It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.
I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice
Better yet: don't pick any poison at all -- both System76 and Tuxedo Computers (as examples, sometimes you can buy a latop without an OS and save the money, same goes for PCs) offer laptops with Linux installed: no Microslop tax, and hardware that's guaranteed to work with OSS.
Personally I'm a huge Linux supporter and user. I try my best to not to use any non-free software, and while I prefer macOS laptops, I always have an exit strategy if I decide to ditch the platform.
Recently, I decided to start making music again after a decade of hiatus. I got a nice audio interface and some hardware which can do nifty things. The catch?
None of the supporting software for my hardware runs on Linux. I either need to run a VM to configure these things, or use the macOS versions of the software. I chose the latter because it's not meaningful to passthrough all the devices to change some parameters and give device back to Linux. I also don't use Wine. I don't want to install something that big into my daily driver.
While Linux is great for many, many things, there are some things still sorely lacking in the ecosystem. Why can't I adjust monitoring/routing in a class-compliant audio device? Why my effect processors' USB protocol is not open so I can't play with it parameters from Linux?
Most people want a computer that works with their software. No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution. Especially because nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS solutions, that only a niche Windows program can actually do correctly.
Then at least let the company that makes your niche software know that you want a Linux version of it, even if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this chicken / egg problem. Nobody wants to use Windows, they want to use some specific application. If most software is available on Linux too, then consumers can actually choose their OS.
Most software is already available on Linux. I've successfully run Linux in corporate jobs where everything runs on the MS/AD/Azure stack. The issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background. Windows is really great at that - until it breaks. Then you're usually screwed. Like, if the problem is close to the kernel, you can't even fix it theoretically. Best you can do is wait for an official MS patch. On Linux things break more often, but you can usually fix them without having to resort to extreme measures. It's a fundamentally different usage philosophy that plays very hard into the strengths of techies. So non-technical users will always shy away from Linux.
>
Then at least let the company that makes your niche software know that you want a Linux version of it, even if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this chicken / egg problem.
To solve the chicken/egg problem, the GNU/Linux distributions should generate some very (in particular binary) stable interface for writing applications (including GUI applications) on GNU/Linux - like WinAPI on Windows. With "stable" I mean "stable for at least 20-25 years". This interface must, of course, work on all widespread GNU/Linux distributions.
An operating system is a style of thinking about your work. WINE is a way to get Windows applications to run (by now run decently) under GNU/Linux. These Windows applications are nevertheless foreign bodies in the whole kind of thinking which GNU/Linux is built around.
I don't want windows or linux, I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there. When I have to think about my OS, then the OS has a flaw. And currently nor Windows or Linux can deliver that anymore. Windows 7 after some customizations and Windows XP had this, but M$ destroyed it. Linux never had this and I don't expect that this will come in the future.
> I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there.
I guess you want a Mac. That's fine.
I value freedom and things not mysteriously breaking and functionality not disappearing, and am quite happy investing a the time and knowledge upfront, so I use Linux.
And then there are people who want to have a system which works out of the box initially and who don't want to learn anything and don't mind it breaking later, and they choose Windows.
Well acktshually, gaming is a really good example. Valve did a lot of good with Proton to the point that a lot of games work and work well.
Perhaps ironically, Wine may be the best stable API on Linux. I'd like to see a concerted and well-funded effort to make Wine run certain Windows applications well. We might not be able to replace the Adobe Suite short-term by a FOSS alternative for most of its users, but we might be able to get Wine to run the Adobe Suite, Affinity Suite, and whatnot well enough to make it possible to switch and keep running these applications.
> you have a product that is predatory towards you and you refuse to change your ways.
And honestly it seems like you refuse to learn even the smallest bit about human nature.
Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their computer. Walk into a room of 100 graphic designers who have spend the last 20 years using Photoshop exclusively and put GIMP in front of them and and at least 98 of them are going to say what the hell is wrong with you, they have work to do, take this uncanny valley garbage and get out of here.
I'm typing this on a System76 laptop right now but I understand expecting people to use Linux writ large is ridiculous.
I would propose a new law of interaction design: Whenever something is promoted as a tool that you wouldn't need to learn, then it's actually designed to use you, and you are the tool.
I mean I kinda agree on what you are saying but then it logically follows that if you don't want to try out alternatives, don't want to push your government to enact better laws, don't want to spend time taking them to small claims court - basically don't want to do anything but suffer - then just suffer.
> nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS
I'm interested in where that estimate + number are coming from. And I'd like to point out that I don't nearly see as many people pushing back against say MacOS for "not being Windows", despite the fact that the same issue would be there. I wonder why Linux gets special treatment in that regards, when modern distros make usage very accessible.
> And that doesn't even get into gaming.
Gaming on Linux works very well. And if something doesn't, it's usually by choice (e.g. BattleEye customers not enabling it on Linux) or by sheer incompetence / malevolence (e.g. EA Games and their shitty EA App that breaks often even on Windows, and even worse on Linux in a Wine environment).
<< No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
It actually is. It may not be the best solution, but it absolutely is one of available solutions. = Not being able to ( or wiling to ) learn ( and adjust ) as needed is part of the reason we are here.
I am not being nitpicky here. Reasonable people don't hope things will change; instead, they change things they can.
> Most people want a computer that works with their software.
I suspect that most people don't run much software at all outside of their web browser and wouldn't notice any difference between using chrome in windows and using chrome in linux. Gaming is not the barrier it used to be either.
Well, considering that you can run almost anything (excluding games and specialized graphics software) with 99.99999% guaranteed result via WinApps, I don't see what the issue is for a hypothetical member of the majority population.
It's not 2016 anymore, you don't have to switch to LibreOffice if you need an office suite of apps.
That obviously would be preferable, but if you're an avid Microsoft ecosystem user, just use WinApps. It's simple enough to the point that a child could use it.
I know it's a bit ironic given TFA's focus on shoving Copilot and Recall down users' throats, but I really do believe that an OS-level AI agent could solve these usability issues. We need to solve a lot of trust issues, but the capabilities are essentially already there for a non-technical user to tell a Samantha-like OS AI "please get this working", and it will.
That's barking up the wrong tree. Github shows instructions for software developers. A normal user would just install Winapps from package manager, like with all the other Linux software.
Even skipping the first step (which requires a second readme) the next step involves opening a terminal. Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work, what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.
Linux is an important operating system, but anyone under the delusion that it is desktop ready right now needs to actually watch someone use it. I say this not because I hate linux, but because I love it. I want someone to make it usable for a desktop, and people claiming that it is usable right now are not helping that.
I agree that most users won't be able to follow Winapps' guide, but "The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work" is just false. That is the point of an OS for computer illiterates, not the "entire point of an operating system".
I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage their applications and work processes rather than their computer.
It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from their computers - that as long as they can "save" their work, and "send" it from one app to another, they'd be able to get all the productivity that they are looking for.
Cool. Windows can't do 99% of the things I and anyone not grasping at straws can do with Linux.
It is getting tiring, I don't say Linux is perfect, but KDE has been better than Windows for years, Linux doesn't bit rot like an average Windows install and Linux is in practice surprisingly more stable, but no-no-no, Linux can't be this time again. Quick... ehm "there is a piece of software that only works on Windows". Have you ever thought the reverse holds too, but times 1000?
If you call yourself an IT-professional, you only run spyware.exe in a vm or in a box with all networking gear ripped out and you don't making stupid excuses.
No need for such childish reaction, dismissing other's viewpoints achieves nothing for your side of arguments, at least nothing good and one of the reasons some skilled folks won't migrate, we have enough toxic communities elsewhere.
Also quite a few inaccuracies - what the heck is 'bit rot' on windows? I had 1 same Windows 10 install running on desktop for 8 years as primary personal PC and installed tons of software and games, both official and... some other types. 0 issues.
On laptop whole lifetime with original install is the default for everybody I know, for me 6-7 years (simply the length of ownership). We don't talk about Windows 95 or ME era here where frequent installs were basically mandatory and a well-practiced chore.
Or Accessibility, which the Linux desktop is notoriously bad with, since, what, 20 years. The constant push to rewrite things typically forgets making Accessibility a priority, for the sake of "progress".
For better or worse, well mostly worse, most of the software people use these days is either directly running in the browser or is electron based so running perfectly fine on Linux.
Gaming on Linux is a mostly solved issue for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming. If a game isn't using some root kit level anti-cheat or copyright protection, it is going to run just fine. Same with running most other software.
The only part where Linux is sucks is for certain creatives fields. If you need Adobe products you are out of luck. Video editing well you use Da Vinci or free software. There are some good DAWS but no Ableton.
Yes, you have to compromise but Linux is definitely getting there. Not everything runs on Mac either and people cope just fine.
>>for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming
Turns out, a lot of people do exactly that. Hundreds of millions of people play CoD, Fortnite, Battlefield, Apex and many many other games which won't work on Linux at all.
I think the state of gaming on Linux is absolutely incredible - what used to be a very esotheric and "roll of the dice" process 20 years ago now is extremely simple and it mostly just works. But when I play games with friends every week it's almost never a game that would work on Linux.
Good news re: gaming is with SteamOS/Bazzite gaming on Linux is finally near-turnkey. Only thing I had to adjust on my bazzite computer was zram, otherwise I’ve never had to open the terminal (unless I wanted to). Expedition 33 ran perfectly day 1.
I do agree with your larger point though. It’s the same reason everybody doesn’t change the oil in their car on their own or cook their food every night over ordering out. Only it goes even further because by this point most people expect a computer to just do what it’s supposed to do (or they think it’s supposed to do) the first time they try. I can’t imagine asking my parents to start inputting terminal commands. Even just the process of something like running etcher and prepping a usb drive to install linux is a whole thing.
Linux is just no good option. Linux has it's own issues that make them unusable for people that don't want to put time and effort in their OS itself.
Current example: Slidly incompatible unix tools, still not 100% complete, but rewritten in rust.
What bugged me for years is that I ended up paying the microsoft or apple tax that way. In the end I figured out a more efficient way around that than any of the rebates/refunds: just buy second hand hardware. Someone else paid for and used the windows license, I just need the box.
I have two left hands (and one of them is backwards) and components spontaneously disintegrate when I touch them. I know I'm not capable of building a computer so I bought mine from Tuxedo computers, who sell computers running GNU/Linux. I might be the GNU/Linux whisperer who manages to not have any major issues, but that doesn't correlate with the type of technical aptitude which would let me turn a heap of components into a working machine. I even managed to break a laptop by trying to replace the CMOS battery.
This is another way they rip off consumers. In a perfect world, the license would be resalable for someone else, just like you can sell a used Blu-ray. During piracy cases, they clamor about their "intellectual property". Ok so that means it's not physical, and once one person is done, they can sell it to someone else who needs it.
Look at the mobile YouTube client. The bottom navigation bar has the "+" create button stuffed right in the middle of it, larger than any other button. What % of users creates YouTube content? Probably <1%. What pp of those do it in the mobile YouTube client? Probably 0.1%. Yet the button is there, with no way to disable it.
In general, why don't apps have a "creator" toggle, off-by-default, that optimized the entire UI for viewing / consuming? Just how apps like Uber have either an entire separate app for 'partners', or toggle.
I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders. And YouTube has no competitor, so they can go buckwild with anything that synthetically increases KPIs.
I think the only app in recent memory that I have seen right the ship is Spotify. The past year they have introduced a lot of toggles for things like the shuffle algorithm, the dumb looping album art videos, audio loudness normalization being split out into normalization and compression ('volume'), etc; About the only thing that's missing is a toggle to disable podcasts, just like YouTube needs a toggle to completely disable shorts.
Any PMs reading this, be our hero. Fight the good fight.
