I don't think Microsoft can pull this off, I think as mindshare is shifting it will continue to do so and its going to take Microsoft a long time to row back and right now its only talking about doing some minor things. Now Nvidia is developing the drivers on Linux seriously there is every chance this transition snowballs and nothing Microsoft does will be enough.
I personally will never forgive them for uploading the entirety of my users dir to OneDrive without asking for permission. They're --still-- doing this. Whatever decision making process they have in place that not only cooked this scheme up, but allowed it to continue for years must be broken beyond repair. It's contemptuous, backwards, and hostile to users. It cannot be condemned enough.
This blog post talks about taskbar positioning and vaguely gesturing at quality, which is whatever. I'm not mad about removing features or even a higher incidence of bugs. I'm mad about hostile dark patterns that they have consciously chosen to employ at an ever increasing rate. I don't think you can fix this without drastic company wide changes.
For as long as I live, if I have a choice, I will avoid Microsoft products. They cannot be trusted.
> Enhancing Search: [...] Clearer and more trustworthy results, with results from content on your device easy to understand and clearly distinct from web results
So yeah, you still get web results in your search bar, a feature absolutely zero people want and which is just there to fake Bing success, just with a little divider now next to the applications the search failed to find.
Some reasons: Even as a low-level programmer fully capable of resolving problems, I want to spend my time working on my programs, not working on making my OS work, and Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues. Windows does a better job of managing memory/swaps, at least out of the box. Windows has a stable userland with 30 years of backwards compatibility. Windows makes good use of both GUIs and CLIs, letting you choose whichever is faster for the task, while Linux distros and devs have some kind of bizarre ideological purity culture and generally refuse to make good GUIs. Windows has a built-in tool for easily making full system images while the system is running, without requiring the image destination be larger than the system drive including unused space. Windows developers are not so in love with dynamically linked system libraries that dependency management becomes a pain in the ass. Windows generally has a polished UX with a lot fewer papercuts.
So the only superiority is that it runs the apps most people want to run?
And this is why geeks are always the “Less space than Nomad. No Wireless. Lame” types or the HN equivalent when talking about DropBox:
“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
99% of people buy a desktop and don't even consider what the operating system is let alone think about changing it to something else. I would imagine they don't even know that a difference exists between operating systems.
The problem is that I do not want to mess around to make things work. This is the power of Windows. Everything is built around it and it does not need or want you to keep hacking it.
Don't get me wrong I am working on Mac and my personal dev laptop is a Linux Mint, but sometimes it physically hurt to find something that sends me down a rabbit hole yet again on Linux. I just think the whole "you have to hack it because you can and otherwise you don't really own it" thing is a big hurdle on Linux that keeps mainstream peeps to stay away
Not sure if I made sense, but yeah basically in order to challenge Windows Linux would need to "just work" which is not the case right now (or ever was)
Having said that, I don't begrudge people from using Windows or Mac. As much as I'd like to believe otherwise, Linux has rough edges that most people really don't want to deal with. I'm willing to give Linux some grace because I believe in open source and want to support that world with my actions. But when someone complains about why their fingerprint reader doesn't work, all I can say is "yep, that can happen". I think the little niggles in Linux are worth it for having a free (as in freedom) OS, but as it turns out, most people don't value that.
The UX/UI of Windows 98 is far, far ahead of whatever Linux DWM we have today. It's nowhere near close. My KDE is usable but everything feels off, from icon shapes and sizes to mouse cursor icons, mouse cursor speed, the way settings are organised, almost everything. And it's not a matter of habit, as I've been on KDE for years, and I kept trying to make it work. Windows just clicks out of the box, it's more comfortable.
Microsoft, once upon a time, put an enormous amount of money into creating a user experience that makes sense for a maximum amount of people. Even though this experience suffered enormously over the last decade, it's still better than everything else, including OSX. And I'm not praising Microsoft, everyone else (including Canonical) is just that bad.
