But it has since then stalled and got increasingly worse. Especially with this AI shoving everywhere, not even mentioning getting ads at some point in notifications and start menu.
I'm not particularly in love with MacOS either (but have no realistic alternative on my MacBooks).
I'm more and more inclined of switching my desktop (my main working machine) to Omarchy, two coworkers in my team use it and love it and seems the sweet spot for what I need as a dev without the annoyance of Windows or the god awful macos.
However, I found Omarchy to be whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is. It brings all the complications of a tiling WM, so you still have to learn a complicated new way of using your system, but at the same time it is extremely opinionated so instead of ending with a tailored custom tiling WM that suits your needs at the end of the learning curve, you end up with a tiling WM that is suited for someone else’s needs.
On the flip side, the simplifications it does add, such as a supposedly easier way to add packages, does no such thing. It doesn’t simplify the process at all and in fact makes it harder to understand how to actually remove stuff.
I find Omarchy to simply "make sense" out of the box for me. And, I've never used a tiling WM before it (and feel crazy for not having done so)
DHH built it, and I find it absolutely hilarious that his Linux distro is literally his insufferable personality personified in Linux form
Something like 90% of all new devs today learn only cloud-native backend dev or web frontend dev. The only exceptions tends to be mobile and game developers. Collectively cloud+web, mobile, and games account for like 98% of all new devs it seems. Nobody learns anything else.
The web is going to become the desktop UI in the future for this reason alone. It's going to be slower and much more bloated than almost any other alternative, but it's got the critical mass of adoption behind it and that's what determines core technologies in the industry. Technical merit is a distant second or third.
This is frustrating but it's not surprising to one who has studied biology and evolution. In evolution this is called "path dependence," and it's why we have weird things like a man's testicles hanging in a bag below his body. A previous evolutionary path optimized the sperm production process to run at a lower temperature than the rest of the body, so then evolution's hack for this is to put them in a bag outside the body. Ticket closed with "resolved." The pathways taken through a complex solution space determine the outcome and the outcome is often bizarre and "hacky" for this reason. The key is that it's very hard to back-track. Once a path has been taken, it's very hard to un-take it.
Large industries and markets are essentially "biological," not rationally designed, so you get the same kinds of phenomena.
It could be much worse. If Linux+HTML+JS had not taken over, we might have the Microsoft Enterprise Web(tm) where Visual Basic (not VB.NET, OG Visual Basic) is the main language and each service or site would require an NT license for every node and an IIS license for every web hostname. UIs might be written in ActiveX or desktop ones in Microsoft C/C++ with OLE and similar horrors. It might be just as slow and infinitely uglier and more expensive and less open. Apple would be dead and open source would much more marginalized than it is today. The net would basically be a total MS monopoly. If you didn't live through the 90s: this nearly happened.
The kind of developers who are willing to work with native GUI APIs (even though a framework) simply don't exist in enough quantity anymore.
New Notepad in 11, with tabs and autosave (and dark mode), is so much better and more practical to use over old one, it just stays open all the time and become my main notetaking pick. It may take a beat to open a big file (1+ mb) with line wrapping, but it's pretty much just as fast as anything (and may be even faster than some other editors). It's just very easy to reach for and quite snappy.
There are some apps on Windows with actual gripes, but Notepad, Paint, Snipping tool, they're quite solid and have become everyday tools that eliminated the need to reach for some other third party apps.
And for the kicker, the update made it forget my font settings.
Never heard of it and the website and GitHub repo sure aren't doing a great job of describing it's benefits.
"Beautiful, Modern & Opinionated" are vague and really aren't adjectives I'd be looking for in an OS.
A lot of Windows' current problems can be traced back to the Ballmer era, including the framework schizophrenia, as Microsoft shifted between Win32, UWP, WPF, and god knows what else. This has lead to the current chaotic and disjointed UI experience, and served to confuse and drive away developers. Repeatedly sacrificing reliable and consistent UX while chasing shiny and new technologies is no way to run an OS.
