10% or so of the way is what would really be the game changer. And if we believe Pareto, of course that is gonna be 90% of the work. We've barely scratched the surface.
As I use AI more and more to write code I find myself just implementing something myself more and more for this reason. By the time I have actually explained what I want in precise detail it's often faster to have just made the change myself.
Without enough detail SOTA models can often still get something working, but it's usually not the desired approach and causes problems later.
typing "open hackernews" into copilot instead of clicking the browser and typing hackernews?
99% of OS interactions already boil down to 2 clicks and a search phrase.
- "Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options"
- "Look at my household budget and find ways to be more frugal."
There are thousands of things I can think of when it comes to how an agentic OS would work better than the current Screen Keyboard paradigm. I mean all these things I could now do with Claude or Codex and some of these things I already do with these tools.
> Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options
What part of this does an agentic OS help with? My OS doesn't know my travel preferences, family size, work schedule, etc.
These are more appropriate tasks for a smart assistant.
What specifically does an agentic OS UX look like beyond giving claude access to local files and a browser?
huh? ... this reads to me like you don't need an "agentic" OS to do the things you'd want to use an "agentic" OS for..?
like... it seems you just don't want a keyboard to do the same things you've already been doing? ... is that the crux of it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4
i feel like someone high up in microsoft probably has this pinned in a epic or something somewhere
I think you and I have very different meanings of "intelligent", "understands" and "gets it done"
See how that sounds a bit silly? It's because it presents a false dichotomy. That our choice is between either the current state of interfaces or an agentic system which strips away your autonomy and does it for you.
There's everything wrong when "agentic" means that the regular bread-and-butter functionality of the OS becomes unusable.
Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.
Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.
Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.
When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.
You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.
I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.
I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.
And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.
Yep. That stuff makes money (via upsells) so it will never be removed.
Online accounts are fine when optional, but unacceptable when forced.
They are not even acknowledging that feedback is negative. They make it sound like a love fest where users love windows so much that they want to make it even better.
How is it even possible to spend 4-5 seconds to show a list of files in a local freaking folder?
Now all folders with media files open immediately. Also if you want no wait for video files folders, right click in the folder and select 'View -> Details or View -> List or some other option where it doesn't create thumbnails and it'll load even quicker.
I'm sorry, this is very funny to me in the context of the person upthread arguing about how great "agentic OSes" are. Some people seem to believe that we're living in the future, but I'm pretty sure we're still stuck in Windows '95.
Surely you don't mean remove all columns, and if you did you wouldn't have to also specify removing media metadata columns?
When such basic tasks are failing spectacularly, nobody can have any confidence that complex things can be achieved reliably. Instead of spying on their users and trying to squeeze more and more money from them, they should first focus on making a great product and work on making it better, not researching ways to enshitify things.
That's a why, but it raises more questions than it does answers.
I need that Drake meme here, where he's negative about the idea "Optimize the calculator layout to improve the UX" and very enthusiastic about the idea "Find ways to get incremental revenue from users of Calculator with ads or selling of data"
We're reaching Microslop levels we never thought possible. I actually think Claude Code would have done a better job.
No. "Commitment" in corporate speak is a synonym for "absolute lack of intention". That's why corps 'commit' to reducing emissions, treating employees fairly, etc, ie. to all the things they will not do. But no suit 'commits' to making money. They just make money. It's just a superficial linguistic gesture. Shakespeare got it.
They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.
Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.
And, yes, I am aware that Pro/Enterprise don't suffer from this, but a LOT of computers sold are Windows Home/OEM licenses. It impacts a ton of people.
(that's an overstatement, early OS X were buggy too, but they just switched to Unix after OS9, so, understandable.)
it's just better than Windows, which is just aggressively bad. (and I guess Linux is eating their gamers market with Proton? but I am not a gamer)
- The OS is getting buggier, with every large update getting press coverage on scary bugs.
- The OS is getting overbearing; constant nagging for upsells on Microsoft products with terrible attach rates.
- The OS is getting focused on hype; the latest trend is AI?Let's force a new button on people that will break decades-old workflows. Let's put AI everywhere.
- The OS is getting slow; there's no focus on speed and the place where 85% of the market resides (laptops) is getting completely trounced by Apple Silicon.
- The OS is getting squeezed; under 300$ it's all terrible e-waste in six months Chromebooks. Over 500$ Apple is aggressively entering the market with the Neo. Over 1,000$ Apple has owned a commanding share of the profits there for decades.
There are 994 more problems with Windows but I've made my point; there's just no end in sight to the problems with Windows. I haven't mentioned it's become a minor part of Microsoft's profits!
Saying and doing are very different. They have passed through the "fuck around" phase, and are entering the "find out" phase of this AI journey. Lots of companies are, suddenly.
My employer trained us all on the Gartner hype cycle, tested us on how to remain level-headed before and during the peak of unreasonable expectations and now every single manager in the company is drooling over AI, saying that "this is the future, join us or find another job" and I cannot wait for the curve to come back down to a sane level where intelligence rules behavior as much as it used to. We'll see.
We’ve certainly done the “fucking around” and now we'll see if we "find out" enough to regain our sanity and our humanity.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
1. That's not how businesses work - the 10-year-old will be 28 when he becomes an IT manager, and their 40yo boss will say "LOL no, learn to use Active Directory, we're not switching the entire company to Chromebooks/MacBook Neos because you 'grew up with' them." They will then adapt and learn to use what the business has.
2. Even assuming charitably that our 10yo will be founding a company one day and making all purchasing decisions for themselves, it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything. Even MDM Apple farms out to third parties, likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though). A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only.