A while ago, they introduced the Home page with algorithmic recommendations; okay, it sucks that you can't choose whether Home or Subscriptions is the default, but at least you can choose between the algorithmic recommendations and the chronological subscriptions feed.
Then they introduced Shorts. These are algorithmic ally recommended TikToks which you can't disable, they always litter both the Subscriptions page and the Home page. This sucks.
Then, recently, they added algorithmic recommendations to Subscriptions. So if you're on Home you see only algorithmic recommendations, and if you're on Subscriptions, a lot of your screen is still taken up by algorithmically recommended videos from channels you subscribe to.
Every one of these steps is in the direction of making sure you watch what YouTube wants you to watch instead of what you want to watch.
There seems to be a pretty wide gulf between "segregate consumers and content creators" and "please let me make it so that I can remove/disable the huge central button I never use that takes up a lot of space and is super easy to accidentally hit"
> I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders.
Exactly.
I am in an engineering design software developer organization bought by an investor from the founders approaching retirement (they worked 3 decades on this software helping construction engineers designing better homes).
Ever since the lead up to the sell - changes were tuned to lure in investors, for the liking of investors - our organization is focusing on maximising revenue. Fast. That is THE focus. New marketing strategy, sales strategy, licensing strategy changes, reshape organization to have more informed decision making in sales (i.e. collecting and processing much more data on increasing number of contacts). Company meetings are about EBITDA, sales goals vs. actual, streamlining organization. Luncbreak discussions evolve around how to license existing features differently so it would trigger/force up/cross sales.
What is not on the agenda for maximising revenue: features and engineering. We are a "sales oriented organization", says our new CEO prodly - brought in during the sale. Addressing user needs and becoming more popular for the eventual income boost takes longer than the sales cycle of less than 5 years (the investor wants to sell the company in 5 years time). Engineering is in the way, accounting books need to look much much better much sooner for the eventual profit. Only sales tactics work here.
I see ralted pattern elsewhere, in tools I have the misfortune to use (SaaS and other subscription based products). Shameless self-promotions (cross-sale) distact your focus all the time, 'features' good for the assumed 'cutting-edge' image of the organization, privacy offensive practices (data for running sales campaigns), 'offerings' that help you with the ideas they force on you for some sizeable extra cost.
It will not end well. Takes long time to fail, but without valuable features and engineering there will be no value left for the users to buy eventually. No user wants top notch marketing, licensing, and sales strategy for the benefit of the organization.
On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase in two kinds of posts: 1) That’s it, I’ve had it, windows is dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a distro. 2) I’d love to get off window and move to Linux but I can’t because it doesn’t have an app that works identically to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).
lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.
I don't think "care" is the right word here at all. We simply don't have options.
This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition, but competition eventually leads to winners that then consolidate their positions and we end up with no real choices.
You're telling me people would pick a worse OS because they don't care even if they had real options? I don't believe that for a second.
Right, and even when there are options that doesn't mean you actually get to choose what you want for all things you care about, e.g. there might be option A with feature a (e.g. no ads) and option B with feature b (e.g. no vendor lock in) but none with both a and b - so you only really get a choice for the things you care most about. Which is effectively why gradual enshittification is effective: Most users will put up with minor anti-features rather than jump to a different platform that will require new programs and/or relearning.
> This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition
The fact that governments allow Microsoft to abuse its position to force OEMs to install Windows is the biggest problem. This would never happen in a market where regulation ensures healthy competition.
That version of capitalism sailed 40 years ago in the USA, antitrust enforcement has slowly disappeared which creates a race to the bottom for other countries who would like their companies to compete against USA's companies. If they enforce antitrust then the behemoths created in the USA by absorbing competitors without antitrust enforcement can eat their lunch, even though it's better for consumers.
Unfortunately this also allowed the USA to have companies so large that they basically control the government, changing this now will require massive political will and a political body untethered from corporate interests. I really don't see that happening in the USA, it's been thoroughly captured after so many years driving on that path.
I totally agree. There seems to be absolutely zero focus on Glass Steagall or Citizens United so I can't see how this actually happens without political revolt at this point.
Yes, the neo-liberal economy we've ended up with has drifted quite far from well-regulated Capitalism. I'd still argue that we owe a lot of our rights to hard-fought socialist policy though.
Sometimes companies will make more money by refusing to give consumers what they want. Collusion is also extremely profitable. A competitor that isn't interested in playing along can be bought out, but once shareholders get involved they're going to insist on screwing over their customers just like everyone else does anyway because they'd be leaving a huge pile of cash on the table otherwise and short term profits are all shareholders care about.
That argument doesn't really hold when the barriers of entry are so high. Believing that one of the biggest tech firms in the world is doing something undesirable and having a better idea that many people would in fact pay for is not the same as having the resources to become a unicorn with a huge global customer base that can practically implement that idea.
This is about markets. It has nothing to do with capitalism. And in fact, it is usually _because_ of healthy competition that this type of enshittification happens everywhere because quality is hard to compare for the buyers and so the sellers are forced to compete on cost.
Too late now. Multiple people having anything to say when choosing hardware and software, including me, will no longer advise or approve buying windows machine or using windows in general.
That's how the world works for everything: software, politics, social stuff (good or bad), war, etc. People are bad at judging gradual/slow changes but when you push a bit too far, you have already gained so much that you can usually just say sorry and move on
Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.
Good luck getting the average person through the setup process
AI is part of the problem with what MS has shoved in to things but it may be part of what can help with the underlying issue of this behavior by corporations.
The average user increasingly will not need to be walked through in certain ways, they’ll only have to be aware something, some way, is possible. Because we are most of usthe average, meaning outsider to knowledge and understanding of things their functioning on a computer. I can strip out tired windows behavior to some extent and certainly stand up a Linux desktop. But I didn’t know how to easily manage retrieval of data from an old disc image that refused to mount. But I knew it was there and not impossible so I asked Claude. A one shot prompt that a few minutes later had Claude reading raw bytes in someway and finding the location of a few files I needed.
So there is potential for AI to fill some gaps in this way and make some things easier and more in reach of average users. It’s potential only though, so continuing to work and ensure open models remain a thing, it’s important. Just like the Internet enabled a lot of things previously out of reach of people. And yeah, that was not an un mixed blessing with the rest, so all the more reason to move forward thoughtfully.
This is what the Steamdeck is. But it took an absolutely massive amount of work over a decade from valve just to get gaming working. No laptop manufacturer could afford to do the same for fixing wine for desktop software since they aren’t getting a cut of the software sales like valve does.
How long would it take for some MBA to come there and say hey if we install this full of crap we could make multiple euros per unit... And then fill it with crap, spying and other things?
Purely hypothetical, hasn't happened yet. The reason is that Linux system vendors are lead and staffed by people who are idealistic like the average Linux system customer. They know their clientele, they know it would be bad for business.
I too would absolutely blame a plumber for trying to fix my leaking pipes with a screwdriver instead of e.g. a solder patch. Not everything is a screw, not even in the developing world.
I recently began developing an app for Xbox Series X/S. The only framework that will work is UWP. When you look at the UWP docs, this is at the top of the page highlighted "If you are starting to develop Windows apps, we recommend you consider using the Windows App SDK, and WinUI rather than UWP. Although still supported, UWP is not under active development. Please see Start developing Windows apps for more information."
So no, React is a (poor) solution, not the problem. The problem is Windows can't nail down a solid SDK for it's platforms.
We can blame both. If my repair bill was higher because the mechanic chose to use a ridiculous electric screwdriver that used tons of power to achieve what a normal screwdriver can and stripped the screws in the process then I'd also be upset with both the mechanic and the ridiculously inefficient tool.
So React, the most popular front-end library and used my hundreds of thousands of successful apps, is the ridiculous electric screwdriver? See how weird that sounds and makes it obvious you guys can't give an honest assessment?
Its popularity or success in other apps has nothing to with the windows situation.
Other apps are successful despite being slow and bloated, since performance isn’t a primary concern of users. In contrast it’s critical for OS internals like the start menu, so a javascript runtime and framework is just the wrong tool for the job.
React is a javascript library. Javascript needs its own runtime. Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and save having to run an entire javascript runtime for no reason?
Only someone who has not tried to write stuff in "native windows" would ask this question. If you want a real answer, go try and develop a Windows native application real quick. I'll wait...
I would hope that the windows developers who are working on the windows shell would know how to write a windows native application in C. If it's that bad, they should improve the API, not just write it all in react instead
I have no issue with user-facing applications doing whatever they want, electron apps bundle an entire chromium to do their thing, but there's a win32 and win64 api in C for a reason, to make OS level stuff fast
Using an entire javascript runtime and framework to make your OS start menu is using a ridiculous overpowered electric screwdriver that strips heads. Using native windows controls is using a proper manual screwdriver that just works
Seen in the context of the thread, with the both of you never addressing the actual problem at hand but instead reflexively and vigorously defending React against an alleged attack, I'm sorry to say this reads like an admission.
I also appreciate the callout but don’t believe it’s in bad taste. There are enough analogs, and it makes you question the type of people who run the companies and make the decisions. In MSFTs case, Bill Gates was an associate with a known pedophile and likely an abuser himself.
I completely understand it being triggering but shying away from it because of that protects perpetrators. A lot of executive circles are filled with abusive freaks and their decision making reflects that.
The underlying point about power imbalance and gradual normalization of bad behavior is fair, but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
Yeah, fully agree. The idea domestic abusers care about flowers is ludicrous. They’re violent and mostly remorseless about it. Anyone who dealt with it personally would chuck the flowers in the bin.
Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.
But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.
Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.
We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory.
Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.
Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.
> Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows
I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.
SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.
I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.
I don't think so. The web version is mostly incompatible with the Windows or Mac desktop versions.
Have you compared the UI of Word/Powerpoint/Excel with alternatives like Apple Pages/Keynote/Numbers or Google Docs/Sheets? For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons, abysmal font rendering and insane defaults.
> For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons
In the case of Office I actually consider it a strength. Office has to take into account a large number of use cases, most people will use only a fraction of what is available, but not everyone use the same fraction. So that "unrelated button" may be someone else's essential feature. The "insane defaults" are what people are used to. I don't know about Apple, but I tend to get to the limits of Google Docs/Sheets rather quickly. It may cover 99% of my needs, but Office gives me the missing 1%.
That's for the traditional Office Microsoft are sabotaging, the web versions are only a shadow of it, and by most points worse than the Google suite, and that's the problem.
As for font rendering, I am sure that Apple is ahead, it has always been their strength. Microsoft may be the king of the office, but when it comes to art and creative work, Apple has always been on top.
Windows used to exist in a competitive environment where they had to fight to remain relevant. For a long time now they have become complacent, no matter how many ads, product placements, and user abusive features they push, people will tolerate it.
The situation has only just changed now that Apple and Valve are getting close to threatening the Windows monopoly.
Frankly I don't know why we still have laptops. Honestly I think my mobile with a usbc base for screen and usb would perfectly work in a hardware pov. I don't know if Android would work, and besides of that a small fixed pc for whatever needs power.
because phones are not general computing devices, and really shouldn't be. They are too important to modern society to be unlocked for their full potential.
That said, I doubt the average person on a laptop even needs a general computing device, so your point does make sense. Though, is carrying around a screen and a keyboard and cable any better than carrying a laptop?
I could see an argument of it being cheaper, but that would take years, possibly decades, of multiple competitors in the space for the market to make that true.
Now, if we could have a decent folding keyboard and monitor that fit into the same case as your phone, that would be a game changer, but I don't think anyone is risking the investment to develop that.
It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products).
Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.
I'd read "Microsoft lost their way" as a description of how the speaker's worldview has changed, as they've gained experience and perspective.
Microsoft is often good to their customers. Generally in situations where badness has a poor RoI, or they're trying to lure you deeper into their clutches.
That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend that decision.
In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's about 14/user/month.