It's the easiest route. On non-Apple computers, Windows is already installed. (It takes a bit of effort to buy a computer without an OS.) Microsoft makes it easy for a user to get Microsoft 365. With that, users have the computer they have at the office and are familiar with. Most are just surfing the web and writing an occasional letter, anyway. That doesn't include people who are perfectly fine with a Chromebook or just their phone.
Finding a Linux distribution, downloading it, putting it on a USB stick (or burning a disc), then installing it is not simple for most people. (Don't even ask them to verify the checksum.)
I think that the market (though it is certainly irrational) is moving away from windows. It's very likely the reason why this post was written and they're now (4+ years after the release windows 11) addressing even the most basic complaints (like the taskbar). I have zero faith that the attitudes driving the fundamental problems that brought us to the point where MS has to be genuinely worried about the future of Window's market share have changed.
Microsoft still sees your computer as belonging to them. They still feel entitled to all of your data and the contents of your hard drive. They still want to use their OS as an ad platform. They're still deeply envious of Apple and want an app store with similar control over what you can and can't install on your computer.
Like you, they've lost me. The moment any meaningful amount of gaming was viable on linux they lost the only thing that could have kept me using Windows in any capacity (and even then my gaming PC would have been treated like a console. Almost zero personal info and mostly offline).
They fucked up badly and promises like "you can move your taskbar" or "we'll be less obnoxious with updates" is not going to being me back.
The only winning move is not to play - leave behind all the Windows and Apples garbage, and life gets remarkably better. I'm almost 6 months in switching from Windows to Linux and it's so awesome that my computer doesn't fight me anymore. I've done 10% of the troubleshooting under Linux that I had to do under Windows, and that was just early on; once things work, they stay working, and there's no sense of dread about what was going to break next after every patch Tuesday.
Look.
I guess we all care about software business here.
And computer? It’s what consumers buy from store. Preferably in cybermonday or similar sale.
To run the software they ran on their previous computer.
They hope slightly faster. But honestly? They couldnt tell. Anyway the new computer is shinier.
OS? What’s that? (They honestly could not care less)
They dont buy apple for the os. They buy it for the brand.
The context here is the average user, so you need to consider if this they share this perspective of fundamentally inferiority that is so obvious to you.
Here's a litmus test: Put your non-programmer relative in front of each, have them do some common simple tasks, like print an email on their printer, and ask them.
You are *NOT* an average user.
edit: people are focusing on the printer too much. my point was some arbitrary task they would be common to an average user. OMMIT THE PRINTER. After they use their computer as they normally would for a week, what is it exactly that so clearly results in their perception of "obviously inferiority"? My claim is somewhere between nothing and the very first thing to go wrong.
2. Linux has, historically, been fundamentally inferior for some purposes. Lots of (sometimes very expensive) equipment has proprietary drivers that only run on windows. You'll find old versions of windows running hardware in labs all over the world. This is minor though, compared to the mainstream office and home user, as well as gamers. If a typical joe uses windows and MS office at work, its only natural to do the same thing at home. Why learn a new OS for your home computer if you're only using it a few hours a week? Gamers, of course, are still locked into Windows for some titles despite Steam's best efforts. Some gaming hardware still doesn't support Linux properly (I'm looking at you, Razer). Linux is getting really close to Windows for gaming though.
3. Windows was actually a pretty nice OS for a while, until the recent slide into Microslop silliness.
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"Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus: You will see us be more intentional about how and where Copilot integrates across Windows, focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted. As part of this, we are reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad."
While mealy-mouthed at best, I take this as indicating MS has finally started paying attention to the growing backlash and is going to back off on trying to AI ALL THE THINGS. A lot of users simply don't need or want Copilot everywhere. Many users also now have a compelling alternative in Linux. Inertia keeps them with Windows, but a significant irritant could make them switch. If MS wants to keep those users, they need to stop pushing AI so hard and focus on keeping the rest of Windows in good shape.