July 2014: Microsoft lays off 14k people, a large portion of which are SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test)/QA/test people.
The idea was that regular developers themselves would be writing and owning tests rather than relying on separate testers.
I'm sure there were multiple instances of insane empire building and lots of unproductivity, but it's also hard to not think this was where the downfall began.
People have been flocking to it for reasons like
1. They don't want to configure hyprland themselves.
2. They want to say they are running an "elite" distro like Arch.
3. They're part of DHH's weird following that is a mix of insufferable smugness and right-wing politics.
Had high hopes for it but in my testing the mouse cursor chokes and drops frames/precision under load which I just can’t deal with.
Surely there's a typo there, and you meant late 2000s, e.g. 2009?
Late 2010s Windows was W10 with constant system-breaking bugs, mobile-first interface, more and more data mining and adware my MS, etc.
Not sure what is bad with data mining / telemetry (as long it is anonymised and respects GDPR).
Adware is issue only on Windows 11.
Im generally a microsoft shill, but theyre really on the down hill slope. windows 11 is truly a masterpiece of changes no one asked for or wants, Teams is the least reliable piece of business software I've ever seen. New outlook does not have feature parity with old outlook and has the same bargain bin apple ux stylings as w11.
Maybe ive finally crested the age gap and im officially a dinosaur, but God damn every microsoft product is worse than it used to be.
Sometimes, I click on the windows button and it legit takes 3-4 seconds for windows to render the start menu that only has the program list, nothing else, just the list of programs.
These machines with their 6/8 or so cores can do tasks at the scale of nanoseconds and it takes, 3 whole seconds to render a single window with a list of program names, that’s simply stupid.
Anyone who has ever touched a windows xp machine knows that the start menu can complete drawing before my brain can register that my fingers in fact touched the keys, which takes roughly 20ms or so if I remember correctly. What the hell is this system doing?
- dell p2 300 win95
- early core duo era with linux 2.4 (some kali linux image)
and saying this as a fan of recent linux kernel and systemd parallelism with the crazy cpu over ssd speed.. i was utterly surprised
On a more serious note, I really only use Windows for games & I'm still always frustrated with how many updates (& restarts during updates) Windows needs. My fans are always constantly spinning on Windows too (laptop or desktop) whereas my Mac & Linux machines are generally silent outside of heavy load.
A friend of mine complained that he hated how Firefox "always" wants to restart with an update. I couldn't understand what he was on about. Turned out I use Firefox daily and he uses it like once every 2 months to test something and yeah, Firefox has an update out every 2 months or so, so that fits.
It's the same with Windows (and, I assume, macOS). Use Windows more and the updater will disappear out of sight.
Windows still reboots instead of shut down when you do update and shut down.
defender seemingly needs to check every 10ms that you still don't have a virus
And it's not that i don't like windows, it is just too damn slow for me.
And no. I do not want to upgrade my gear every 2 years or so
I miss the ~mid Windows 7 era. Not that everything ran perfectly without issues on Windows 7 at the time, particularly old games, but at least there was an option good enough to assume to always go with first instead of "see if the games you play work best here".
It's always hardcore multiplayer games with the actual crowd. Using linux for gaming is a great way to continue down the path to becoming a recluse.
That said, my favourite Windows computer ever was the Fujitsu Stylistic ST4110 w/ transflective display and Wacom EMR digitizer --- put an SSD in it, carried a couple of spare batteries, added a USB GPS, and kept a pair of docking stations w/ power supplies at my desks at work and the office and a third power supply in my laptop bag and it just worked --- despair of really replacing it, the Samsung Galaxy Book 12 was close, but then Fall Creators Update came out and crippled styluses down to an 11th touch input so that they would scroll rather than select text... getting by w/ a Book 3 Pro 360, but Windows 11 has me looking at a Raspberry Pi paired w/ a Wacom One or Movink display....
Every feature they listed was some anti-consumer thing that only a corporate customer would ever care about or want. Every single one.