The MacBook Neo is a cute PC for a student or a grandma or indeed any casual user. But despite it giving Apple (for the first time in Apple's existence) a price point for an entire computer that's under the amount where you'd be embarrassed to propose adopting it for your whole fleet... the hardware is but one part of a larger ecosystem, and Apple has demonstrated that they have no interest into selling into "The Enterprise" except for tiny niches (relative to the whole PC market) such as "web and mobile" software engineers, video editors, VFX shops etc.
source: been there.
As a result, I do not currently think that Microsoft is consumer-oriented. They have reinforced my opinion by doing anti-consumer changes in XBOX and then saying that they were pro-gamer. Seems like a pattern.
Maybe they will prove me wrong; I am sun-setting my final host that's running their software soon.
Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.
So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.
MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.
The continual recall/ai push from Microsoft has not helped at all and is pretty gross. There is a way to do a “recall” style thing that some folks will really want if they can trust it. The msft approach has been the opposite of that.
Yet it was the end users that forced enterprise to embrace the iPhone, not the other way around.
If her vision was the only driver, we'd still be rocking Blackberries.
Windows 11 is finally catching up to MATE desktop (which is maintained possibly by a single guy from their basement), what a time to be alive!
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftwindows951994...
… this was a feature in Windows 95. I didn't even realize they'd removed it! Is the author too young to remember a time when the start bar was positionable…?
… to then follow "we listed to your feedback" with "more AI everywhere" … it's satire … right? Right?!
No automatic restarts! I understand that in our security patching world that patching and restarting automatically is the default, fine, but there absolutely should be a dead simple way of disabling auto restarts in settings. I'm fine if it pesters me to restart or whatever, perhaps with growing alarm the longer I wait, but it should always be optional in the end. There are just no words for how bad it can be for mission critical workloads when your computer restarts without your consent. Please make disabling this simple.
If you make it possible to defer updates indefinitely, users will. Guaranteed. Doesn't matter how urgent or critical the update is, how bad the bug or vulnerability it patches is, how disastrous the consequences may be: they'll never, ever voluntarily apply them.
If you're running a server, and willing to accept the risk of deferral because 1) you're in a better position to assess the risk and apply compensating controls than a regular user is, and 2) you're OK accepting the personal risk of having to explain to your boss why you kept deferring the urgent patch until after it blew up in your face, then yes, you should have a control to delay or disable it.
But end users? No. I use to believe otherwise, but now I've seen far, far too many cases where people train themselves to click "Delay 1 day" without even consciously seeing the dialog.
Most security-only updates have a low risk of interfering with with the user or causing instability. Most feature updates have a high risk of doing so.
(1) Although I think there should be some way of disabling even those, even if that way is hard to find and/or cumbersome to keep the regular users away.
Even the Server Core edition, which has a much smaller "surface area" needs reboots almost every month.
It's also good since you can't swap out the kernel without rebooting.
I assume Microsoft took the same approach, just replace everything offline then reboot into a fully up-to-date system without any chance of things in RAM still being outdated.
Yeah you can. Ksplice.com We got bought by Oracle so it's in their ecosystem but the technology exists.
Windows isn't MacOS that runs on set of verified configurations - it runs on variety of hardware with vendor drivers and other software. That combined may cause issues but so lack of testing - we know that Microsoft in its wisdom dismantled QA and replaced it with this prosthetics of enthusiasts community that all the time suggest "sfc /scannow". Now they put Charlie Bell in role of "engineering quality" position but I have no hope that something will change with a good outcome for users.
And users should be again allowed to avoid updates which were proven to cause issues - that's the fundamental need here. Deterring a scheduled action isn't enough.
Considering Windows behavior, all the telemetry that was smuggled to W7 in poorly described updates, I see how appealing is to Microsoft to use this big updates package format and add features, components which surely would be avoided by experienced users. Since W10 and maybe even partially during W7 they're fighting their users when it comes to control over operating system.
I'm on CachyOS now but I still get calls from friends who struggle with all this MS circus. Recently, this friend lost data to bitlocker encrypted machine because she didn't had backup keys. She's that kind of user that doesn't know what happens on the screen beside text processor and web browser - everything is a nuance that has to be quickly dealt with by "next next done" tactic. Should she be more patient and read what's being displayed on the screen - sure but I've told her that years ago.
Anyway, CachyOS: arch-update renders a popup in KDE about recommended restart, sometimes update process requires restarting services and users can select ones it needs or everything listed altogether. There's snapshots support for updates: https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/btrfs_snapshots/ and pretty sure other distributions have this as an option as well.
This is basically: we’re doing the absolute minimum possible to claim we’re listening to users while still pursuing exactly what we were doing before. We realized we just need to boil the frog a little slower.
If they were hoping this would help shake microslop, they’re in trouble.
Sorry Microsoft, some people already transfer to a different train because you offered a crazy ride.
And when all is good and everybody's too busy to pay attention we'll force feed you an update that will revert all changes to what we want.
> all while reducing update noise with fewer automatic restarts and notifications.
Pause for longer.. why not just stop. And resume when wanted.
Fewer automatic restart. What about no automatic restart.
I couldn't read any further. Mind bended leadership to think this sort of wording after the obvious fiasco would make users hopeful.
I stopped using windows personally 15 years ago. My mental health improved right away. Forced to use Windows at work, I finally got liberated 4 years ago and my mental health got even better. I refuse since then employment forcing me to use this OS. It's a health hazard, always has been.
Because most regular people will never choose to turn them back on, that’s why. We already know what the world looks like when millions of computers run an unsecured OS. Last I heard, a stock Windows 98 machine lasted 30 seconds online before being compromised. Automatic updates are good, and they’re here to stay.