At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly cost for something that is comparable to something you can get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and intuitive it is.
The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive with it, than the free version?"
The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as well.
Not 'But it costs $X million!'.
Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day?
Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their monitors.
I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.
> I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.
I, living in Germany, rather wonder myself quite often why US-American tech startups don't act much more frugally: this would give them so much more leeway/runway to make their startups succeed.
Half of the time it's startups subsidizing each other in a circle to have users. Like if you're a VC, you "force" your companies to use tools made by your other companies. So everyone will use the chat app made by one company the VC owns, the CRM software, all the different SaaSes etc. So it's just money moving in a circle, but then all the apps get to claim good sales and user numbers.
So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There must be massive discounts above certain threshold.
yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.
How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise.
It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a winner takes all Ferengi style system.
Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365 subscription is net positive for the bean counters.
18€ a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat application seems absolutely insane.
Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks.
We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.
Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.
Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent.
XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.
Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom?
The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.
Teams is not that bad if you are using Office and OneDrive anyway, as it integrates well with those.
Most of my team members are using different named chats for discussion instead of channels, which are used for more important notices. Somehow it works, and our channels on slack were also basically chats anyway.
My only gripe is that Linux does not have a “native” client anymore and the web client is full of bugs on Firefox. But it’s Microsoft, what can you expect. It’s not that bad except for memory consumption on other platforms.
I haven't had that many issues on Windows "native" client. So I really don't get what the critical issue is... To me it has long looked like good enough.
No but it’s hard to get excited about two different flavours of shit sandwich. Teams is terrible piece of software no doubt but slack is worse, marginally
Microslop is saying “I’m sorry that you’re offended” and will continue to abuse their users. All of this is a PR campaign to fix their image so that they can raise more money.
> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions
sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?
as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.
mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.
Not only is it enabled hy default ... it magically gets enabled by default after some days, desktop spotlight feature that pushes some lock screen wallpapers and trivia overriding my personal wallpaper, Edge trying to do the same thing to homepage, edge trying to steal browser favourites and extensions from other installed browsers once every few weeks, edge stealing default app linkage for PDF viewing, copilot in various flavours appearing on taskbar, start menu, edge, ...it's mayhem out there.
Death by a thousand cuts. So many micro abuses by the OS that keeps reminding you who has the power.
I have the same experience. I'm on a Windows Surfuace 7 Arm laptop right now. There's no Copilot icon next to the start menu. I press the start icon and I don't see a single ad anywhere. There are no ads on my screen. I use Edge and I don't see anything odd while I shop. Granted, I run "Pro." Maybe the home edition has more of this?
I pay for a 365/OneDrive subscription and it works well. I get the apps on desktop/laptop/phone and 1 TB storage for a decent yearly rate. I log into the PC and laptop on the same account and useful things sync.
I've done mild tweaking to turn a few things off, like the icons in the "search" bar, but nothing's been "hacked". On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?
Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.
When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.
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I bought my first x86 PC in 1994 to install Linux on. I wanted a Sun workstation but couldn't afford it.
I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like they have Stockholm Syndrome.
My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac.
The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. It's got the price of entry down to where it's now the obvious recommendation for less-technical friends/family wanting an affordable-but-nice laptop for light home/office/student use.
I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real Mac running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.
I don't think Ipads are selling well. I have an old style basic one (from 2019 I think?), and the only thing I use it for is to read articles and occasionally look at emails, for which it's perfectly adequate.
Thus, the MacBook Neo. For the average user who only occasionally needs a general-purpose computer, it's powerful enough. As the geek in my friends-and-family circle, it's what I will be recommending to most of them if they ask.
Mac’s are way more expensive than most people need. If anyone asked me today, I’d say buy a cheap laptop and I’ll install Linux on it for you. Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs come up. Problem solved, hundreds of dollars saved over the Mac.
Don't care about windows. Haven't used a windows computer in over 20 years. Happy Ubuntu user here. What bothers me is the upcoming Android restrictions. I distribute an app that none of the app stores want to touch with a 10 foot pole. That's fine -their store, their choice. But now, to distribute the app from my website I have to jump through hoops and pay their stupid fees through a credit card (at a time when I'm trying to stay anonymous because of the nature of the app). I don't know what to do.
I opened a blank document and pasted a fairly large markdown text. Converting it to word (or html) formatting is easy, there are online tools and/or any other LLM can do it. This one time I opened the Copilot willingly and was excited about getting it done with a few keystrokes: "convert to word formatting".
It generates a formatted response but cant edit the document. How stupid you have to be to integrate copilot and not allow it to update text in a text editor??!
Recently I got tired of having random changes occur to a Windows installation I use for one purpose: running X-plane. I took the drastic measure of disabling both inbound and outbound network access in Windows firewall by default and turning off most of the pre-installed rules. Then, I allowed outbound access from the things that really need it. Spurious network traffic dropped to zero and surprises are gone. If I cared more, I'd explore profiles for enabling only useful network activity in more situations, but this has been really good for my use case.
X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.
I think nowadays the only safe and sane way is running Windows isolated as a VM (e.g. QEMU on proxmox). I did this with my gaming server. The VM sits on ZFS which I can snapshot before any Microsoft stuff happens, to revert any action. I can cut off the network card virtually and shutdown the guest whenever I get tired of it. I could even disguise the CPU/QEMU config, so that the anti-cheat from Star Citizen didn't recognize it was running in a virtualized environment. Pair this with Moonlight+Sunshine and you can game without issues on any remote client. Why I prefer Windows for gaming? It is just (still) the default and provides the least barrier and setup effort for most games.
Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better product. People who know they need Windows will always have the option to install it themselves.
There was a rumour 1-2 months ago about Lenovo and Asus meeting Microsoft execs and warning them that if win11 issues continued to cost them support hours and devicw returns they would be forced to find an alternative.
In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.
Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.
For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.
This is one of the areas that annoy me due to how limp microsoft is with the requirements...
Either give a solid set of requirements that let a dev assume things about a windows 11 system (good hardware security, in particular), or fuck off entirely.
Unfortunately Linux doesn't run well on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (which is perfectly functional other than the lack of Windows security updates). I'm very unlikely to buy or recommend a Microsoft computer again, even though I liked the hardware.
I check out the status every so often. Not much is upstreamed yet, so it requires a patched kernel and some mucking about, likely on an ongoing basis. I'll probably try it at some point but not until I have moved my uses for that machine onto something else.
Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years. Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them, but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm probably leaving some stuff out.
Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.
Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.
Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.
Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.
Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.
Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.
Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.
They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!
They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.
It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.
Did they increase profits and/or stock price or not? That's the only relevant question. Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.
Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.
> Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.
I don't understand this point. Are you suggesting that less people being happy with their product and thus less people buying it is not related to the valuation of the company and their stock?
> Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.
Huh?
I get you're trying to make a point about the bottom line, but that doesn't mean the bottom line is impervious to bad product decisions or that the people who are paying for their products are not in fact their customers.
Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely unhelpful logs, but gave up.
I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.
Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.
I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well. It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.
But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.
Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.
I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.
I used linux on Desktop 15 years ago, tried it once in a while every few years. But there was always something. Often video driver, tearing, hardware video decoding, or a specific game that I played a lot. And now it would be that my DJ software does not run on it.
Still use it on my server though.
I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.
The last time I tried to use Linux, I said "fuck this" when I had to open up a text editor for something so basic as making a shortcut with command line arguments. This is the easiest menu in the world on Windows, but it took me looking up a bunch of things to get it to not work on Linux.
The real crime, by a lot, it middle click. I did not realize how often I use middle click scroll until I switched to Linux and it didn't work anymore.
Yeah, it's kind of annoying. But middle click scroll is something I use literally every single second of every single day on my web browser. It's a deal-breaker.
Ok that's fair ig. I used to be a fairly heavy user of the middle click scroll feature on windows like a decade ago. Made the switch to Debian w/ Awesome, and that habit just casually fell away. The switch is probably a 3 day annoyance at most. IMO arrow keys and scroll are fine. On laptop trackpads two finger scrolling and momentum scrolling are far more accurate IMO. Also if you have the mx master mouse, it has a crazy good scroll wheel that you can "throw".
Also you can turn on Firefox specific middle click scroll feature "autoscroll" which is the same thing. They may have similar stuff for other browsers. Long story short, in less clicks than it takes you to turn off stupid notifications and ads on Windows, you can get a semi decent middle-click-scroll feature where you need it the most.
macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and customizations to make it sane for basic things like window management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount of tweaking needed for power users.
And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...
I've installed linux (debian LTS with XFCE) on my mom's computer and she recently called me to thank me. She says her computer is much quieter now (meaning fewer notifications). She only needs a web browser and a text editor.
So you're right, it's great for power users, it's also great for other users.
Window management: only if you are the kind of power user who needs complex layout. I have used Windows for decades and have used Mac on and off, and have even bought one of those window management app on MacOS, but never needed to use them. In rare occasions where I need several windows open, side-by-side on each of dual screens is usually good enough, if not I probably am working in a terminal where I use tmux.
Gaming: that's a fact but again doesn't matter to most people. Most people play video games on phones/tablets/consoles if they play games at all. PC gaming is a relative minority, and (regular) Windows laptops can only do lightweight gaming anyway. The amount of people who decides what "everyday computer" they should buy based on whether they are going to play games on it is very small. Plus, you get much better ROI by buying a PS5+Macbook Air than spending the same amount of money on a gaming laptop.
you need a ton of third party tools to make it behave like Windows, that's what you mean.
I'm perfectly happy with my "vanilla" macbook. Runs Baldurs Gate 3 and my final fantasy ps2 emulator just fine, and even trackmania was quite easy to get installed and runs well.
Can't comment on that hash thing, but I don't see why that would be a problem? It's not linked to your name or something. Windows does a ton of things too that I find inexcusable, such as changing settings or permissions after updates, those have an actual impact on my daily experience with these things
Depends on whether using someone else’s windows machine leaves you crazy annoyed.
My windows machine is also “fine” for the most part because i turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could not. Even so, every once in a while, typing “code” and being taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to shreds.
And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.
I have a desktop computer that I use for gaming so it had windows forever. Lately it started running laggy. Occasional frame drops and stuff. Reinstall, bios update etc nothing helped.
For debugging I installed Bazzite (Linux gaming distro) assuming compatibility would be shit but I can at least test native linux builds of some games to see if there is a hardware issue. The thing runs perfectly. I've been playing propert windows games on Proton with higher / more consistent FPS. It is kind of funny at this point. Granted I do not play any competitive / multiplayer games.
I guess Valve did a great job on the Steam Deck sw.
I've been running Fedora (or a flavor) on my gaming PC for two years. All my games work. I understand some competitive games with intrusive anti cheat are incompatible, but with the success of the steam deck I don't think the gaming argument is holding much water these days.
I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora recently. Most of the games I play work without issue but I know there are some which categorically refuse to work (mainly some specific anti-cheating software reasons).
- They are rapidly iOS-ifying the desktop experience
- All core services and apps experience significant performance degradation (to thenpoint that Spotlight regularly fails to find installed apps) which are currently only offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
- Services become more and more pervasive, with ads throughout the system
> offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
I'm really afraid of that one. MacOS engineers don't have to worry about performance optimizations anymore, because the chips gobble it up anyway. Ever more powerful hardware is how we ended up with the awful performance of modern-day computing.
You're probably an iCloud services user. Try a Mac without an iCloud account - it's nagging you pretty heavily to set it up, get an iCloud+ subscription, use TV and Music and Game Center subscriptions, and so on.
> I don't know what that first one means. You mean the glass design?
Not just glass. It started with Big Sur at least. It's forcing narrow and/or devoid of controls interfaces into every app, breaking decades-old system behaviours (misbehaving controls, wrong or non-functioning keyboard shortcuts, mobile-like interfaces in desktop apps etc.). It's eschewing MacOS-native development for shoddy half-assed ports of iPhone software even for first-party apps. Etc.