What I learned is that Windows 11 is great for the customer, I'm just not the customer. I'm just the dummy who paid for it.
- Secure Boot enforcement
- Microsoft account requirement
- BitLocker device encryption tied to MS account
- Hardware attestation
- Telemetry/Data Collection
- Extensive diagnostic data collection
- Advertising ID tracking
- Activity history syncing
- Bing integration everywhere
- Edge as persistent default (difficult to change) - OneDrive integration/nagging
- Microsoft 365 upselling
- Copilot integration
- Widgets panel with MSN content
- Start menu web search forcing Bing
- Centered taskbar (not moveable)
- Simplified right-click menu (hiding options)
- Removed taskbar features (no drag-to-taskbar, no ungrouping)
- Start menu ads/recommendations Update Control
- Forced automatic updates
- Limited update deferral for Home users
- Feature updates bundled with security updates
- Device Management (Enterprise)
- Intune/MDM integration
- Windows Autopilot
- Azure AD requirements
- Remote wipe capabilities
- Monetization
- Ads in Start menu
- Ads in File Explorer
- Suggested apps
- Pre-installed third-party apps (Candy Crush, etc.)
Forcing saving to OneDrive causes this issue a lot too. I was stunned to find that saving changes to an existing document will often try to save a new file in OneDrive instead. So if you don't notice this and go back to your original file, it will look like your changes weren't saved.
The only part of windows that really matters in the long run is win32 which has been extremely stable. You could go back to XP and not lose that many features. The fact that modern windows runs like ass has very little to do with backwards compatibility.
The oldest, worst, and most over-used trick in the (windows) book.
*Corporate surveillance.
There’s plenty of that content in our media, but those people don’t consume that media. A computer is a critical general purpose tool. Everyone needs it. This is like putting scantily clad elves on every refrigerator.
It's not great. Linux mint is what I install for older relatives now. It's close enough to windows feeling that they never even question it.
To stoke my rage into an incandescent fury, if you go to settings -> Lock Screen, there's no obvious way to disable it at first. You have to change the background image from "Microsoft Spotlight", the one where the image changes to a static background image, and THEN you get a checkbox. The checkbox you uncheck is "get tips, fun facts, and more". I guess trying to sell me shit is under "more".
It sucks because i agree that having the picture change is a nice feature. Microsoft has decided to hold that nice feature hostage to ads.
I just want an OS that helps me control my computers and be productive, not one that "mines" me to sell me to be exploited.
While I have been using various Linux flavors for my servers, my desktop has been Windows for decades. Microsoft's charade with Win11 has me committed to moving to desktop Linux in 2026. There will be pain, but they crossed a line.
That said, I was restoring a notebook owned by my aunt recently and I decided to run Ubuntu on it so I could mess with gparted a little bit. I'm already a full-time Linux user (have been for about five years now, I guess), but I was still surprised to see that one of the most bloated Linux distributions ran lightning fast on my aunt's Pentium Gold + 4gb RAM + HDD while Windows took over four minutes to boot.
It's absolutely time to abandon Windows if you're still dependent on it. There are alternatives. Heck, I'm not a fan of Apple either but at this point I'd recommend a MacBook for anyone wanting to get away from Windows and not comfortable with Linux or a Chromebook.
But then I don’t find macOS to be slow or a buggy mess, so mileage may vary.
Besides that no problems with MacOS, it feels snappy to me and Office apps work mostly fine (except for all the missing features Microsoft refuses to add to Outlook).
For a fair test against Windows 10 and below, you'll have at least to do this: "Temporarily turn off your Memory Integrity and VMP" -- https://support.microsoft.com/en-US
Also, it's important to have all bits and pieces of Hyper-V/Windows Virtual Platform off (which the Menory Integrity relies on), thus cutting off WSL functionality.
We don't need flawed tests to tell us Windows 11 sucks -- yesterday my explorer bar didn't respond to clicks nor Windows key. In the past killing explorer.exe and restarting it, or logging off and back on, worked. Yesterday I had to reboot the machine to fix it.