No one should be able to have control over his computer.
Average computer owners don't really care about their machines, let alone understand them. Computers are appliances to them like their washing machines and microwaves.
> More direct control over updates, including the ability to pause updates for as long as you need
So it does sound like you'll be able to pause updates forever and also therefore not automatically reboot.
I was forced to work on windows for years too, it's like working with a tool that's broken and repaired with duct tape. You can't stop thinking it's amateurish and this product should have perished a long time ago.
Switching everything to apple was like a breath of air, sadly it's starting to become bad. Every updates brought stuff that felt out of place but last one is complete nonsense..
And it's not like there is much competition, it's either'duct tape' windows, macos or 'broken' Linux.
There is the forced aspect, which alone is problematic. I can imagine that Linux forced upon millions of casual users would bring more clients to consult with a doctor if they were to use it personally, and 8h per day for a living.
What makes Windows particularly guilty, is that while lambda Linux users would get better at understanding how computer is work, the opposite is true on windows, it is dumbing down and obscuring how things work.
The growing number of invasive ads for other MS products and their partners.
The revamping of core OS navigation features, UX for things like launching apps, the fact that in Windows 10 (maybe first version of 11) a lookup for a local app would trigger a web search with a spinner indistinguishable from local search, followed by the display MSN news..
The forced reboot when you have 12 applications running a long task, and downloads that are at 80%, after a 4h long wait on a slow server that doesn't offer download management.
the regular blue screen to prompt you for privilege escalation permission even though you had just granted it 35 seconds ago for that same app, and about to see that inception blue screen again since the very same app will keep crashing until you figure out where the bugs lurk.
I literally call the compounded effects of these: mental health hazard.
Don’t listen to the smooth talk. Plan an exit strategy now, before you need it later.
The idea that we'll all be forced off of Windows one day sounds like a dream, but so far we continue to be in a state where myself and many other are long past the point of wanting to leave, but we can't for some reason or another.
Microsoft knows that, which is why they've been able to do whatever they want and not worry about the consequences.
Even if you're not leaving the ecosystem anytime soon, you should always know where those lines are and what the landscape looks like on the other side of things.
MMC snapins haven't been touched in years and still can't even sort those columns properly, search and filtering is terrible
Control panel is still not migrated over to settings after 12 years nor you can open two settings apps.
Error messages in modern apps are just the worst, how about printing valuable error messages than "something is wrong"?
Fixing dark patterns like taking over your screen with popups and taking over the application header so you can't close windows unless you go to the task manager. First time opening edge shows a really annoying splash screen + home page is filled with ads.
Also where are 5 second boot times on NVMe SSDs? Anything more is just sloppy.
Just to list a few pet peeves
But let's see if they can even fix things they've mentioned in the post, though that's like 1/4 of the issues that should be fixed.
Control panel is still not migrated over to settings after 12 years nor you can open two settings apps.
I wish they'd migrate back to the old Control Panel...
Error messages in modern apps are just the worst
...as the new one is a "modern app" and about as horrible as they come.
From an elevated Powershell prompt:
Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Where-Object { $_.PackageName -like 'Microsoft.WindowsNotepad*' } | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online
They have a bunch of replacements, all of which are slow as molasses and not feature complete.
1. Server Manager.
2. Windows Admin Centre.
3. Settings App (same as desktop).
4. PowerShell
5. DSC
6. Azure Arc
There's also Active Directory Administrative Center which never replaced dsa.msc for me or anyone I've ever worked with.
Similarly, there's like half a dozen performance monitor tools for Windows Server, and they're all terrible and are missing critical features.
It also takes a solid two seconds to launch even on a high-end PC with a fast SSD. It takes much longer on a small VM with overpriced cloud remote storage.
1. deprecated lol
2. i think it can't be run on things like AD, so for very small companies this is annoying
3. ... that's not really an admin app?
4. sure, but then i might as well switch to linux if i have to stick to cli (and i did)
5. last time i checked there were two versions, incompatible with one another, not great alternative to ansible
6. if you have hybrid and are in azure already, maybe? haven't used
I mean it's not like there are not 5 alternatives in azure/intune for every thing as well that are half baked. And 365 and azure is worse with terrible migration guides, ms graph with a combination of commands and json inputs and defaults from 2016.
It's really time for microsoft to fully commit to one thing, make it good, finish it and deprecate everything else.
It launches by default on new installs of Windows Server 2025!
> 2. i think it can't be run on things like AD, so for very small companies this is annoying
In "Preview", which is a sad state of affairs: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/manage/wind...
> 3. ... that's not really an admin app?
I was just listing stuff that generally replaced the old MMC consoles. Things like regional options can be set through the Admin app, and is weirdly difficult with other mechanisms even on Windows Server. Some critical aspects are still MMC-only or require half a page of PowerShell scripts.
> 4. sure, but then i might as well switch to linux if i have to stick to cli (and i did)
Ironically, you're missing out on PowerShell, which is more UNIX than UNIX, and blows every legacy shell on Linux out of the water.
> 5. last time i checked there were two versions, incompatible with one another, not great alternative to ansible
There are three now, all incompatible and incomplete: https://dsccommunity.org/blog/what-is-microsoft-dscv3/
> 6. if you have hybrid and are in azure already, maybe? haven't used [Azure Arc]
It's supposed to replace Group Policy, Windows Update, and bits and pieces of SCCM and SCOM.
It is incredibly, hilariously bad at all of those things.
It's a level of failure that simply boggles the mind, and I can only surmise that it was developed by a small army of junior outsourced Indian developers that had never seen any of the tools they were replacing and did everything "to the letter of the spec".