For folks who use odd-ball hardware, e.g., the new generation Wacom EMR stylus equipped Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 I'm writing this out on (really, using a stylus to write this out) it's pretty much the only option, which I wish was not the case.
That said, I bought a pair of Raspberry Pi 5s a while back, and am hopeful that the Soulscircuit Pilet I backed on Kickstarter will work well w/ a Wacom One, and if it does so, I'll upgrade to a Movink 13 or something similar.
The fun thing about the Mac is that technical people can do more or less whatever they want, while the out of the box experience is still super simple and easy for people who do not have a comfortable relationship with computing. This is a good thing.
Consider the easy integration you get with Apple headphones and Apple devices. Regular Bluetooth pairing is far more fiddly and annoying.
Consider how you'd set up easy use of a password manager across devices. This is "it just works" territory with the Apple ecosystem. It's awkward and weird on Windows. It's a giant DIY project on Linux.
This is why Apple succeeds. They think about end user experience far more than Microsoft does. Linux, as a non-product (this is not a ding), doesn't "think" about this at all, for the most part.
I DO think it's pretty obvious that desktop Linux would be much farther along had Apple not pivoted to a FreeBSD based OS a quarter century ago. That brought a lot of very technical people onto the platfor that would've otherwise gone to Linux. There was a time when any given tech conf was a sea of illuminated Apples on the backs of laptop screens, because getting your average LAMP stack running was trivial on a Mac and painful on Windows. It was an opportunity for Microsoft, but Ballmer couldn't see it, and so here we are.
I’m not seeing any brick and mortar stores selling Linux laptops or any mindshare for any Linux brand. Maybe if Ubuntu started selling hardware in supermarkets Linux would have a chance of capturing people’s consciousness outside of the power user / professional circles. But they’re years too late now.
My father is a 70-year-old software engineer who programs .NET Core in Notepad and builds using custom BAT files that build the project using csc (the outright compiler). He browses and copies files in the Windows Terminal. He is also accustomed to Linux since we deploy to it in our business, and he can do everything comfortably in the Linux terminal.
He trusts me almost blindly, yet I can’t convince him to swap to Linux even though every time he keeps fighting Windows. I'm actually fairly surprised since I'm certain he'd find himself at home almost immediately( he already is when managing servers)
I’m fairly sure it’s Notepad keeping him there, but I’ve told him there is also a Linux clone or Wine. I had been dabbling in Linux for 30 years, and it’s been about 7 or 8 years since I switched full-time and couldn’t be happier. But honestly, we're going to get there because it’s inevitable. It’s the only OS that's currently not wholly incentivized to "enshittify" itself and is actually improving at a pretty good pace due to Wayland's novelty fostering a plethora of alternative window managers.
I'm not a Windows fanboy by any stretch, but it is a remarkably resilient OS. Case in point: I took the OS drive (SATA SSD) from my old workstation and installed it into a laptop. This was a Dell 7910, with a dual CPU Xeon configuration, NVidia graphics card and ECC memory. The laptop the drive was transplanted into was an old T520. The OS was Windows 10. Firing it up, I expected a kernel panic given how different the drivers would be between the two and resigned myself to a couple of hours using the Recovery partition. To my surprise, it booted up to the desktop and automatically started installing the missing drivers. In the meantime, I could actually use the darn thing.
In all my years of using Linux, I have yet to see that work without a hitch. A chroot to modify fstab is usually the starting point, then comes the inevitable blacklist and driver removal. Linux LiveCDs come close, but this was a full fledged Windows install with custom swap file configurations, 10G network card, etc.
Barring all this user-hostile behaviour from MS, at the OS level, Windows seems well-engineered.
Pop! OS is definitely not ready for the average user in my opinion. Some common work-related apps I need like Citrix Workspace straight up don't work. Audio + Camera randomly give out in the middle of video conferences, only fixable by a complete reboot. Some things are only fixable in the terminal.
I use it as much as I can, but there is still work to be done. I agree that Windows is on the wrong path.
To call an ecosystem superficial evidence is puzzling to me. The ecosystem is -everything- for an operating system.