> I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see them?
I've seen notifications for Apple Music, and I've seen ads in the System Settings
This used to be the case but looking at Macbooks now they are not much more expensive than a Windows laptop you would actually want to buy. And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now i think it's about even.
This used to be case before the M series. Now each year a new M processor gets released that are "cheaper" than the previous generation MAC - better processor, more RAM and more storage for similar price than last year model.
This impacted their price in used market.
> And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now.
I dont know any private person in my circle that actually sold their laptop until it wasnt broken or so painfully old that the used value was mostly for spare parts. That may change a bit with the skyrocketing pc part prices but still.
are you a creative professional? because I see that argument quite often as if people use Adobe CS daily, and then its mostly people who do basic stuff (that photopea or gimp can handle fine), but they like to feel "pro" by launching their pirated version of photoshop.
> Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram
This hasn't been true for at least a decade. And it's especially not true for the M* series Macs.
Even Macbook Neo can handle editing several layers of 4k video files in several apps while running everything else https://youtu.be/Mo6o8RKn7jE?is=opeCYMDbt7bUAdvS Try that on "the same performance/ram" Windows Machine
Beating is a normal English idiom. While I do sympathize with anyone suffering from abuse, I highly doubt anyone is actually suffering from use of the word.
I agree with stndef. "Flowers after beating" is a very direct evocation of physical abuse in an intimate relationship. Whether or not you think it's appropriate.
There are all kinds of language registers for communication. From formal business speak to 'locker room banter'. What is appropriate or otherwise depends entirely on the participants of the conversation. So, it depends on what kind of conversation we're trying to have.
I think this post's usage is meant deliberately to be a bit edgy, to illustrate how badly Microsoft has behaved.
An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
Personally, data point of 1, I think it's a bit distasteful, and would prefer to participate in a community that doesn't routinely use that kind of langauge.
> An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
I don't understand how HN's news guidelines apply to a blogger writing an article on their own blog. The controversial language was found in the article. It wasn't found in the thread you're replying to.
It’s actually more triggering / offensive that you brought up abuse when no one was talking about abuse. This site is for adults who understand the concept of analogies. You just wanted to bring up the topic of abuse for whatever reason. Why?
The article comes back to the abuse analogy multiple times. If you want to defend that as fine, go for it, but in no way is it a new topic that the poster here brought up.
Oh please, TFA has a title of "Flowers after the beating" - its a direct reference to domestic abuse which attempts to equate Microsofts behaviour and that of a domestic abuser.
Username checks out, but you might want to check with your mother about how she feels about this comparison.
TFA brings up abuse not stndef.
An analogy is "a thing which is comparable to something else in significant respects" and stndef is right to point out that microsoft behavior, while abusive, is not comparable to domestic abuse "in significant respects". Not even close.
The TFA title is sensational for effect and in very poor taste.
I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).
I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.
It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.
I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice
The only way this get better is if the user gets to choose between an OS with ads, lock-in, telemetry etc. and then one with none of that.
As it is now, buying a laptop in a store is a "pick your poison" situation.
Better yet: don't pick any poison at all -- both System76 and Tuxedo Computers (as examples, sometimes you can buy a latop without an OS and save the money, same goes for PCs) offer laptops with Linux installed: no Microslop tax, and hardware that's guaranteed to work with OSS.
Personally I'm a huge Linux supporter and user. I try my best to not to use any non-free software, and while I prefer macOS laptops, I always have an exit strategy if I decide to ditch the platform.
Recently, I decided to start making music again after a decade of hiatus. I got a nice audio interface and some hardware which can do nifty things. The catch?
None of the supporting software for my hardware runs on Linux. I either need to run a VM to configure these things, or use the macOS versions of the software. I chose the latter because it's not meaningful to passthrough all the devices to change some parameters and give device back to Linux. I also don't use Wine. I don't want to install something that big into my daily driver.
While Linux is great for many, many things, there are some things still sorely lacking in the ecosystem. Why can't I adjust monitoring/routing in a class-compliant audio device? Why my effect processors' USB protocol is not open so I can't play with it parameters from Linux?
We still have a long way to go in some areas.
Most people want a computer that works with their software. No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution. Especially because nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS solutions, that only a niche Windows program can actually do correctly.
And that doesn't even get into gaming.
Then at least let the company that makes your niche software know that you want a Linux version of it, even if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this chicken / egg problem. Nobody wants to use Windows, they want to use some specific application. If most software is available on Linux too, then consumers can actually choose their OS.
Most software is already available on Linux. I've successfully run Linux in corporate jobs where everything runs on the MS/AD/Azure stack. The issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background. Windows is really great at that - until it breaks. Then you're usually screwed. Like, if the problem is close to the kernel, you can't even fix it theoretically. Best you can do is wait for an official MS patch. On Linux things break more often, but you can usually fix them without having to resort to extreme measures. It's a fundamentally different usage philosophy that plays very hard into the strengths of techies. So non-technical users will always shy away from Linux.
> Then at least let the company that makes your niche software know that you want a Linux version of it, even if you don't use Linux (yet). We need to solve this chicken / egg problem.
To solve the chicken/egg problem, the GNU/Linux distributions should generate some very (in particular binary) stable interface for writing applications (including GUI applications) on GNU/Linux - like WinAPI on Windows. With "stable" I mean "stable for at least 20-25 years". This interface must, of course, work on all widespread GNU/Linux distributions.
It's an old joke, but it's also accurate in this case - isn't what you are asking for just WINE?
> isn't what you are asking for just WINE
An operating system is a style of thinking about your work. WINE is a way to get Windows applications to run (by now run decently) under GNU/Linux. These Windows applications are nevertheless foreign bodies in the whole kind of thinking which GNU/Linux is built around.
I don't want windows or linux, I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there. When I have to think about my OS, then the OS has a flaw. And currently nor Windows or Linux can deliver that anymore. Windows 7 after some customizations and Windows XP had this, but M$ destroyed it. Linux never had this and I don't expect that this will come in the future.
> I want a OS where I don't notice that it's there.
I guess you want a Mac. That's fine.
I value freedom and things not mysteriously breaking and functionality not disappearing, and am quite happy investing a the time and knowledge upfront, so I use Linux.
And then there are people who want to have a system which works out of the box initially and who don't want to learn anything and don't mind it breaking later, and they choose Windows.
To each their own.
Company? Most of the time this stuff is years (sometimes DECADES) old. That's why it doesn't work on Linux in the first place.
Well acktshually, gaming is a really good example. Valve did a lot of good with Proton to the point that a lot of games work and work well.
Perhaps ironically, Wine may be the best stable API on Linux. I'd like to see a concerted and well-funded effort to make Wine run certain Windows applications well. We might not be able to replace the Adobe Suite short-term by a FOSS alternative for most of its users, but we might be able to get Wine to run the Adobe Suite, Affinity Suite, and whatnot well enough to make it possible to switch and keep running these applications.
> No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution
Hard disagree. Not that it has to be FOSS, but you have a product that is predatory towards you and you refuse to change your ways.
Leaving an abusive relationship is hard, but sometimes you have to do it.
> you have a product that is predatory towards you and you refuse to change your ways.
And honestly it seems like you refuse to learn even the smallest bit about human nature.
Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their computer. Walk into a room of 100 graphic designers who have spend the last 20 years using Photoshop exclusively and put GIMP in front of them and and at least 98 of them are going to say what the hell is wrong with you, they have work to do, take this uncanny valley garbage and get out of here.
I'm typing this on a System76 laptop right now but I understand expecting people to use Linux writ large is ridiculous.
Everybody "learned" how to use their computer. It's just a question of what they learned first.
I would propose a new law of interaction design: Whenever something is promoted as a tool that you wouldn't need to learn, then it's actually designed to use you, and you are the tool.
I mean I kinda agree on what you are saying but then it logically follows that if you don't want to try out alternatives, don't want to push your government to enact better laws, don't want to spend time taking them to small claims court - basically don't want to do anything but suffer - then just suffer.
> nearly everyone has some niche thing they like, some 5% that isn't covered by the FOSS
I'm interested in where that estimate + number are coming from. And I'd like to point out that I don't nearly see as many people pushing back against say MacOS for "not being Windows", despite the fact that the same issue would be there. I wonder why Linux gets special treatment in that regards, when modern distros make usage very accessible.
> And that doesn't even get into gaming.
Gaming on Linux works very well. And if something doesn't, it's usually by choice (e.g. BattleEye customers not enabling it on Linux) or by sheer incompetence / malevolence (e.g. EA Games and their shitty EA App that breaks often even on Windows, and even worse on Linux in a Wine environment).
<< No, "learn the FOSS version" is not a solution.
It actually is. It may not be the best solution, but it absolutely is one of available solutions. = Not being able to ( or wiling to ) learn ( and adjust ) as needed is part of the reason we are here.
I am not being nitpicky here. Reasonable people don't hope things will change; instead, they change things they can.
> Most people want a computer that works with their software.
I suspect that most people don't run much software at all outside of their web browser and wouldn't notice any difference between using chrome in windows and using chrome in linux. Gaming is not the barrier it used to be either.
Agreed. Default Ubuntu is pretty much feature complete for mainstream users, as long as they don’t have to install it themselves.
Well, considering that you can run almost anything (excluding games and specialized graphics software) with 99.99999% guaranteed result via WinApps, I don't see what the issue is for a hypothetical member of the majority population.
It's not 2016 anymore, you don't have to switch to LibreOffice if you need an office suite of apps.
That obviously would be preferable, but if you're an avid Microsoft ecosystem user, just use WinApps. It's simple enough to the point that a child could use it.
What percentage of MS Office user can, in your estimation, complete the steps as described in this readme?
https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps
I know it's a bit ironic given TFA's focus on shoving Copilot and Recall down users' throats, but I really do believe that an OS-level AI agent could solve these usability issues. We need to solve a lot of trust issues, but the capabilities are essentially already there for a non-technical user to tell a Samantha-like OS AI "please get this working", and it will.
I've already been doing this haha, got Claude to install VR mods into a game that most certainly should not have been working with VR mods on linux
That's barking up the wrong tree. Github shows instructions for software developers. A normal user would just install Winapps from package manager, like with all the other Linux software.
Your critique should be channelled into a productive direction and point the finger at the maintainers why this is not packaged yet. https://repology.org/projects/?search=winapps https://pkgs.org/search/?q=winapps
Even skipping the first step (which requires a second readme) the next step involves opening a terminal. Instant fail. The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work, what a file is, what a command is, or having to look up anything. If something needs to be done, it needs a GUI.
Linux is an important operating system, but anyone under the delusion that it is desktop ready right now needs to actually watch someone use it. I say this not because I hate linux, but because I love it. I want someone to make it usable for a desktop, and people claiming that it is usable right now are not helping that.
I agree that most users won't be able to follow Winapps' guide, but "The entire point of an operating system is to make computers usable without knowing how they work" is just false. That is the point of an OS for computer illiterates, not the "entire point of an operating system".
Arguably, the vast majority of users are "computer illiterates", and an OS should cater to the majority. So in a sense, OP has a point.
I may be showing my grey hair here, but that's emphatically not the point of an operating system.
I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage their applications and work processes rather than their computer.
It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from their computers - that as long as they can "save" their work, and "send" it from one app to another, they'd be able to get all the productivity that they are looking for.
Cool. Windows can't do 99% of the things I and anyone not grasping at straws can do with Linux.
It is getting tiring, I don't say Linux is perfect, but KDE has been better than Windows for years, Linux doesn't bit rot like an average Windows install and Linux is in practice surprisingly more stable, but no-no-no, Linux can't be this time again. Quick... ehm "there is a piece of software that only works on Windows". Have you ever thought the reverse holds too, but times 1000?