Still, each time I install Ubuntu I discover unpolished side of Linux that makes it harder to recommend to the non technical user. After install I always need to figure something out, with Wayland the graphic stack is complex so even basic remote control (including the built in one) becomes a complex task.
For governments: We already see some shift to OSS and non-US from all sort of reasons.
For businesses: Tech companies are more agile to changing stacks and devices. But traditional business are less easy to switch.
For private users: Younger generation will shape the future of the above. But there’s no real OS lock in today for general use. The MacBook Neo is great investment by Apple. Google might also introduce eventually something that fuse ChromeOS and Android in a way that will spark this discussion again. AI companies already shaping some ideas that will change OS workflows (yet OS product managers shouldn’t try to shove things as it is now - also mentioned in the above post)
Anyway, future of OS will be very interesting
I think this is good, because they're talking about removing (hideously inappropriate) react and other web technologies from core OS components, and using proper native OS calls instead. But I'm not familiar with WinUI3. I only know Win32. Is WinUI3 a flash-in-the-pan system like their other UI attempts, or is it decent and stable?
If you stay in the happy path, it's decent, better than it used to be. Microsoft does seem committed to it, they're slowly converting Windows apps to WinUI 3.
That said, the team is clearly understaffed; there are long-standing unresolved bugs, just search for "memory leak" on their GitHub issue tracker. Also, native, non-.NET support is definitely an afterthought, it's barely documented and the tooling is super awkward. But at least, unlike WPF, it exists.
To remain compatible with Android and iPhones they removed or simplified a bunch of features, ironically stripping out HDR support just when practically all phones got wide gamut and HDR, OLED screens, etc.
In the era when mobile phones are getting amazing, Microsoft is still racing towards the bottom along with every laptop maker other than Apple.
There's nothing wrong with Win32 (and everything wrong with the newer stuff); "interaction latency" was just fine on a single-core 33MHz 486 running Windows 95.
It's not only steered me off of Windows, but Azure, Office, and anything else with the Microsoft name on it. I'll do my best to steer family and business customers off likewise.
Trust is earned over years, and whoever the execs are that pushed all these shitty short-term squeezes on their customers, the company now gets to pay the reputational price.
Personal computing is a rare niche these days thanks to the majority who have chosen to give over the personal aspect to the privacy hostile duopoly of MS and Apple (while celebrating doing so) who hold the leash.
I wonder if this will include being able to put it on the non-primary display once again. It's not mentioned, but that was one of the biggest frustrations with Windows 11. It seems their focus is exclusively on single display devices.
It also ruined my flow for my flight sim until I found a workaround. The fullscreen window wishes to launch to the primary display, which means losing the useful bits of the taskbar.
I love what they're saying, but my faith in them is very, very is low.
I also have set the classic right-click menus.
There are some things about Windows 11 I like but a lot of it seems to be designed by people who use Mac OS (graphic designers).
I had to dig around because I could not remember since when I take this stuff - putting as many toolbars as you'd like anywhere on multiple monitors you feel like as granted and yes, 14 years ago xfce 4.10 was released. Time flies, I guess.
Say what you want, but Microsoft has always explored and pushed boundaries of computing, but the company's aggressive nature is ultimately their downfall IMHO. Catering to business needs is understandable, but if all your relationships are adversarial, you're doomed to fail because nobody loves you.
Taskbar position? El-Oh-El. Sucks to be tone-deaf I guess. Good luck with adding more widget controls.
The feedback/forum tool, has been a thing for years. Submited many bugs that I wanted fixed, and always been ignored.
Thanks, but Im not looking back.
Just like the dialog that searched for a solution to why my program just crashed. Of all the times I saw that (maybe every other day), it found something precisely 0 times, but wasted my time every time.
Did it work for anyone or am I alone?
It is not that everything should stay the same, that is one choice, but there needs to be a steward that says, hey our right click menu on the desktop has an SLA of 100ms to open, it doesn't matter which features you put in there, if something causes it to be slow, kill it.
Can I access basic apps that are table stakes for an OS, an editor, screenshots etc without popups for unrelated nonsense. If you fail at that, then as a user I get confused. I am used to just being able to note down some text, why am I asked to transcribe with Copilot or login to microsoft.
It is clear that the adoption of Copilot was measured in activations, and as such was pushed in as many places as possible, simply because they needed all that exposure to meet their targets. Windows was not just a product but a funnel to other offerings and that cannibalized windows even more than it was previously.
I've got a slight bias, as I haven't had windows installed in about 10 years, but when I've helped my family with their issues, it is clear how much of a shitshow it actually is.
Great!
On the other hand, Microsoft is famous for killing something good (like OneNote) but spamming the UI with numerous entry points that will make you think "this is some piece of crap that Microsoft is spamming because nobody in their right mind would want it." That they are getting some self-awareness of this is a good sign.
[1] I'd say Google's AI Mode gives consistently better answers (like use "vite-ignore" instead of writing a Vite plugin that doesn't work) than copilot with the reservation that if Google seems to get uncomfortable about a conversation it will end the conversation with a ten pack of search results whereas Copilot tries to simulate a person with healthy boundaries (e.g. "I will help you write a romance story but I won't help you write a sex scene")
And I could tell that. In one instance where I asked it to write a script that does a bunch of things, it provided a series of steps to do in the terminal. This is very off my typical experience with other chatbots. I immediately went to Claude which gave me a complete script that does exactly what I need.
At the very least, don't forget my font setting on the update.
Starting with Windows 11 26H2, the Start Menu will be removed and replaced with Copilot. In order to use a locally hosted app, an externally hosted LLM will need to be instructed to launch it. The reliability is phenomenal: our testing has shown it can launch the right app with 95% accuracy.