Developers, apps, distribution, users; all of it is ecosystem.
I installed linux mint on a new drive in January
Firefox was tearing awfully on just scrolling
Surely I just need to install Nvidia drivers
Install drivers, but they dont work due to some secure boot interaction with driver signing, that made me jump through quite a few hoops (thx to AI for walking me through it fairly well)
I'm sorry but an average person is not ready for this level of bs in their daily life
But since real users live at the level of the ecosystem, what's hard about understanding that they can't replace a lacking ecosystem with "inherent traits"?
You, I, and everyone on HN are all racecar drivers. Our view of Windows is heavily skewed by our technical knowledge, but it is exactly what it's supposed to be - the operating system of the masses. The masses will never love Linux...it's very philosophy is antithetical to what makes a good operating system for the average user. The idea that Linux could ever take serious ground from Windows is never going to happen. It is purely wishful thinking, but it will always have its place in infrastructure and for geeks like you and I.
All of that said, for daily driving, I'll take the Mercedes.
The reason is simple: Microsoft has a lock on PCs used by corporate and government employees, so the vast majority of people who use computers at work use Windows computers. And so they naturally buy the same kind of computer for home that they're used to using at work. People like me, who run Linux at home even though I'm forced to use Windows at work, are outliers. And probably always will be. So the only way for the Linux desktop to really take off would be for large corporate customers and governments to switch from Windows to Linux. I would love it if that happened, but I'm not holding my breath.
If your biggest innovation of a decade is a carbon copy of a feature introduced in NT 3.5 in 1994 AND THEN it turns out most serious people disable it because you cannot even copy a feature without introducing new vulnerabilities - that's a sign of quality.
I've completely replaced Windows with Bazzite since November and it's been great for me, but it's not been without issues. Those issues are doable for me, but if I put Bazzite, Fedora, Linux Mint or any of the other beginner friendly distros on anybody else's PC they'll encounter a roadblock that they won't know how to resolve and that'll taint their Linux experience. Not to mention spotty hardware drivers (I've had several wifi drivers just stop working with an update, which is infuriating if you don't have a reliable wired connection), volunteer software for many configurations (OpenRGB doesn't support my motherboard), nVidia drivers and finding alternatives to software people know and use like Office and Photoshop.
These might not seem like a big deal, but they're dealbreakers for many and they'd rather put up with some dodgy window resize behaviour or their OS spying on them.
Every time my swap is full the entire system freezes for a good second, sometimes it stays stuck, no way out besides rebooting, I've never experienced that in any other OS ever
It's impossible to get more than a few days of uptimes, it's like the ram is never ever freed, last time I had to reboot my mac I had close to one year of uptime.
A friend sent me a png to print, every time I open it with the image viewer it uses 100% of my memory instantly (10+gb), causing the system to freeze. The image is 700kb and opens fine on gimp
I completely understand why people stick to the alternatives, it's way too easy to "hold it wrong" with Linux
Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc.
I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.
The author of this commitment is the same person (Pavan Davuluri) spearheading move of Windows into an Agentic OS: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.
I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.
And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.
They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.
Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.
Saying and doing are very different. They have passed through the "fuck around" phase, and are entering the "find out" phase of this AI journey. Lots of companies are, suddenly.
My employer trained us all on the Gartner hype cycle, tested us on how to remain level-headed before and during the peak of unreasonable expectations and now every single manager in the company is drooling over AI, saying that "this is the future, join us or find another job" and I cannot wait for the curve to come back down to a sane level where intelligence rules behavior as much as it used to. We'll see.
We’ve certainly done the “fucking around” and now we'll see if we "find out" enough to regain our sanity and our humanity.
(that's an overstatement, early OS X were buggy too, but they just switched to Unix after OS9, so, understandable.)
it's just better than Windows, which is just aggressively bad. (and I guess Linux is eating their gamers market with Proton? but I am not a gamer)
They are not even acknowledging that feedback is negative. They make it sound like a love fest where users love windows so much that they want to make it even better.