If you call yourself an IT-professional, you only run spyware.exe in a vm or in a box with all networking gear ripped out and you don't making stupid excuses.
Linux is pretty awful at a lot of things …
No need for such childish reaction, dismissing other's viewpoints achieves nothing for your side of arguments, at least nothing good and one of the reasons some skilled folks won't migrate, we have enough toxic communities elsewhere.
Also quite a few inaccuracies - what the heck is 'bit rot' on windows? I had 1 same Windows 10 install running on desktop for 8 years as primary personal PC and installed tons of software and games, both official and... some other types. 0 issues.
On laptop whole lifetime with original install is the default for everybody I know, for me 6-7 years (simply the length of ownership). We don't talk about Windows 95 or ME era here where frequent installs were basically mandatory and a well-practiced chore.
> And that doesn't even get into gaming.
Or Accessibility, which the Linux desktop is notoriously bad with, since, what, 20 years. The constant push to rewrite things typically forgets making Accessibility a priority, for the sake of "progress".
For better or worse, well mostly worse, most of the software people use these days is either directly running in the browser or is electron based so running perfectly fine on Linux.
Gaming on Linux is a mostly solved issue for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming. If a game isn't using some root kit level anti-cheat or copyright protection, it is going to run just fine. Same with running most other software.
The only part where Linux is sucks is for certain creatives fields. If you need Adobe products you are out of luck. Video editing well you use Da Vinci or free software. There are some good DAWS but no Ableton.
Yes, you have to compromise but Linux is definitely getting there. Not everything runs on Mac either and people cope just fine.
>>for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming
Turns out, a lot of people do exactly that. Hundreds of millions of people play CoD, Fortnite, Battlefield, Apex and many many other games which won't work on Linux at all.
I think the state of gaming on Linux is absolutely incredible - what used to be a very esotheric and "roll of the dice" process 20 years ago now is extremely simple and it mostly just works. But when I play games with friends every week it's almost never a game that would work on Linux.
Most games nowadays run perfectly fine on Linux.
Good news re: gaming is with SteamOS/Bazzite gaming on Linux is finally near-turnkey. Only thing I had to adjust on my bazzite computer was zram, otherwise I’ve never had to open the terminal (unless I wanted to). Expedition 33 ran perfectly day 1.
I do agree with your larger point though. It’s the same reason everybody doesn’t change the oil in their car on their own or cook their food every night over ordering out. Only it goes even further because by this point most people expect a computer to just do what it’s supposed to do (or they think it’s supposed to do) the first time they try. I can’t imagine asking my parents to start inputting terminal commands. Even just the process of something like running etcher and prepping a usb drive to install linux is a whole thing.
Linux is one of the poisons bro
Which kind of poisons? Can you list more?
Linux is just no good option. Linux has it's own issues that make them unusable for people that don't want to put time and effort in their OS itself. Current example: Slidly incompatible unix tools, still not 100% complete, but rewritten in rust.
First of all that's only Ubuntu, but also at this stage uutils is way more compatible with the GNU tools than Apple's tools are.
No general user that is now using Windows would come in contact with the edge cases were the rewrites differ from the standard utilities.
What bugged me for years is that I ended up paying the microsoft or apple tax that way. In the end I figured out a more efficient way around that than any of the rebates/refunds: just buy second hand hardware. Someone else paid for and used the windows license, I just need the box.
If you don’t need a laptop, you can also build a machine from parts. This is probably the best way to run a desktop computer.
Anybody on HN that didn't know that you can build a machine from parts or isn't capable do doing so is probably on the wrong website ;)
I have two left hands (and one of them is backwards) and components spontaneously disintegrate when I touch them. I know I'm not capable of building a computer so I bought mine from Tuxedo computers, who sell computers running GNU/Linux. I might be the GNU/Linux whisperer who manages to not have any major issues, but that doesn't correlate with the type of technical aptitude which would let me turn a heap of components into a working machine. I even managed to break a laptop by trying to replace the CMOS battery.
This is another way they rip off consumers. In a perfect world, the license would be resalable for someone else, just like you can sell a used Blu-ray. During piracy cases, they clamor about their "intellectual property". Ok so that means it's not physical, and once one person is done, they can sell it to someone else who needs it.
I mean, this goes way beyond OSes.
Look at the mobile YouTube client. The bottom navigation bar has the "+" create button stuffed right in the middle of it, larger than any other button. What % of users creates YouTube content? Probably <1%. What pp of those do it in the mobile YouTube client? Probably 0.1%. Yet the button is there, with no way to disable it.
In general, why don't apps have a "creator" toggle, off-by-default, that optimized the entire UI for viewing / consuming? Just how apps like Uber have either an entire separate app for 'partners', or toggle.
I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders. And YouTube has no competitor, so they can go buckwild with anything that synthetically increases KPIs.
I think the only app in recent memory that I have seen right the ship is Spotify. The past year they have introduced a lot of toggles for things like the shuffle algorithm, the dumb looping album art videos, audio loudness normalization being split out into normalization and compression ('volume'), etc; About the only thing that's missing is a toggle to disable podcasts, just like YouTube needs a toggle to completely disable shorts.
Any PMs reading this, be our hero. Fight the good fight.
YouTube in general is such a good example.
A while ago, they introduced the Home page with algorithmic recommendations; okay, it sucks that you can't choose whether Home or Subscriptions is the default, but at least you can choose between the algorithmic recommendations and the chronological subscriptions feed.
Then they introduced Shorts. These are algorithmic ally recommended TikToks which you can't disable, they always litter both the Subscriptions page and the Home page. This sucks.
Then, recently, they added algorithmic recommendations to Subscriptions. So if you're on Home you see only algorithmic recommendations, and if you're on Subscriptions, a lot of your screen is still taken up by algorithmically recommended videos from channels you subscribe to.
Every one of these steps is in the direction of making sure you watch what YouTube wants you to watch instead of what you want to watch.
That's a terrible idea. The greatest thing about the Internet is that there's no segregation between creators and consumers.
TV has it. Only TV program production companies can create shows. That literally undermine ... a lot of things. We don't need that.
There seems to be a pretty wide gulf between "segregate consumers and content creators" and "please let me make it so that I can remove/disable the huge central button I never use that takes up a lot of space and is super easy to accidentally hit"
> I know the reason this happens is because we aren't the real customers of an app. Nor are the creators / partners. The real customers are the shareholders.
Exactly.
I am in an engineering design software developer organization bought by an investor from the founders approaching retirement (they worked 3 decades on this software helping construction engineers designing better homes). Ever since the lead up to the sell - changes were tuned to lure in investors, for the liking of investors - our organization is focusing on maximising revenue. Fast. That is THE focus. New marketing strategy, sales strategy, licensing strategy changes, reshape organization to have more informed decision making in sales (i.e. collecting and processing much more data on increasing number of contacts). Company meetings are about EBITDA, sales goals vs. actual, streamlining organization. Luncbreak discussions evolve around how to license existing features differently so it would trigger/force up/cross sales.
What is not on the agenda for maximising revenue: features and engineering. We are a "sales oriented organization", says our new CEO prodly - brought in during the sale. Addressing user needs and becoming more popular for the eventual income boost takes longer than the sales cycle of less than 5 years (the investor wants to sell the company in 5 years time). Engineering is in the way, accounting books need to look much much better much sooner for the eventual profit. Only sales tactics work here.
I see ralted pattern elsewhere, in tools I have the misfortune to use (SaaS and other subscription based products). Shameless self-promotions (cross-sale) distact your focus all the time, 'features' good for the assumed 'cutting-edge' image of the organization, privacy offensive practices (data for running sales campaigns), 'offerings' that help you with the ideas they force on you for some sizeable extra cost.
It will not end well. Takes long time to fail, but without valuable features and engineering there will be no value left for the users to buy eventually. No user wants top notch marketing, licensing, and sales strategy for the benefit of the organization.
On the Linux subreddits recent, I have seen a great increase in two kinds of posts: 1) That’s it, I’ve had it, windows is dead to me, I have moved/will move to Linux. Help me pick a distro. 2) I’d love to get off window and move to Linux but I can’t because it doesn’t have an app that works identically to word/excel/photoshop/whatever.
This.. give me the - option - to not be an ad infested hellhole of an OS and sell me a product.
> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.
this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).
lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.
If a regulator is effective at protecting the users, that regulator becomes a target for the industry
Things forced on you is not market. You are not talking about market rules at all. This is not it!
I don't think "care" is the right word here at all. We simply don't have options.
This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition, but competition eventually leads to winners that then consolidate their positions and we end up with no real choices.
You're telling me people would pick a worse OS because they don't care even if they had real options? I don't believe that for a second.
Right, and even when there are options that doesn't mean you actually get to choose what you want for all things you care about, e.g. there might be option A with feature a (e.g. no ads) and option B with feature b (e.g. no vendor lock in) but none with both a and b - so you only really get a choice for the things you care most about. Which is effectively why gradual enshittification is effective: Most users will put up with minor anti-features rather than jump to a different platform that will require new programs and/or relearning.
We see this same phenomenon play out in other industries too, like cars.
> This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition
The fact that governments allow Microsoft to abuse its position to force OEMs to install Windows is the biggest problem. This would never happen in a market where regulation ensures healthy competition.
That version of capitalism sailed 40 years ago in the USA, antitrust enforcement has slowly disappeared which creates a race to the bottom for other countries who would like their companies to compete against USA's companies. If they enforce antitrust then the behemoths created in the USA by absorbing competitors without antitrust enforcement can eat their lunch, even though it's better for consumers.
Unfortunately this also allowed the USA to have companies so large that they basically control the government, changing this now will require massive political will and a political body untethered from corporate interests. I really don't see that happening in the USA, it's been thoroughly captured after so many years driving on that path.
I totally agree. There seems to be absolutely zero focus on Glass Steagall or Citizens United so I can't see how this actually happens without political revolt at this point.
Yes, the neo-liberal economy we've ended up with has drifted quite far from well-regulated Capitalism. I'd still argue that we owe a lot of our rights to hard-fought socialist policy though.
If people truly cared then there would be a high enough expected value to invest into building competitor to be financially worth it.
Sometimes companies will make more money by refusing to give consumers what they want. Collusion is also extremely profitable. A competitor that isn't interested in playing along can be bought out, but once shareholders get involved they're going to insist on screwing over their customers just like everyone else does anyway because they'd be leaving a huge pile of cash on the table otherwise and short term profits are all shareholders care about.
That argument doesn't really hold when the barriers of entry are so high. Believing that one of the biggest tech firms in the world is doing something undesirable and having a better idea that many people would in fact pay for is not the same as having the resources to become a unicorn with a huge global customer base that can practically implement that idea.
This is about markets. It has nothing to do with capitalism. And in fact, it is usually _because_ of healthy competition that this type of enshittification happens everywhere because quality is hard to compare for the buyers and so the sellers are forced to compete on cost.
Too late now. Multiple people having anything to say when choosing hardware and software, including me, will no longer advise or approve buying windows machine or using windows in general.
That's how the world works for everything: software, politics, social stuff (good or bad), war, etc. People are bad at judging gradual/slow changes but when you push a bit too far, you have already gained so much that you can usually just say sorry and move on
Like that windows recall feature which they keep pushing
Because Microsoft makes far more money on enterprise and ai products than they do selling windows licenses to consumers.
The rollback only ever applies to the thing people noticed. Everything else quietly becomes the new normal.
The other thing is availability of alternatives.
Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.
Good luck getting the average person through the setup process
AI is part of the problem with what MS has shoved in to things but it may be part of what can help with the underlying issue of this behavior by corporations.