I am doing my part - I managed to get 6 people in my family and friend group off Windows onto Debian last year.
All positive feedback so far :).
Sure it's only a small victory - but a meaningful one to me.
How about, turn it off by default?
This article is so disconnected and uninterested in the actual needs of users who despise windows in its current form today.
Switched to Linux on my personal devices 2 years ago and using Ubuntu and PopOS! on two different laptops. I've had very small number of issues. Can't understand people moving to Mac - it is the same messed half backed OS as both Windows and Linux (flavors). With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes.
With Linux at least I don't have to worry about privacy.
> With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes. I think this point is really it. What in the past needed a 40min google search to fix something, llms now fix it in seconds.
* We're going to keep shoving AI and copilot in your face in every corner of the system whether you want it or not. It's what we want after all. Please subscribe to copilot now or 3 days later.
* We're going to continue vibe coding core system components and interface elements in JavaScript to minimize our developer costs. Just get over it already.
Just this past January I implemented something on my workstation I should've done a long time ago: outbound filtering all network traffic via so-called 'Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security'. I've also skipped more Insider builds in the past two months than I have in the past 11 years.
The only thing keeping me around at this point is the migration overhead and (at least I tell myself) window 'snapping'.
I went back to windows, using WSL in 2017. In 2023 I got sick of how everything was getting progressively worse and switched to linux (which has window snapping). I'm never looking back.
https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/use-this-awesome-trick-to-g...
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/12/macos-sequoia-window-ti...
But also, why wouldn't UI changes be possible if the source was open? I remember WindowBlinds and patched uxTheme.dll in the XP days, and that was /without/ source being available. So in this hypothetical, what's stopping hackers from backporting the things they like about 7 to 10 or adding more rounded translucency?
Which just tells me what I already know - Windows is actively hostile to power users, and they should be on Linux. Leave Windows for the less technically confident who need that stuff hidden away.
- MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating...
- Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.
Also, why couldn't they make this announcement as they release the taskbar change. Taking away the most basic features and bringing a few back doesn't mean things are improving, it means things are getting petty.
There is no reason for the start menu to take 2 seconds to show up on a computer with 8 CPUs running at 4GHz. We all know that they're completely half-assing everything now.
Would you settle for 2 out of 3? UX is improving, and things get more polished every year, but we've mostly settled on shoving things into some sort of package (container, flatpak, snap) alongside all its dependencies specifically so we don't have to actually stabilize any sort of ABI
I was coincidentally just updating old softare I wrote, and I just ripped out the snap, RPM and Debs because I can't be bothered to maintain all of them.
I've used Windows since 3.1. Win 11 was the straw that broke the camel's back. I moved to CachyOS a few months ago and I honestly can't find a reason to switch back.
Microsoft Copilot 365 Operating System App is just trash, plain and simple.
Only a public statement of "deepest possible rethink in attitude" from Satya Nadella would mean a different future for Windows.
Whatever this is - which is mostly weasel words - will fizzle and fade.
Microsoft will continue to move in that direction in various overt and covert manners, and any so-called responding to what users wants is just a charade.
They may say they're backing off now, but it's hard to trust them. Will they just do the same thing with whatever the next tech trend is?
I gave up a long time ago hoping Windows would get better. At this point, I just hope it does not get worse.
Spoken like a true AI.
Your commitment to quality is skin deep.
I can use my computer as a tool to do my craft and I’m not constantly sucked in ai features, news, or external search results, if I don’t want it.
OS stands for operating system, Microsoft is not that for me.
I wouldn’t know how to ever go back. I really hope I’m not forced to for some reason.
I still don't know how to create a native app so inefficient that, it needs to take more than 500 milliseconds to open a directory
I press snooze and get on with my day
The fix is upside down UI?
https://web.archive.org/web/20080626154537/http://blog.seatt...
I used Windows since Windows 95 (back in '96, I was 5 years old).
But still having regular blue screens come back with Windows 11..
I am better off selling my 64GB of RAM, than Windows Defender eating a third of it at random times
That said, it's completely rudderless. How important is an operating system anymore anyway when most applications are just an Electron app anyway? What does consumer Windows provide Microsoft anymore besides a gateway to Office 365 and other actually profitable services?
They also clearly fell asleep at the wheel on things like gaming. The future is clearly Linux-based.
And on the hardware front, Microsoft seemed to have given up on their own consumer gear, and their partners have left them out to dry yet again.
This already existed. You took it away. If anything, you are back peddling and re-introducing it. But I don't care anymore. Made the switch to Linux and don't look back.
What finally pushed me to linux was because specifically in my narrow usecases it's just plain better, but if we were to completely ignore that, even if linux was worse, I just don't want to support evil companies anymore.
Now I'll admit that this is what AI would say, but it's not always about what is better, it's about sending a message, a message that microsoft appears to have heard loud and clear, however, we will have to see if this is just PR or not.
This would be great. It's still easy to freeze up File Explorer when moving thousands of files. The same operation from the command line works fine.
> options when to update
> less horrible and slow file explorer
Finally, a desktop with feature parity of an OS from the year 2000.
Good on them for hearing complaints after 4+ years and addressing some of them.. maybe. They say they will at least.
s/2000/1995/fire most of your leads & new programmers.
hire back anyone willing to come back with competence.
return to the Windows 10 LTSC codebase.
try again.
It could be turned into a great OS if they simply remove some things. Get rid of the ads, make copilot an optional component, stop trying to sell 365, let me turn off telemetry, etc.
I have zero windows machines now and no promises will change that.