How is it even possible to spend 4-5 seconds to show a list of files in a local freaking folder?
No. "Commitment" in corporate speak is a synonym for "absolute lack of intention". That's why corps 'commit' to reducing emissions, treating employees fairly, etc, ie. to all the things they will not do. But no suit 'commits' to making money. They just make money. It's just a superficial linguistic gesture. Shakespeare got it.
That's what a corporation does.
Even with their proposed “improvements” to Windows Update it would remain inferior in principle to what it was in Windows 7 (or 8 which I never used) and prior when you could “pause” updates indefinitely or, in non-dystopian terms, refuse them. If a third party, even one that you trust, can mandate changes to the software on your computer, then it is not really your computer.
My next laptop will be a MacBook Pro.
My Surface Laptop 5 will be collecting dust in case I need it, but that’s highly unlikely.
I think OS level integrations that are opt-in, not opt-out, may even be popular. But they have to be done carefully and tastefully.
Funnily enough, there's a bug that's affecting all MacBook users in my company (does not wake after lid down overnight). Apparently the culprit is windows defender installed in the MacBooks. Corporate, you know...
In fact, basically any feature added since Windows 10 is probably unwanted.
Sure both have their quirks, but it's just wild how much Windows goes out of its way to be annoying. From a billion startup notifications to basic UI stuff to copilot and the list goes on.
No, I don't need you to summarize a two sentence email. How about I move emails to folders and you start to learn the patterns? Or which alert emails I want to ignore? Or who asked me something last week and I forgot to respond? Or which emails I should look at first after a vacation? Etc.
Gen AI has even more power at task generation than at content generation. Imagine running Photoshop or Final Cut Pro via prompts. People seem squeamish because so far the Copilot entrypoints have been encouraging tacky text & image content generation, like Clippy. But imo that’s the weakest and most sensitive application.
V1 is often not very good, for any new application.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.
So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.
MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.
Now that people have phones as their principal computing devices and 90% of enterprise software runs in a browser the biggest thing helping Microsoft keep their share is AD (or whatever it's called these days, Copilot Entra ID 365?).
If someone disrupts their business by releasing a stripped-down OS that you don't even need GPOs to lock tight and a companion comprehensive IAM solution that works with iOS/Android as well, I can see Windows quickly degrading to become the "we keep one Windows PC around to control this widget from 2022" OS.
Yet it was the end users that forced enterprise to embrace the iPhone, not the other way around.
If her vision was the only driver, we'd still be rocking Blackberries.
The continual recall/ai push from Microsoft has not helped at all and is pretty gross. There is a way to do a “recall” style thing that some folks will really want if they can trust it. The msft approach has been the opposite of that.
Windows 11 is finally catching up to MATE desktop (which is maintained possibly by a single guy from their basement), what a time to be alive!
… this was a feature in Windows 95. I didn't even realize they'd removed it! Is the author too young to remember a time when the start bar was positionable…?
… to then follow "we listed to your feedback" with "more AI everywhere" … it's satire … right? Right?!
No automatic restarts! I understand that in our security patching world that patching and restarting automatically is the default, fine, but there absolutely should be a dead simple way of disabling auto restarts in settings. I'm fine if it pesters me to restart or whatever, perhaps with growing alarm the longer I wait, but it should always be optional in the end. There are just no words for how bad it can be for mission critical workloads when your computer restarts without your consent. Please make disabling this simple.
If you make it possible to defer updates indefinitely, users will. Guaranteed. Doesn't matter how urgent or critical the update is, how bad the bug or vulnerability it patches is, how disastrous the consequences may be: they'll never, ever voluntarily apply them.
If you're running a server, and willing to accept the risk of deferral because 1) you're in a better position to assess the risk and apply compensating controls than a regular user is, and 2) you're OK accepting the personal risk of having to explain to your boss why you kept deferring the urgent patch until after it blew up in your face, then yes, you should have a control to delay or disable it.