The average user increasingly will not need to be walked through in certain ways, they’ll only have to be aware something, some way, is possible. Because we are most of usthe average, meaning outsider to knowledge and understanding of things their functioning on a computer. I can strip out tired windows behavior to some extent and certainly stand up a Linux desktop. But I didn’t know how to easily manage retrieval of data from an old disc image that refused to mount. But I knew it was there and not impossible so I asked Claude. A one shot prompt that a few minutes later had Claude reading raw bytes in someway and finding the location of a few files I needed.
So there is potential for AI to fill some gaps in this way and make some things easier and more in reach of average users. It’s potential only though, so continuing to work and ensure open models remain a thing, it’s important. Just like the Internet enabled a lot of things previously out of reach of people. And yeah, that was not an un mixed blessing with the rest, so all the more reason to move forward thoughtfully.
> good luck getting the average person through the setup process.
an enterprising hardware manufacturer can take on the mantle, and be the trail blazer with a no-setup machine that works.
Personally, i would imagine something like framework laptop, and steam machine, are the best candidates.
This is what the Steamdeck is. But it took an absolutely massive amount of work over a decade from valve just to get gaming working. No laptop manufacturer could afford to do the same for fixing wine for desktop software since they aren’t getting a cut of the software sales like valve does.
That's mostly because they didn't care before. It also took a massive amount of work to get gaming to work on windows.
How long would it take for some MBA to come there and say hey if we install this full of crap we could make multiple euros per unit... And then fill it with crap, spying and other things?
Purely hypothetical, hasn't happened yet. The reason is that Linux system vendors are lead and staffed by people who are idealistic like the average Linux system customer. They know their clientele, they know it would be bad for business.
I think managers were promoted for infecting their features with Copilot, and developers for infecting them with React, and here we are.
OneDrive managers on the other hand are one step away from inventing some way of adding a gacha mechanic.
Infecting with React can be easily explained by pathetic state of desktop application development environment.
See https://domenic.me/windows-native-dev/
Blaming React is absurd. Its like blaming the screwdriver instead of the person using it.
I too would absolutely blame a plumber for trying to fix my leaking pipes with a screwdriver instead of e.g. a solder patch. Not everything is a screw, not even in the developing world.
lol Blame the plumber then.
"Infecting with screwdrivers" now see how dumb that sounds?
Blaming React is correct. It is like asking for a picture on a wall and instead getting noisy, power hungry plasma TV on a wall.
I recently began developing an app for Xbox Series X/S. The only framework that will work is UWP. When you look at the UWP docs, this is at the top of the page highlighted "If you are starting to develop Windows apps, we recommend you consider using the Windows App SDK, and WinUI rather than UWP. Although still supported, UWP is not under active development. Please see Start developing Windows apps for more information."
So no, React is a (poor) solution, not the problem. The problem is Windows can't nail down a solid SDK for it's platforms.
This metaphor is so stupidly bad it's hard to believe you guys even know what React is.
I'm not a dev and actually don't know what React is. I don't care for this metaphor.
As a user, however, I find that the Start menu has become more sluggish than it used to be, and that's pretty annoying. What about that?
Thank you, your comment sure helps to improve our understanding of React a lot.
My bad. I didn't realize it was my job to educate people who talk about things they don't know anything about.
lol what a weird response.
Thanks for adding nothing at all to the conversation.
Nobody's blaming React. The blame lies on the bad developers that chose it to write a freaking start menu.
React is the symptom here, not the cause.
What does "infecting them with React" mean?
Introducing bloat.
Umm sir, it's Windows. Bloat is part of its core architecture.
We can blame both. If my repair bill was higher because the mechanic chose to use a ridiculous electric screwdriver that used tons of power to achieve what a normal screwdriver can and stripped the screws in the process then I'd also be upset with both the mechanic and the ridiculously inefficient tool.
> a ridiculous electric screwdriver
So React, the most popular front-end library and used my hundreds of thousands of successful apps, is the ridiculous electric screwdriver? See how weird that sounds and makes it obvious you guys can't give an honest assessment?
Its popularity or success in other apps has nothing to with the windows situation.
Other apps are successful despite being slow and bloated, since performance isn’t a primary concern of users. In contrast it’s critical for OS internals like the start menu, so a javascript runtime and framework is just the wrong tool for the job.
React is a javascript library. Javascript needs its own runtime. Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and save having to run an entire javascript runtime for no reason?
Only someone who has not tried to write stuff in "native windows" would ask this question. If you want a real answer, go try and develop a Windows native application real quick. I'll wait...
I would hope that the windows developers who are working on the windows shell would know how to write a windows native application in C. If it's that bad, they should improve the API, not just write it all in react instead
.NET Framework needs its own runtime. Java needs its own runtime.
What's the issue?
I have no issue with user-facing applications doing whatever they want, electron apps bundle an entire chromium to do their thing, but there's a win32 and win64 api in C for a reason, to make OS level stuff fast
> Why not just write stuff in native windows controls and save having to run an entire JavaScript runtime for no reason?
Idk, and I'm not saying it's not a good question, but it's irrelevant to the comparison in OP's comment.
Using an entire javascript runtime and framework to make your OS start menu is using a ridiculous overpowered electric screwdriver that strips heads. Using native windows controls is using a proper manual screwdriver that just works
He isn't blaming React (or Copilot), but those who used them in context they had no place in.
"developers with infecting then with React" is 100% blaming React
No it’s directly putting the blame on developers
"I'm on HN and whenever I see React mentioned I'm constitutionally incapable of not saying something dumb"
Seen in the context of the thread, with the both of you never addressing the actual problem at hand but instead reflexively and vigorously defending React against an alleged attack, I'm sorry to say this reads like an admission.
So you’re saying that the people (HR) team is responsible and that their retention and growth policies are to blame.
I believe they are abusing their customers but I think it's in poor taste to compare this to domestic violence.
I agree and appreciate you calling this out.
It’s easy to not understand the impact or meaning of referring to violence in a flip way when one has never had to have experienced it.
I also appreciate the callout but don’t believe it’s in bad taste. There are enough analogs, and it makes you question the type of people who run the companies and make the decisions. In MSFTs case, Bill Gates was an associate with a known pedophile and likely an abuser himself.
I completely understand it being triggering but shying away from it because of that protects perpetrators. A lot of executive circles are filled with abusive freaks and their decision making reflects that.
The underlying point about power imbalance and gradual normalization of bad behavior is fair, but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions
I felt the exact same way. Put a bad taste in my mouth and I just stopped reading.
Thank you for saying this. Some journos don’t mind crossing the line for a click bait headline.
Yeah, fully agree. The idea domestic abusers care about flowers is ludicrous. They’re violent and mostly remorseless about it. Anyone who dealt with it personally would chuck the flowers in the bin.
You'd be surprised how much that happens. They'll sweet talk their way back and that's how these relationships often survive.
Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.
But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.
Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.
We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory.
Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.
Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.
> Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows
I agree with you, but I feel like they've stopped caring about most of their software. Windows is just the most egregious, high-impact example.
SharePoint and Teams were the first ones I noticed. I used to run an enterprise SharePoint farm for a big company. Under the covers it was a Rube Goldberg machine. Microsoft has some of the best database-related developer knowledge in the world because of SQL Server, but SharePoint was storing its data in giant XML blobs instead of using proper, efficient table schemas.
That lazy "it works (most of the time), and it's cheaper for us to offload the cost onto our customers' devices" approach was even more pronounced in Teams, and now Office and Windows itself each spawn about a million Edge WebViews for the same reason.
I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the Microsoft of the mid-2000s.
> The traditional Office suite is still good
I don't think so. The web version is mostly incompatible with the Windows or Mac desktop versions.
Have you compared the UI of Word/Powerpoint/Excel with alternatives like Apple Pages/Keynote/Numbers or Google Docs/Sheets? For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons, abysmal font rendering and insane defaults.
> For me, the MS products are a complete mess with arbitrary collections of unrelated buttons
In the case of Office I actually consider it a strength. Office has to take into account a large number of use cases, most people will use only a fraction of what is available, but not everyone use the same fraction. So that "unrelated button" may be someone else's essential feature. The "insane defaults" are what people are used to. I don't know about Apple, but I tend to get to the limits of Google Docs/Sheets rather quickly. It may cover 99% of my needs, but Office gives me the missing 1%.
That's for the traditional Office Microsoft are sabotaging, the web versions are only a shadow of it, and by most points worse than the Google suite, and that's the problem.
As for font rendering, I am sure that Apple is ahead, it has always been their strength. Microsoft may be the king of the office, but when it comes to art and creative work, Apple has always been on top.
Windows used to exist in a competitive environment where they had to fight to remain relevant. For a long time now they have become complacent, no matter how many ads, product placements, and user abusive features they push, people will tolerate it.
The situation has only just changed now that Apple and Valve are getting close to threatening the Windows monopoly.
Isn’t this backwards? Microsoft had way less competition on the desktop in the 90s than they do now.
Frankly I don't know why we still have laptops. Honestly I think my mobile with a usbc base for screen and usb would perfectly work in a hardware pov. I don't know if Android would work, and besides of that a small fixed pc for whatever needs power.
because phones are not general computing devices, and really shouldn't be. They are too important to modern society to be unlocked for their full potential.
That said, I doubt the average person on a laptop even needs a general computing device, so your point does make sense. Though, is carrying around a screen and a keyboard and cable any better than carrying a laptop?
I could see an argument of it being cheaper, but that would take years, possibly decades, of multiple competitors in the space for the market to make that true.
Now, if we could have a decent folding keyboard and monitor that fit into the same case as your phone, that would be a game changer, but I don't think anyone is risking the investment to develop that.
Its as steve jobs said, once you control market share theres no incentive to build a good product and you lose the ability to do it.
Yeah, it used to feel like "we'll crush competitors, but at least we ship solid software"
It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products).
Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.
I'd read "Microsoft lost their way" as a description of how the speaker's worldview has changed, as they've gained experience and perspective.
Microsoft is often good to their customers. Generally in situations where badness has a poor RoI, or they're trying to lure you deeper into their clutches.
I find Teams is often simply picked because of cost reasons.
A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?
Don't forget network effects. If other companies you are working with use Teams then there is less friction if you also use Teams yourself.
That was the reason we ditched Slack. I hate Teams with a passion, but we're not going to pay 6k per year for a chat app if we get Teams for free. There's just no way to defend that decision.
6k would be a no-brainer.
In our office, we'd definitely need the enterprise version for compliance reasons, not because of the features. That's about 14/user/month.
At a workforce of roughly 2500, that's a 4million+ yearly cost for something that is comparable to something you can get without that pricetag. It's no competition at all at that point. Think about it, would you be willing to ask your boss to pay 4 million so you can have a different chat app? No matter how much more ergonomic and friendly and intuitive it is.
That's a very upside down way to think about it.
The question is: "are staffers $14 / mo more productive with it, than the free version?"
The answer may also boil down to satisfaction, support calls, other things, aka 'total cost of ownership' as well.
Not 'But it costs $X million!'.
Companies will spend a fortune giving staff the right monitor, or chair, but literally don't think they're smart enough to know the dam tool they use all day?
Let them pick their chat software, like they pick their monitors.
I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.
> I feel like most Americans don't appreciate the financial constraints under which European startups are operating :) The median series A is something like 1–6 million Euros over here. You have to seriously consider what you spend money for on these scales.
I, living in Germany, rather wonder myself quite often why US-American tech startups don't act much more frugally: this would give them so much more leeway/runway to make their startups succeed.
Half of the time it's startups subsidizing each other in a circle to have users. Like if you're a VC, you "force" your companies to use tools made by your other companies. So everyone will use the chat app made by one company the VC owns, the CRM software, all the different SaaSes etc. So it's just money moving in a circle, but then all the apps get to claim good sales and user numbers.
The reasoning makes more sense when you factor in that your startup’s VC is also Slack’s VC.