Otherwise it wouldn't take years to unbreak the simple stuff like taskbar positioning!
> Thank you for holding us to a high standard
"We" apologize for failing to do that!
> moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework.
Is that the framework that's incapable of the most basic frameworky thing - displaying non-blurry text and hopes that high-dpi screens will save us?
> Enhancing Search: Delivering faster, more accurate results with consistent search experience across Windows surfaces > Substantially lower latency for search,
Everything has existed for many years and solved the speed/latency! Some file managers were even smart enough to integrate it!
> Improving the Start and Taskbar experience: Making these core Windows surfaces more reliable, flexible and personalized
Similarly, Windhawk already exist, take that power and make it built-in and easier to mod/apply!
P.S. By the way, when have we retired programs and apps?
> File Explorer is one of the most used surfaces
I'd wish they did a more modular OS (explorer, browser, etc), keep it simple and streamline installing requirements as needed.
There's only one complaint that practically everyone has regarding what's required "during device setup," and it's not updates. I can't say I'm shocked that it's being ignored.
More in the topic. Good that Windows Update will suck less. Did the Discover-something-or-other-imply less start-memu ads, I couldn't tell..
Guess not.
It's a shame, I'd appreciate more than a single 9 of uptime from GitHub (luckily I don't need to interact with anything else Microsoft related)
For now, I am so bitter about windows, that I just want it to stop being a thing
I did not know you can't move the taskbar in windows 11... I literally lol'd. That type of shit is why I dumped gnome 3 a long time ago.
>Today, I’m sharing what we are doing in response.
Just these words are already off putting. The extremely careful wording to avoid anything minimally resembling recognizing an issue.
It's ok to say we fucked up. It's empowering. Not being able to do it is a huge red flag.
So they threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall, and this is the bit where some of it falls off.
Their commitments here seem to try to bring windows back to what it was when they still had their QA teams.
The last performant Windows version was Windows 8, despite its UX flaws. It actually made old computers faster and it started going downhill with the very first Windows 10 Technical Preview. I doubt that MS will reach that level of performance and stability again.
More control over ads? The whole widgets screen is quite literally just ads.
Someone in the comments here said nobody loves Windows. I probably did love Windows 7. I felt that it was the best of all worlds, huge support for hardware, basically rock solid on good hardware, gaming performance was fantastic.
In my opinion, Windows has spiraled downwards ever since 7. So much so that I finally switched to Linux permanently. Windows 11 and the forced AI integration was the absolute last straw for me.
The only thing that had really kept me on Windows lately was the gaming side of it. As I've gotten older, the games became less important. Now Proton pretty much gets me compatibility on 172 of 173 games in my steam library. Sure I had to search and find and compile my own controller driver, but it wasn't super painful, probably beyond the realms of an average user still.
Glad they're putting taskbar back into whatever sides. I despise my work Mac's single location at the bottom, wasteful waste of space. I've had icons on the left since Windows 95 and I like them there.
Linux support for video games will eat their dinner.
In this case it's the MacBook Neo that's causing them to get off their butts and reinvest in the quality of their software after letting it stagnate for years, but the pattern is the same: rest on their monopolistic laurels until competition makes them feel threatened, then magically start caring about their users again all of a sudden.
[1] https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/183701230/gates-of...
Ehm, what? Windows XP had this feature. Pretty sure that Vista and 7 did too. I had plenty of friends who used the taskbar in non-standard edges.
Did they recently REMOVE the feature and are now bragging about introducing this "new" feature, or am I missing something?
Oh and stop resetting preferences on update.
Windows is a fabulous operating system. I encourage people to see it as a tool and as an engineering marvel, rather than as an enemy or target of ridicule. I’ve been tremendously productive on Windows, and I have run every desktop OS , including Gentoo (when it used to take 2+ days to compile), BeOS, OS2 , Redhat on Power PC, FreeBSD and loads of niche operating systems.
If you like Operating systems, and hate Windows, I encourage you to read Show Stoppers about Dave Cutler making NT. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and will probably convert you from a Windows hater to an NT Kernel appreciator.
When did they get rid of that?
In 10 and prior you could even move it to other monitors, just by dragging and dropping it. It's baffling they thought that functionality was a bug that people wanted 'fixed'.
At this point I genuinely think people would be blown away at how much of a functional improvement it would be.
There would also be a lot of bewilderment for the younger generations, and people who aren't interested in actually using computers who don't think it looks "sleek" enough or whatever. But in terms of day to day quality of life, those old UIs just got the fuck out the way, and were obvious when you had to interact with it. I have some earned hate for the underlying windows OS, but in terms of UI and desktop, we didn't know what we had until it was taken away.
“More fluid and responsive app interactions: Reducing interaction latency by moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework.
* Improving the shared UI infrastructure that Windows experiences rely on, reducing interaction latency and overhead at the platform level
* Faster responsiveness in core Windows experiences like the Start menu, by moving more experiences to WinUI3”
Also there is one huge glaring omission in the article. The sneaky integration of ads embedded in the OS. I have thankfully never experienced this myself since I abandoned Windows before the ads became a thing.
I sometimes have to use Enterprise Windows 11 professionally, but I can’t ever see myself going back to it for any kind of personal computing. Basically Microsoft had a good thing and decided to enshitify it to death.
No, you mean reintroducing a capability that was standard in Windows for 20+ years? Stop acting like this is some new innovation being introduced in Windows 11.
Just a handful of things that all were taken for granted in Windows previously, doesn't even scratch the surface of issues with Windows 10/11, which removed tons of useful stuff and added garbage nobody wants.