But end users? No. I use to believe otherwise, but now I've seen far, far too many cases where people train themselves to click "Delay 1 day" without even consciously seeing the dialog.
Windows isn't MacOS that runs on set of verified configurations - it runs on variety of hardware with vendor drivers and other software. That combined may cause issues but so lack of testing - we know that Microsoft in its wisdom dismantled QA and replaced it with this prosthetics of enthusiasts community that all the time suggest "sfc /scannow". Now they put Charlie Bell in role of "engineering quality" position but I have no hope that something will change with a good outcome for users.
And users should be again allowed to avoid updates which were proven to cause issues - that's the fundamental need here. Deterring a scheduled action isn't enough.
Considering Windows behavior, all the telemetry that was smuggled to W7 in poorly described updates, I see how appealing is to Microsoft to use this big updates package format and add features, components which surely would be avoided by experienced users. Since W10 and maybe even partially during W7 they're fighting their users when it comes to control over operating system.
I'm on CachyOS now but I still get calls from friends who struggle with all this MS circus. Recently, this friend lost data to bitlocker encrypted machine because she didn't had backup keys. She's that kind of user that doesn't know what happens on the screen beside text processor and web browser - everything is a nuance that has to be quickly dealt with by "next next done" tactic. Should she be more patient and read what's being displayed on the screen - sure but I've told her that years ago.
Anyway, CachyOS: arch-update renders a popup in KDE about recommended restart, sometimes update process requires restarting services and users can select ones it needs or everything listed altogether. There's snapshots support for updates: https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/btrfs_snapshots/ and pretty sure other distributions have this as an option as well.
This is basically: we’re doing the absolute minimum possible to claim we’re listening to users while still pursuing exactly what we were doing before. We realized we just need to boil the frog a little slower.
If they were hoping this would help shake microslop, they’re in trouble.
Sorry Microsoft, some people already transfer to a different train because you offered a crazy ride.
... like every OS ever.
And when all is good and everybody's too busy to pay attention we'll force feed you an update that will revert all changes to what we want.
> all while reducing update noise with fewer automatic restarts and notifications.
Pause for longer.. why not just stop. And resume when wanted.
Fewer automatic restart. What about no automatic restart.
I couldn't read any further. Mind bended leadership to think this sort of wording after the obvious fiasco would make users hopeful.
I stopped using windows personally 15 years ago. My mental health improved right away. Forced to use Windows at work, I finally got liberated 4 years ago and my mental health got even better. I refuse since then employment forcing me to use this OS. It's a health hazard, always has been.
Because most regular people will never choose to turn them back on, that’s why. We already know what the world looks like when millions of computers run an unsecured OS. Last I heard, a stock Windows 98 machine lasted 30 seconds online before being compromised. Automatic updates are good, and they’re here to stay.
Average computer owners don't really care about their machines, let alone understand them. Computers are appliances to them like their washing machines and microwaves.
> More direct control over updates, including the ability to pause updates for as long as you need
So it does sound like you'll be able to pause updates forever and also therefore not automatically reboot.
It resumes when wanted /by MS/ - to protect their brand from cyberattack.
The user preference is now secondary.
I was forced to work on windows for years too, it's like working with a tool that's broken and repaired with duct tape. You can't stop thinking it's amateurish and this product should have perished a long time ago.
Switching everything to apple was like a breath of air, sadly it's starting to become bad. Every updates brought stuff that felt out of place but last one is complete nonsense..
And it's not like there is much competition, it's either'duct tape' windows, macos or 'broken' Linux.
Don’t listen to the smooth talk. Plan an exit strategy now, before you need it later.
MMC snapins haven't been touched in years and still can't even sort those columns properly, search and filtering is terrible
Control panel is still not migrated over to settings after 12 years nor you can open two settings apps.
Error messages in modern apps are just the worst, how about printing valuable error messages than "something is wrong"?
Fixing dark patterns like taking over your screen with popups and taking over the application header so you can't close windows unless you go to the task manager. First time opening edge shows a really annoying splash screen + home page is filled with ads.
