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.
> Just write good, bug free code that does things people want
Who could imagine Apple would eventually inherit Sun’s crown as the king of the RISC unix workstation?
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?
AFAICT it's only updates to things that run at startup time that require a reboot, probably because NTFS doesn't allow you to write to a file that's currently opened (as opposed to nearly every Linux filesystem, which handles that just fine: the process that has the file opened continues to see the "old" file, while any that open it after the write will see the "new" file — but NTFS, probably due to internal architecture, can't handle that and so you have to reboot to change files that background services are using).
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???
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!
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.
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".
When you think about it, it is kind of insane that Linux can match or outperform windows when it has an extra layer translating the system calls though. And for many of us, who don't play competitive twitchy shooters on a high level, the performance of gaming on Linux is perfectly adequate currently. I played Baldur's Gate 3 on Linux earlier this year for example, and it maxed out the frame rate of my monitor.
Greatest strength. Greatest papercut.
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.
Getting a tool that did exactly what I wanted with no fuss was delightful.
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.
The Tithe Barn in Bradford On Avon was the medieval equivalent to an Amazon warehouse!
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.
I think there is a real chance that there will be an EU push for that to be made available as a way of gradually decoupling national security interests from the US, for obvious reasons.
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.
Similarly with "reducing unnecessary Copilot integration." They added it everywhere before, users hated it, and now removing it is considered a feature.
This isn't a commitment to quality. This is just a fix for years of treating the operating system as an advertising platform.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
.. yet. The absolute roll-over I've seen regarding OS level age verification is concerning and disheartening.
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.