Forced to use Windows 11 at work (well, or a Mac, but Windows 11 is just barely the lesser of two evils) and I hate it. I continue to use Windows 7 at home, which remains the best workstation OS and likely will forever.
Microsoft has proven itself the undisputed king of enshittification and a blog post will not change my mind on that.
Maybe my grandkids will give it a shot.
Nothing
Back a decade or so, the Visual Studio experience was terrible, the team promised they were going to fix a lot of it, I didn't believe them, and they actually delivered. No VS is not perfect. But it was on a downward spiral and they got it out.
I hope they deliver now, and bring back my inner Windows fan which they eroded and then killed with the abomination that is current Win11.
What a list of bangers!
We’re not first time users, we don’t want Microsoft BOB as our UI, we don’t want ads and internet search “functionality” in our Start menu, we don’t want AI everywhere and we don’t want things hidden from us.
Make Windows 11 Pro for real pro users and 11 Home for new users. I hope a few people from MS are reading this, especially Mr Engineer.
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but I don’t care.
P.S. Yeah yeah guys, I know about Linux ;-)
At work, I'm switching to Mac for the first time in my life. At home, I'm already gaming on Linux. Windows is dead to me.
“Windows has lost its way! Move the task bar!”
It completely ignores the huge UI regressions Windows has suffered over the last... 20 years?
Windows's UI ineptitude has reached crippling levels. Application windows lack title bars, so you frequently don't know what application you're looking at. Applications lack menus; critical functions are scattered all over the place behind hamburger buttons... and sometimes even further, under a "more" item in the menu the hamburger invokes (try saving a file you're viewing in Edge).
Applications eschew the tidy, readily comprehensible, familiar, and efficient File dialog in favor of a bizarre text-based pane consisting of crude, unlabeled boxes and horizontal lines... with no context as to where you are in the file system.
Then there are the baffling functional regressions. Here's one that wastes my time daily: You can't select multiple files in Explorer and say "Open with." WTF, this was old hat 30 years ago. Want to open several PNGs in Photoshop? NOPE, not anymore!
Just dismal.
Really? it took "user feedback" for one of the world's best software companies to realize one of the most fundamental parts of the OS was broken?
I have been long on $MSFT for a while now, but my faith as an investor stands shook.
> Windows is as much yours as it is ours.
Microsoft has been inflicting unwanted crap on me for years now, and they keep expanding with more unwanted crap (even to the point of wanting to force people to have Microsoft accounts) as time goes on. Reading this line actually made me laugh out loud. No, Microsoft, you don't believe this even a little.
These people don’t even know their own product.
Also, Linux (via Android, micro computers everywhere and the vast internet) touches way more lives then Microsoft.
At this point in the article I realized I didn't care one bit and stopped reading
They aren’t trying to add Copilot in useful ways for their users. They’re forcing it into Notepad when they know it doesn’t fit there, because it might be your “entry” into their slop generator.
User experience be damned, these shareholders must have their value.
> Craft
> To us, craft is the discipline that turns functional products into loved ones through usability, polish, coherence and refinement.
> This year, you will see us invest in raising the bar on the overall usability of the experience, with more opportunities for personalization, less noise, less distraction and more control across the OS. That includes being thoughtful about how and where we bring AI into Windows, leading with transparency, choice and control, so that new capabilities enhance the experience rather than complicate it.
Tell us why it was removed in the first place, why it takes years to put it back and it's still future promises as of March 2026. That's just a clown show.
You could skip the "almost" if you had stuck to your guns on Windows Phone. It was a good phone OS, and we could have done without the iOS/Android duopoly, but MS chickened out.
This can not possibly be true, in several dimensions/metrics. I understand that this is mostly marketing bluster, but holy cow are they delusional here.
On one hand, Windows has pressure to be something that "just works" like an iPad used to be - users can't screw it up. This is what enterprises want for the daily drivers of their massive user populations.
OTOH, Windows has pressure to be this highly customizable tool for savvy high-agency individuals. This is what we all want.
I can empathize with both needs, for sure, but it is a constant war. They're doing alright, considering.
Welcome to the 90s?
They are so far off track. I'm basically never leaving Windows 10.
RHEL is mostly what you will see @ Corpo, with some occasional SUSE for Europeans. Given that Fedora is the upstream for RHEL (and no snapd), it is quite well supported. AFAIK, it's also what Linus Torvalds has ran for a long while now.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:
Pfft. Still slow, react-based, and ad-riddled
> reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
Must have failed to meet the metrics goals
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
You can bet they will still flash the screen take-over riddled with all the dark patterns in the world to get you to upload all your files to their cloud "for backup"
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer [..] quicker launch experience:
Oh, the preloading of explorer into ram before it's launched? Lmao. Entirely embarassed by File Pilot https://filepilot.tech
gtfo.
- native quick launch bar
- killing telemetry
- killing UI kludge
- permitting non-MS apps again
Frankly, the things they've listed as action items for the future are things that they should have been doing FROM THE BEGINNING.
Like, how on earth was
> Faster and more responsive Windows experiences
NOT a part of just the general release cycle of a major windows update? How was it they didn't notice that the file explorer experience in 11 was noticeably worse than windows 10 and the same hardware?
We all know the answer, it's because the highest priority wasn't a good UX, it was to make sure copilot was integrated into everything.
So long as microsoft management doesn't prioritize performance (and they clearly do not) this is just a natural endstate of any software. If you aren't focusing and paying your developers to make things faster and smoother, you'll get this sort of high memory consumption and janky applications. Making things not janky requires someone in management to care about that.
""" ok copilot, implement these changes, make no mistakes """
Having learned absolutely nothing from their existing sins.