Why is it, when ever someone points out that Microsoft shits the bed on something someone will come out with ludicrous ideas about changing the default environment.
The default environment is what you get, all this handwringing about whats potentially possible misses the point entirely; for decades we have, as a community, scoffed at linux for requiring you to understand deeply how your OS works in order for it to function. Now we’re in the situation where the out-of-the-box experience for gaming requires less esoteric knowledge on Linux than Windows, yet people defend Windows still.
Do you seriously think the exec running emails even knows what Hyper-V is? Do you think any IT department is going to disable memory integrity?
Would any Dev disable WSL? Do the vast majority of gamers want to do this? Should they have to?
You’re now arguing that overhead is ok because its mitigated by newer hardware, I don’t believe that to be true as I run W11 on A Threadripper 3970x and an i9-14900k and the fuckers feel leagues slower than my M1 Macbook, its a joke! Like 10x the power/thermal envelope- and sure, some of that is down to the M1 being great, but there’s no benchmark putting it above those CPUs.
Stop pretending that this is ok, and stop trying to spread uncertainty about a valid test.
I’d prefer newer hardware too, but this is the compromise if we want older OS’s to be included.
I recently installed CachyOS on a USB NVMe drive, so I can dual boot without the dual boot pain. And wow, that thing flies.
I've been a Windows user since 3.0, but Windows 11 is probably getting replaced soon. I've stopped competitive gaming so anti-cheats ain't an issue, and Linux gaming is good enough.
There are some things I'll miss, but the bloat and lack of care from MS I'll be glad to leave behind.
- https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat (recommended elsewhere in this thread)
- https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ (I used this one a couple weeks ago, seems to work well)
But seriously though, learn to fish. The answers aren't hard to find if you look, know what to search for, and are at least somewhat discriminating in your investigation.
That, and switch back to the classic GUIs (like with OpenShell) so you don't have to deal with the laggy new UIs.
For the record I am also with you that using WinDebloat is not the best way for the simplest reason that it all seems arbitrary.
I simply stayed on Windows 10 and I don’t seem to miss any feature thus far lol
The damn thing was shockingly performant. We have been played for absolute fools.
I used to boot up XP in a VM occasionally. It‘s amazing how streamlined everything felt, inviting you to be productive. This was before the Electron apocalypse. Almost all UI looked the same, behaved the same and was easy on the eyes (remember when widgets had depth?).
Not so fast, the u there means ultrabook. Crammed into a too small chassis, this thing chokes even when using Edge or Chrome to work on Jira.
Windows 11 JS Web Start menu does not help...
Windows 11 is "fine" on my powerful desktop gaming CPU, but that is just brute-forcing it.
Definitely moving in the direction of "what is good for a particular PM" and not "what is good for the user." I would have switched to linux years ago if it were not for the great hardware and I like having access to iMessages from the desktop.
Those beholden to MSO and the One True Excel, which of course is not guaranteed to work well (or at all) under Wine / Proton, are less lucky.
Recently I've been experimenting with Atlas, Revi and Ghost Spectre, which are custom stripped versions of Windows, and it's such a breath of fresh air. It really makes me feel like if only they'd just ruthlessly pull out all the new garbage without regard for "but we just made and shipped this", Windows would actually be pretty good.
Say what you want about Apple and their slow descent into a fully walled garden where independent software development is slowly eroded and sabotaged, but even their most reviled update in years (macOS 26) is still miles ahead of Windows 11 in terms of cohesion and polish.
Also, you seem to skip other notable changes like enforced spam and enforced Copilot and enforced online registration.
What is Microsoft trying to do by ending Windows 10 support?
It was CRAZY fast, over Teamviewer it felt better and faster than my local machine... Sad times.
Note that even though WinRT is largely written in C++, and the team brags about performance, due to the amount of COM/WinRT reference counting and the sandboxing model of application identity, it actually runs slower than .NET applications.