Also where are 5 second boot times on NVMe SSDs? Anything more is just sloppy.
Just to list a few pet peeves
But let's see if they can even fix things they've mentioned in the post, though that's like 1/4 of the issues that should be fixed.
They have a bunch of replacements, all of which are slow as molasses and not feature complete.
1. Server Manager.
2. Windows Admin Centre.
3. Settings App (same as desktop).
4. PowerShell
5. DSC
6. Azure Arc
There's also Active Directory Administrative Center which never replaced dsa.msc for me or anyone I've ever worked with.
Similarly, there's like half a dozen performance monitor tools for Windows Server, and they're all terrible and are missing critical features.
Control panel is still not migrated over to settings after 12 years nor you can open two settings apps.
I wish they'd migrate back to the old Control Panel...
Error messages in modern apps are just the worst
...as the new one is a "modern app" and about as horrible as they come.
I think this is good, because they're talking about removing (hideously inappropriate) react and other web technologies from core OS components, and using proper native OS calls instead. But I'm not familiar with WinUI3. I only know Win32. Is WinUI3 a flash-in-the-pan system like their other UI attempts, or is it decent and stable?
If you stay in the happy path, it's decent, better than it used to be. Microsoft does seem committed to it, they're slowly converting Windows apps to WinUI 3.
That said, the team is clearly understaffed; there are long-standing unresolved bugs, just search for "memory leak" on their GitHub issue tracker. Also, native, non-.NET support is definitely an afterthought, it's barely documented and the tooling is super awkward. But at least, unlike WPF, it exists.
There's nothing wrong with Win32 (and everything wrong with the newer stuff); "interaction latency" was just fine on a single-core 33MHz 486 running Windows 95.
It's not only steered me off of Windows, but Azure, Office, and anything else with the Microsoft name on it. I'll do my best to steer family and business customers off likewise.
Trust is earned over years, and whoever the execs are that pushed all these shitty short-term squeezes on their customers, the company now gets to pay the reputational price.
It is not that everything should stay the same, that is one choice, but there needs to be a steward that says, hey our right click menu on the desktop has an SLA of 100ms to open, it doesn't matter which features you put in there, if something causes it to be slow, kill it.
Can I access basic apps that are table stakes for an OS, an editor, screenshots etc without popups for unrelated nonsense. If you fail at that, then as a user I get confused. I am used to just being able to note down some text, why am I asked to transcribe with Copilot or login to microsoft.
It is clear that the adoption of Copilot was measured in activations, and as such was pushed in as many places as possible, simply because they needed all that exposure to meet their targets. Windows was not just a product but a funnel to other offerings and that cannibalized windows even more than it was previously.
I've got a slight bias, as I haven't had windows installed in about 10 years, but when I've helped my family with their issues, it is clear how much of a shitshow it actually is.
I wonder if this will include being able to put it on the non-primary display once again. It's not mentioned, but that was one of the biggest frustrations with Windows 11. It seems their focus is exclusively on single display devices.
It also ruined my flow for my flight sim until I found a workaround. The fullscreen window wishes to launch to the primary display, which means losing the useful bits of the taskbar.
I love what they're saying, but my faith in them is very, very is low.
I had to dig around because I could not remember since when I take this stuff - putting as many toolbars as you'd like anywhere on multiple monitors you feel like as granted and yes, 14 years ago xfce 4.10 was released. Time flies, I guess.
However, saying you're committed is not the same as being committed.
Furrowing your brow and saying you'll try harder, even when you mean it, doesn't necessarily work, either.
It needs trade-offs, and a willingness for abandon certain things as trade-offs. It requires an honest assessment.
Stop updating the system every 5 minutes, stop with the advertising, stop with the user is the product mentality. Stop changing the interface. Stop with requiring a user account. Stop with the all your data are belong to us. Simplify.
None of this will happen, of course. Corporate imperatives militate against it.