Even for gaming, the only reason why I would stick with windows is not an issue anymore. Thanks to Steam gaming just works on Linux. I'm using Omarchy and it's very easy.
I can't see ever going back to windows personally.
Thankfully Ballmer failed and this isn’t even close to true. I, like a lot of highly technical professionals, have been Windows sober for many years now.
Seems more like FUD.
It's not sitting at 60-65% and has been slowly bleeding for the last 20 years or so. In my opinion, anyone who have figured out how to move his processes, has left the building and never checked back.
Now Windows is being attacked aggressively from multiple fronts:
- macbook neo. Apple is projected to sell roughly 5million of these this year. This is a segment that couldn't previously move out of Windows because of cost not Office.
- improvement in Linux (Desktop/Gaming): This will eat another chunk for people whom Linux didn't function previously.
- HarmonyOS Next. This is underestimated by the rest of the Western world. I think by 5-10 years most of China would have moved to its own OS. Windows highest marketshare is in Asia.
The idea that Microsoft can exist on Azure/Office alone is not valid, in my opinion. Especially for Office, Windows is your portal to the rest of Microsoft stack. If you use HarmonyOS, you'll like use their own Office system. From there, they'll own the rest of the stack.
tl;dr: MSFT is screwed and they know it. They are also going to do nothing about it.
I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very frankly I prefer the developer experience on Windows, where you can write a (relatively) high-quality native desktop application with purely first-party tooling and release a single, tiny (~10^4 bytes) executable that quite literally runs anywhere. The Windows API surface area is huge and developers can write entire multi-domain programs without ever looking for a third-party library.
This probably sounds like a lot of copium, but I feel like recent events like the rising costs of memory and competition like the MacBook Neo will light a fire under Microsoft's arse. I really hope some of the AI overboard in Windows 11 is rolled back over the near future. They should migrate core Windows applications back to native and CLI technologies, actually support and maintain these without chasing the next big thing, and release frameworks for safer compiled languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin, and allocate more resources to F#.
Better support for F#, or really any language other than C# is a longshot though. Those resources were likely 'reallocated' to AI R&D indefinitely.
A good way to put it.
There are third-party tools that Microsoft really need to adopt to make Windows a bit nicer (WizTree, VoidTools Everything, adopt improvements from Total Commander, make more PowerToys default), but broadly it is still a decent OS. There are issues like slow `CloseHandle()` because of Defender (which needs to be a bit less zealous), and maybe more first-party adoption of WinGet.
On the other hand, every time I use desktop Linux I get some paper cut because some edge case that I just don't ever think about is broken on Linux, whether it be my multi-monitor high pixel density layout, my USB audio interface and peripherals, or my touchpad sensitivity and gestures that Windows was widely derided for in the early 2010s and suddenly after 'Precision Touchpads'[1] no one ever complained about again, or random GPU glitches even on Intel/AMD integrated graphics that I have literally never seen on the Windows desktop, or poor battery life (Windows somehow gets 2-3x the battery life of Linux).
Five years of Windows Insider made me pretty weary, though. Being downstream of Microsoft's changes is like reading tea leaves, WSL2 had broken networking for four years before any fix ever came up. I can appreciate the work that Microsoft does to ship a stable OS to millions of users, but my impatience got the better of me in the end. I switched to Linux waiting for WSL2 to get fixed, and while it's not a perfect experience it does consistently improve in a transparent and open manner.
Nah, NT always had... mostly... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved inside of an operating system that actively hates me. But the core OS is cool.
NTFS is plenty fast, even for thousands of small files; it is the Windows Defender file system filter driver that slows things down. Specifically, it slows down CloseHandle[1].
> NT's core tech
I'm not just talking about NT. I think most of the user mode is great, too. Office blows the pants off most other 'office' suites. D3D is generally very forward-looking, and many extensions are released on D3D first, sometimes years before they're ported to Vulkan (ray-tracing, mesh shaders, descriptor heaps, etc). Windows has had a superb low-latency audio subsystem in WASAPI since Vista, which is something like a decade before Linux got Pipewire. There are many other examples of random cool stuff in Windows that Linux 'rediscovered independently' but Windows got there much earlier just because of the sheer install base and surface area.
[1]: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/06/surprisingly-slow/
They are still investing in AI, when they should be investing in ARM.
Apple silon is winning developers, even enterprise and with NEO the entry level market where MS was king.
This is how goodwill works. Easy to burn, hard to earn back. I’m not touching any products by Meta, Google or Microsoft, and none of them are getting me back on board with a cute blog post.
I can't remember when Update became so intrusive and aggressive - Vista? - but it was the top annoyance for me personally.
The pushback which you are only now starting to perceive is being caused by an entire generation of Microsoft intentionally and actively positioning itself in conflict with its customers.
I understand that once you have a million customers, you can't really treat them right anymore. But Microsoft has not given a single shit about customer feedback, even in aggregate for decades now.
As I read this, all I can think is "too little, too late." I have watched in my workplace Windows go from being a product that we are happy to purchase to yet another piece of technology that we would simply replace were we not yoked to it.
I guess even now they probably still don't care. Microsoft will continue printing money until the sun burns out.
LMAO
On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.
> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus
Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions
This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer
See comment on task bar above.
> More control over widgets and feed experiences
Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.
On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:
- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.
- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.
- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.
- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.
- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.
- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps
- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.
- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.
- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.
I think the real issue is that MS doesn't view Windows primarily as an OS that should be invisible, out of the way -- with minimal "innovation" geared to sell MS products. The problem is that MS views Windows as a sales/marketing channel for their ads/apps/services.
Can I change it's color, too? Amazing! /s
Microsoft appears completely bereft of creativity and innovation now.