Quite ironic, given the Windows team sabotaged on Longhorn.
The only care about AI so that’s what we’re gonna get.
I keep a Windows virtual machine for software that doesn't run on Linux but my use of that over the years has declined dramatically.
To me, the earlier versions of Windows 10 were somewhat OK when they're stripped down. But Windows 11 is bloated beyond belief. And shoving AI functionality in it is going to make things worse.
I was surprised the other day when I used a W11 machine that the new context menu took a perceptible second to appear and it still didn't have everything the old had so you still have to call the old one, very dismaying.
You can get even more of your hard drive back by limiting the size of Windows' page file.
I'm actually a big fan of hibernation on laptops and have mine set to suspend for 5 minutes then hibernate. My real life usage battery life has been noticeably longer with this setup.
The UI switch is not particularly obvious, at Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options → System Settings
So I went back to Microsoft's own RDP client - they deprecated it and now only support the new Windows App but you need to login with your corporate email and it does not even support RDP but Azure !!!!.
You need to go to the stone age and use the RDP client they shipped with Windows NT 4.0.
Say what you want about Balmer but Satya is now worse - he needs to go.
Obviously all these security features cost performance and something that linux and macos can live without since they generally do not have closed source drivers that can't be fixed (except nvidia, but it seems to be changing as nvidia is giving up and starting to open up due to AI). Windows has to be proactive and that is one of the biggest performance hurdles it faces. It's actually incredible how comparatively safe windows is if you have all the security features enabled, there are obviously still one-offs due to having to maintain compatibility and what was effectively usermode code ported to kernelmode ruining it, thankfully that also seems to be changing since they're slowly rewriting it to be secure by design with Unstrusted<> guards making these issues significantly less common.
as for apple doesn't have third party code in the kernel at all so they can also fix it themselves.
side note, the restrictive linux license might seem like it is preventing adoption since for example the whole HDMI 2.1 spec is centered around proprietary code, but in reality they have this illusion that their 'proprietary' code can be protected and somehow linux undermines it when in reality people can reverse everything to sourcecode if they spend enough time on it - if anyone is curious you can just take one of the firmware dumps from any hdmi 2.1 capable TV dongle, extract the kernel module responsible handling the authentication for hdmi 2.1, extract the code, put it in your amdgpu opensource driver, now you have hdmi 2.1 on linux.
Every patch Tuesday they’re fixing more insecurities that previous Windows didn’t have.
I love Windows 11, and have zero complaints.
Win+R is instant.
Notepad is the best version so far, I use it as a todo list and it saves and loads in the same place on my third screen every reboot - fantastic.
I have no use for the AI being shoehorned into everything, but I use it every day via chatgpt in the browser, and genie and cp in vsc.
Now you might say modern software needs modern hardware, but Windows as it is is stagnant in terms of functionality and features, so what justifies the requirement of newer hardware?
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/update-to-disable-...
IOS 26 is also terrible (on battery especially). New OS releases always have a ton of new services in them that bog them down.
A lot of this slowdown is just developers getting complacent and getting used to the new hardware capabilities. Windows has a lot of low hanging optimization fruit laying around. It's just Microsoft doesn't really care about that: it doesn't fit the business model at all.
Someone please tell me if there’s a trick to making the Windows snipping tool faster. I press Win+Shift+S to activate the tool for capturing a region. It takes about 2 seconds to load. I draw the rectangle. Then it takes about 2 seconds to finish capturing.
That is 4 infuriating seconds for something that should be (and I’m sure used to be!) virtually instant.
Now that text is easily recognized in images, screenshots are an important interoperability tool for garbage apps like Teams.
I am not associated with this software, just a very happy user. You get a lifetime license for $20, it's constantly updated with new features, and is a joy to use.
"Windows 11 is running on unsupported hardware"
I've been using W10 and W11 Pro versions daily and I don't feel any difference except task bar search menu performance (especially this on corpo laptop, on PC this is fine)