You’re actually giving that same venture capitalist $4m of their own money back, in a way that makes their investment more valuable.
That would be 420k/yr. To get to 4 million you need 25000 users. That's quite a big company.
So cca 16 million $ yearly for my corporation... Nobody is going to approve that, thats a ridiculous sum. There must be massive discounts above certain threshold.
You can easily defend that for only 6k with 'but we like it and we'll be more productive with it and we won't hate our jobs'
yeah, but that wouldn't be honest. Slack is more pleasant to use, but not 6k more pleasant to use. I'd rather put up with Teams and get my devs a raise instead.
How few devs do you have? Assuming a small startup of 12, you'd be able to give each dev a raise of $42 per month. Your devs would have to be severely underpaid to notice a $42/month raise.
We used to have anti trust regulators. We don't now.
We've got a lot of billionaires with a higher balance on their bank accounts though, so you can't say it was all for nothing
It's not the billionaires that depress me, it's the "temporarily embarrased billionaires", the wannabes who don't believe in the American Dream but idolise instead a winner takes all Ferengi style system.
yeah I don't understand how this isn't blatant market abuse through their monopoly position
Regulators should be all over it. EU has tried, but unsuccesfully, since it was lawyers who came up with the mitigation.
Regulators are either sleeping on billions of lobby money or asleep at the wheel
Yep, the amount of penny pinching some companies do nowadays is insane. Teams coming "for free" with their Microsoft 365 subscription is net positive for the bean counters.
Chat software is absurdly expensive. I’m not saying teams is good, but being nickel and dimed is a real risk for businesses too.
18€ a month per user for Business+ with Slack... I really do question whole thing... Ofc, when someone is making quarter to half a million paying twenty for basic cup of coffee is nothing. But still whole thing for chat application seems absolutely insane.
Even if gov adoption dropped, I suspect the incentives wouldn't change much unless there were genuinely viable, low-friction alternatives.
Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks.
We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.
Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.
Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent.
XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.
> XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.
The cycle is more complicated:
* 2000: exceptional
* XP: bad (the original XP was indeed bad)
* XP SP2 (from a technological perspective basically a new OS): decent
* Vista: bad
* 7: good
* 8: awful (it was so bad that soon 8.1 was introduced)
* 8.1: bad
* 10: controversial (some say it's "decent"; some say it's "bad" because of the magnitude of telemetry (spying) that Windows 10 introduced)
* 11: awful
So, in my opinion it's rather a general downward trend with some overlaid cycle.
Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom?
The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.
Teams is not that bad if you are using Office and OneDrive anyway, as it integrates well with those.
Most of my team members are using different named chats for discussion instead of channels, which are used for more important notices. Somehow it works, and our channels on slack were also basically chats anyway.
My only gripe is that Linux does not have a “native” client anymore and the web client is full of bugs on Firefox. But it’s Microsoft, what can you expect. It’s not that bad except for memory consumption on other platforms.
I haven't had that many issues on Windows "native" client. So I really don't get what the critical issue is... To me it has long looked like good enough.
No but it’s hard to get excited about two different flavours of shit sandwich. Teams is terrible piece of software no doubt but slack is worse, marginally
Yes, and you are wrong.
Objectively.
For me the worst is Microsoft Start news. I've already turned it off multiple times and it always come back.
To add insult to injury, it always displays terrible gossip, sports or far right news.
If any developer that works in MS news service is reading this message, please know that I hate you.
Pulling the emergency break promising to improve a situation will in general not build any trust unless the mea culpa also includes:
1. An analysis of what allowed the situation to get out of control to begin with
2. Systematic changes to prevent it from happening again
Otherwise you will just be in the same situation again in 3 years. And neither is included in Microsoft's messaging here.
I don't really see that happening here.
Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be gaining any by this move.
That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their public image is as bad as it can get.
> they won't be gaining any by this move.
Then why even do it?
Microslop is saying “I’m sorry that you’re offended” and will continue to abuse their users. All of this is a PR campaign to fix their image so that they can raise more money.
> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions
sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?
as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.
mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.
Same for me - I find Windows 11 pretty good and I've never seen an ad in the Start menu. It might be specific to some editions or regions?
>sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11
It's a setting called "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen", and it's checked by default.
Ah, it's available only if you pick a specific wallpaper image, that's why not everyone sees it.
Not only is it enabled hy default ... it magically gets enabled by default after some days, desktop spotlight feature that pushes some lock screen wallpapers and trivia overriding my personal wallpaper, Edge trying to do the same thing to homepage, edge trying to steal browser favourites and extensions from other installed browsers once every few weeks, edge stealing default app linkage for PDF viewing, copilot in various flavours appearing on taskbar, start menu, edge, ...it's mayhem out there.
Death by a thousand cuts. So many micro abuses by the OS that keeps reminding you who has the power.
I have the same experience. I'm on a Windows Surfuace 7 Arm laptop right now. There's no Copilot icon next to the start menu. I press the start icon and I don't see a single ad anywhere. There are no ads on my screen. I use Edge and I don't see anything odd while I shop. Granted, I run "Pro." Maybe the home edition has more of this?
I pay for a 365/OneDrive subscription and it works well. I get the apps on desktop/laptop/phone and 1 TB storage for a decent yearly rate. I log into the PC and laptop on the same account and useful things sync.
I've done mild tweaking to turn a few things off, like the icons in the "search" bar, but nothing's been "hacked". On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?
Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.
When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.
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I bought my first x86 PC in 1994 to install Linux on. I wanted a Sun workstation but couldn't afford it.
I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like they have Stockholm Syndrome.
My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac.
The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. It's got the price of entry down to where it's now the obvious recommendation for less-technical friends/family wanting an affordable-but-nice laptop for light home/office/student use.
I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real Mac running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.
> The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. I
It already is.
> MacBook Neo Just Broke an Apple Sales Record, Shipping Delays Continue
> The laptop is a record-breaking release for sales to first-time Mac owners, according to Tim Cook.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/macbook-neo-just-broke-an-apple-s...
I don't think Ipads are selling well. I have an old style basic one (from 2019 I think?), and the only thing I use it for is to read articles and occasionally look at emails, for which it's perfectly adequate.
> for normal people is to buy a Mac
Thus, the MacBook Neo. For the average user who only occasionally needs a general-purpose computer, it's powerful enough. As the geek in my friends-and-family circle, it's what I will be recommending to most of them if they ask.
Most of them only use phones or tablets anyway.
Mac’s are way more expensive than most people need. If anyone asked me today, I’d say buy a cheap laptop and I’ll install Linux on it for you. Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs come up. Problem solved, hundreds of dollars saved over the Mac.
Other brands' USD 599 laptops are atrocious. Neo is guaranteed to be a reliable, pleasure, and long-term investment.
>Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs come up.
This is a dealbreaker compared to never (or even rarely) having any “bugs”.
Don't care about windows. Haven't used a windows computer in over 20 years. Happy Ubuntu user here. What bothers me is the upcoming Android restrictions. I distribute an app that none of the app stores want to touch with a 10 foot pole. That's fine -their store, their choice. But now, to distribute the app from my website I have to jump through hoops and pay their stupid fees through a credit card (at a time when I'm trying to stay anonymous because of the nature of the app). I don't know what to do.
Their office subscriptions are also going up in price at. Crazy rates. Giving Stiff competition to food price inflation
All because it has some AI stuff on it that I don’t want.
Funny thing: I wanted to try out Copilot to help with creating a starting point for a diagram in Visio.
Copilot isn't in Visio (at least in the subscription my work pays for).
I used Copilot's chat interface instead, and it is unable to generate a diagram in the Visio .vsdx format; it tried, failed, tried to fix it, failed.
Sigh.
I opened a blank document and pasted a fairly large markdown text. Converting it to word (or html) formatting is easy, there are online tools and/or any other LLM can do it. This one time I opened the Copilot willingly and was excited about getting it done with a few keystrokes: "convert to word formatting".
It generates a formatted response but cant edit the document. How stupid you have to be to integrate copilot and not allow it to update text in a text editor??!
Copilot's glaring limitations when interacting with Office are insane considering that's its main value prop
Yes the price hike is almost 2x
If anyone knows how to revert to non-AI version of the subscription let me know
It's called 365 Classic and it's hidden in the Subscriptions section of your Microsoft account.
Recently I got tired of having random changes occur to a Windows installation I use for one purpose: running X-plane. I took the drastic measure of disabling both inbound and outbound network access in Windows firewall by default and turning off most of the pre-installed rules. Then, I allowed outbound access from the things that really need it. Spurious network traffic dropped to zero and surprises are gone. If I cared more, I'd explore profiles for enabling only useful network activity in more situations, but this has been really good for my use case.
X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.
I think nowadays the only safe and sane way is running Windows isolated as a VM (e.g. QEMU on proxmox). I did this with my gaming server. The VM sits on ZFS which I can snapshot before any Microsoft stuff happens, to revert any action. I can cut off the network card virtually and shutdown the guest whenever I get tired of it. I could even disguise the CPU/QEMU config, so that the anti-cheat from Star Citizen didn't recognize it was running in a virtualized environment. Pair this with Moonlight+Sunshine and you can game without issues on any remote client. Why I prefer Windows for gaming? It is just (still) the default and provides the least barrier and setup effort for most games.
Replaced all our windows machines with mac silicon and linux 6 months ago. No one is going back no matter what they do now.
Domestic violence analogies for computing....really gross. I wouldn't hire or work with 'Sam Bent'.
Don't worry, they'll just destroy any goodwill they tried to claw back with these 'fixes' in following releases.
They absolutely can't help themselves but make their product more and more user hostile.
Love the quiz at the end
It's remarkable that computer users are paying $139 to give data to Microsoft through an ad-supported "operating system"
Back in the day (generally) only OEMs paid
What is the $139 for
The pattern is pretty familiar at this point:
1. Ship something user-hostile 2. Wait for backlash 3. Roll it back partially 4. Get credit for "listening"
Also called the door-in-the-face method.
I've never seen any adverts in Windows. Just saying.
How many of the people pearl-clutching in this thread actually use Windows?
Sorry Pavan, I'm happier with Fedora Atomic and Bazzite now.
I had enough of Windows 11's ads that I bought a Mac mini for personal use and requested a Macbook to replace my Windows laptop.
I will have to use Teams and Outlook at work because I don't have a choice. But that's it Microsoft.
Thanks for the curated and well described list!
Finally they realizing the power of linux is cannot be taken for granted
'Microsoft was entering a mode called "swarming",'
Swarming, as in locusts, or else flies on shit.
Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better product. People who know they need Windows will always have the option to install it themselves.
I actually belive that is what triggered this.
There was a rumour 1-2 months ago about Lenovo and Asus meeting Microsoft execs and warning them that if win11 issues continued to cost them support hours and devicw returns they would be forced to find an alternative.
Now there's an idea I can get behind.
In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.
Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.
For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.
Windows 11 should run on ANY PC.
I am customer and I absolutely hate it that they have restricted the machine that Windows can run on.
If they don't fix this sort of anti customer garbage then all their words are pure horseshit.
This is one of the areas that annoy me due to how limp microsoft is with the requirements...
Either give a solid set of requirements that let a dev assume things about a windows 11 system (good hardware security, in particular), or fuck off entirely.
have you thought about switching to another OS?
Unfortunately Linux doesn't run well on my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 (which is perfectly functional other than the lack of Windows security updates). I'm very unlikely to buy or recommend a Microsoft computer again, even though I liked the hardware.
Looks like your device is supported & has been for a while ?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/comments/nwr4kd/best_d...
I check out the status every so often. Not much is upstreamed yet, so it requires a patched kernel and some mucking about, likely on an ongoing basis. I'll probably try it at some point but not until I have moved my uses for that machine onto something else.
Am I the only one who’s been using 11 on multiple machines for years without any issues?
Thus begins the next phase of their neverending cycle. They do this same shit every 10 years or so. This has to be what, the third or fourth time?
I mean...this is a huge company. For them to do something even mildly consumer-focused I'll take as a win.
Until they talk about being able to remove Edge, they aren't serious.
Testing commenting functionality for automated QA.
Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years. Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them, but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm probably leaving some stuff out.
Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.
Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.
Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.
Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.
Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.
Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.
Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.
They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!
They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.
It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.
Yeah, but...
Did they increase profits and/or stock price or not? That's the only relevant question. Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.
Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.
> Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.
I don't understand this point. Are you suggesting that less people being happy with their product and thus less people buying it is not related to the valuation of the company and their stock?
> Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.
Huh?
I get you're trying to make a point about the bottom line, but that doesn't mean the bottom line is impervious to bad product decisions or that the people who are paying for their products are not in fact their customers.
Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely unhelpful logs, but gave up.
I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.
Microsoft is on track to be judged for digital genocide.
Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.
Reading the article without Firefox's reader mode is a pain. Maybe it's a secret plan of Mozilla to promote their browser.
Did they really fix the taskbar? I still cannot change it to either side of the screen, am i missing something?
no, the big news is that finally they have the intention to do it
I don't think the fix is released yet, except for possibly Insider builds.
I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well. It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.
But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.
These flowers smell like shit.
If you don't use Linux or MacOS yet, why?
I use a blend of Windows, MacOS, iOS and Linux.
Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.
I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.
I used linux on Desktop 15 years ago, tried it once in a while every few years. But there was always something. Often video driver, tearing, hardware video decoding, or a specific game that I played a lot. And now it would be that my DJ software does not run on it.
Still use it on my server though.
I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.
The last time I tried to use Linux, I said "fuck this" when I had to open up a text editor for something so basic as making a shortcut with command line arguments. This is the easiest menu in the world on Windows, but it took me looking up a bunch of things to get it to not work on Linux.
The real crime, by a lot, it middle click. I did not realize how often I use middle click scroll until I switched to Linux and it didn't work anymore.
So you switched something as fundamental as the OS, and were pissed that it was … different?
You can fault Linux as the primary desktop environment for a few things, but that it’s different to MS is not one of those.
Do you also rant about having no windows key on a MacBook?
Yeah, it's kind of annoying. But middle click scroll is something I use literally every single second of every single day on my web browser. It's a deal-breaker.
Ok that's fair ig. I used to be a fairly heavy user of the middle click scroll feature on windows like a decade ago. Made the switch to Debian w/ Awesome, and that habit just casually fell away. The switch is probably a 3 day annoyance at most. IMO arrow keys and scroll are fine. On laptop trackpads two finger scrolling and momentum scrolling are far more accurate IMO. Also if you have the mx master mouse, it has a crazy good scroll wheel that you can "throw".
Also you can turn on Firefox specific middle click scroll feature "autoscroll" which is the same thing. They may have similar stuff for other browsers. Long story short, in less clicks than it takes you to turn off stupid notifications and ads on Windows, you can get a semi decent middle-click-scroll feature where you need it the most.
macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and customizations to make it sane for basic things like window management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount of tweaking needed for power users.
And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...
And it sucks at gaming.
Linux on the other hand is great for power users!
I've installed linux (debian LTS with XFCE) on my mom's computer and she recently called me to thank me. She says her computer is much quieter now (meaning fewer notifications). She only needs a web browser and a text editor.
So you're right, it's great for power users, it's also great for other users.
I fucking love XFCE! And have more than a decade of mileage with it.
Window management: only if you are the kind of power user who needs complex layout. I have used Windows for decades and have used Mac on and off, and have even bought one of those window management app on MacOS, but never needed to use them. In rare occasions where I need several windows open, side-by-side on each of dual screens is usually good enough, if not I probably am working in a terminal where I use tmux.
Gaming: that's a fact but again doesn't matter to most people. Most people play video games on phones/tablets/consoles if they play games at all. PC gaming is a relative minority, and (regular) Windows laptops can only do lightweight gaming anyway. The amount of people who decides what "everyday computer" they should buy based on whether they are going to play games on it is very small. Plus, you get much better ROI by buying a PS5+Macbook Air than spending the same amount of money on a gaming laptop.
you need a ton of third party tools to make it behave like Windows, that's what you mean.
I'm perfectly happy with my "vanilla" macbook. Runs Baldurs Gate 3 and my final fantasy ps2 emulator just fine, and even trackmania was quite easy to get installed and runs well.
Can't comment on that hash thing, but I don't see why that would be a problem? It's not linked to your name or something. Windows does a ton of things too that I find inexcusable, such as changing settings or permissions after updates, those have an actual impact on my daily experience with these things
Because Windows works just fine for me.
I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.
Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your own.
Depends on whether using someone else’s windows machine leaves you crazy annoyed.
My windows machine is also “fine” for the most part because i turned off whatever I could and tried to mod whatever I could not. Even so, every once in a while, typing “code” and being taken to an edge bing search makes me want to rip it to shreds.
And I delay every update as far as possible and am filled with dread when it finally wont let me postpone it.
It isn’t that fine now that I think about it.
Do you use powershell or run WSL
Games
I have a desktop computer that I use for gaming so it had windows forever. Lately it started running laggy. Occasional frame drops and stuff. Reinstall, bios update etc nothing helped.
For debugging I installed Bazzite (Linux gaming distro) assuming compatibility would be shit but I can at least test native linux builds of some games to see if there is a hardware issue. The thing runs perfectly. I've been playing propert windows games on Proton with higher / more consistent FPS. It is kind of funny at this point. Granted I do not play any competitive / multiplayer games.
I guess Valve did a great job on the Steam Deck sw.
I've been running Fedora (or a flavor) on my gaming PC for two years. All my games work. I understand some competitive games with intrusive anti cheat are incompatible, but with the success of the steam deck I don't think the gaming argument is holding much water these days.
Fair. Depends on the game to be honest.
I switched from Windows 10 to Fedora recently. Most of the games I play work without issue but I know there are some which categorically refuse to work (mainly some specific anti-cheating software reasons).
Do you play fortnite? Steam's linux support is really good but I kept a Windows install for a couple of years so I could keep playing fortnite.
I do use Linux at work and for programming at home, but for general office work Windows is just better, sorry.
As for MacOS, I just hate it.
Macs are circling down the same drain.
In what way?
- They are rapidly iOS-ifying the desktop experience
- All core services and apps experience significant performance degradation (to thenpoint that Spotlight regularly fails to find installed apps) which are currently only offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
- Services become more and more pervasive, with ads throughout the system
> offset by the insane performance of the M* series chips
I'm really afraid of that one. MacOS engineers don't have to worry about performance optimizations anymore, because the chips gobble it up anyway. Ever more powerful hardware is how we ended up with the awful performance of modern-day computing.
I don't know what that first one means. You mean the glass design?
Yeah, spotlight has been rough for years, I grant you that.
I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see them?
You're probably an iCloud services user. Try a Mac without an iCloud account - it's nagging you pretty heavily to set it up, get an iCloud+ subscription, use TV and Music and Game Center subscriptions, and so on.
I am not. I don't even have Apple ID.
> I don't know what that first one means. You mean the glass design?
Not just glass. It started with Big Sur at least. It's forcing narrow and/or devoid of controls interfaces into every app, breaking decades-old system behaviours (misbehaving controls, wrong or non-functioning keyboard shortcuts, mobile-like interfaces in desktop apps etc.). It's eschewing MacOS-native development for shoddy half-assed ports of iPhone software even for first-party apps. Etc.
> I haven't seen a single ad in my system. Where do you see them?
I've seen notifications for Apple Music, and I've seen ads in the System Settings
Because they suck.
I moved to ultramarine linux and it's great - fast, has a nifty desktop management system, a few bugs but more than happy compared to using microsoft.
"It sucks"
Ha!
Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram, and Linux still can't run proper creative software.
"Most companies still do not publish Linux builds for creative software"
There, fixed it for you.
It's not like Linux is the blocker here.
This used to be the case but looking at Macbooks now they are not much more expensive than a Windows laptop you would actually want to buy. And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now i think it's about even.
This used to be case before the M series. Now each year a new M processor gets released that are "cheaper" than the previous generation MAC - better processor, more RAM and more storage for similar price than last year model. This impacted their price in used market.
> And since they will still have some residual value 5 years from now.
I dont know any private person in my circle that actually sold their laptop until it wasnt broken or so painfully old that the used value was mostly for spare parts. That may change a bit with the skyrocketing pc part prices but still.
My main computer is a 2020 m1 Mac. It handles everything I throw at it. I predict I’ll upgrade in maybe 4-5 years.
are you a creative professional? because I see that argument quite often as if people use Adobe CS daily, and then its mostly people who do basic stuff (that photopea or gimp can handle fine), but they like to feel "pro" by launching their pirated version of photoshop.
I use krita, adobe substance 2024, blender and whatever other software. Professionally.
When I hear these arguments I just think these people are simply chained.
> Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram
This hasn't been true for at least a decade. And it's especially not true for the M* series Macs.
Even Macbook Neo can handle editing several layers of 4k video files in several apps while running everything else https://youtu.be/Mo6o8RKn7jE?is=opeCYMDbt7bUAdvS Try that on "the same performance/ram" Windows Machine
I think we need to be a bit more careful and considerate around the use of language around physical abuse, or abuse in general, and using software.
Saying that here as someone that isn't fond of the Windows experience these days, but the two are not relatable.
Beating is a normal English idiom. While I do sympathize with anyone suffering from abuse, I highly doubt anyone is actually suffering from use of the word.
I agree with stndef. "Flowers after beating" is a very direct evocation of physical abuse in an intimate relationship. Whether or not you think it's appropriate.
If you don't claim it's inapropriate then what's left to agree about?
There are all kinds of language registers for communication. From formal business speak to 'locker room banter'. What is appropriate or otherwise depends entirely on the participants of the conversation. So, it depends on what kind of conversation we're trying to have.
I think this post's usage is meant deliberately to be a bit edgy, to illustrate how badly Microsoft has behaved.
An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
Personally, data point of 1, I think it's a bit distasteful, and would prefer to participate in a community that doesn't routinely use that kind of langauge.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> An encouragement to be mindful of language, and therefore discuss what shared context we're trying to build, shouldn't be so controversial in a self-professed 'thoughtful' [0] forum.
I don't understand how HN's news guidelines apply to a blogger writing an article on their own blog. The controversial language was found in the article. It wasn't found in the thread you're replying to.
I'm willing to be wrong, but it's specifically mentioned as an analogy for abuse in the article itself.
Not trying to turn everything "woke", but phrasing of scenarios around this just takes away from the severity of what actual abuse is.
How does it take away from the severity of actual abuse? By not mentioning it when it's not relevant to the analogy?
It’s actually more triggering / offensive that you brought up abuse when no one was talking about abuse. This site is for adults who understand the concept of analogies. You just wanted to bring up the topic of abuse for whatever reason. Why?
The article comes back to the abuse analogy multiple times. If you want to defend that as fine, go for it, but in no way is it a new topic that the poster here brought up.
Oh please, TFA has a title of "Flowers after the beating" - its a direct reference to domestic abuse which attempts to equate Microsofts behaviour and that of a domestic abuser.
Username checks out, but you might want to check with your mother about how she feels about this comparison.
TFA brings up abuse not stndef.
An analogy is "a thing which is comparable to something else in significant respects" and stndef is right to point out that microsoft behavior, while abusive, is not comparable to domestic abuse "in significant respects". Not even close.
The TFA title is sensational for effect and in very poor taste.
Heartbreaking: The Worst Company You Know Just Made A Great Point
Enough with the memes.
This is a functional test comment to verify the posting feature works correctly.
I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).
I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.