Wanna improve Windows? How about having a two-year release cadence? Developers can get a technology preview, full of cavaet emptor achey breaky changes if they want. This allows them to develop for the next release.
Sync the development tools (more importantly the libraries) like C++ in with the release. Include those libraries. The pay-off is, as if by magic, if a user downloads a program for Windows N, it will work. No extra libraries will be required because they'll already be included in the OS.
Great!
At the very least, don't forget my font setting on the update.
Personal computing is a rare niche these days thanks to the majority who have chosen to give over the personal aspect to the privacy hostile duopoly of MS and Apple (while celebrating doing so) who hold the leash.
The feedback/forum tool, has been a thing for years. Submited many bugs that I wanted fixed, and always been ignored.
Thanks, but Im not looking back.
I am doing my part - I managed to get 6 people in my family and friend group off Windows onto Debian last year.
All positive feedback so far :).
Sure it's only a small victory - but a meaningful one to me.
It would be fine if the underlying engineering had any sort of merit. It doesn’t. They cannot even handle scheduling in asymmetric SOC setups (big-little, dual CCD with 3D V-cache). Linux and macOS have solved this years ago.
The only access you can give to an anticheat is exactly what you’d also give to an antimalware - unnecessarily broad. Does this trillion dollar company even understand the basics of security?
I bought an Xbox Ally X to play game pass games on the go, and I kid you not, I couldn’t get to a point where I was installing games until 17 hours of ownership. In stark contrast, I was downloading a game at minute 16 with a steam Deck.
Once Nvidia solves for the DX12 performance in Linux, I will exorcise my computer of Windows for good. And for the games that do not support anticheat on Linux, well, I’ll just not play them. I have zero dependence on commercial crapware that Adobe releases. Looking forward to living without Windows!
I wish Windows ceases to exist in consumer hardware. Stick to enterprise laptops and stay there.
How about, turn it off by default?
Just this past January I implemented something on my workstation I should've done a long time ago: outbound filtering all network traffic via so-called 'Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security'. I've also skipped more Insider builds in the past two months than I have in the past 11 years.
The only thing keeping me around at this point is the migration overhead and (at least I tell myself) window 'snapping'.
I went back to windows, using WSL in 2017. In 2023 I got sick of how everything was getting progressively worse and switched to linux (which has window snapping). I'm never looking back.
- MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating...
- Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.
Also, why couldn't they make this announcement as they release the taskbar change. Taking away the most basic features and bringing a few back doesn't mean things are improving, it means things are getting petty.
There is no reason for the start menu to take 2 seconds to show up on a computer with 8 CPUs running at 4GHz. We all know that they're completely half-assing everything now.
Would you settle for 2 out of 3? UX is improving, and things get more polished every year, but we've mostly settled on shoving things into some sort of package (container, flatpak, snap) alongside all its dependencies specifically so we don't have to actually stabilize any sort of ABI
Switched to Linux on my personal devices 2 years ago and using Ubuntu and PopOS! on two different laptops. I've had very small number of issues. Can't understand people moving to Mac - it is the same messed half backed OS as both Windows and Linux (flavors). With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes.
With Linux at least I don't have to worry about privacy.
> With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes. I think this point is really it. What in the past needed a 40min google search to fix something, llms now fix it in seconds.
Which just tells me what I already know - Windows is actively hostile to power users, and they should be on Linux. Leave Windows for the less technically confident who need that stuff hidden away.
I can use my computer as a tool to do my craft and I’m not constantly sucked in ai features, news, or external search results, if I don’t want it.
OS stands for operating system, Microsoft is not that for me.
I wouldn’t know how to ever go back. I really hope I’m not forced to for some reason.
Windows is a fabulous operating system. I encourage people to see it as a tool and as an engineering marvel, rather than as an enemy or target of ridicule. I’ve been tremendously productive on Windows, and I have run every desktop OS , including Gentoo (when it used to take 2+ days to compile), BeOS, OS2 , Redhat on Power PC, FreeBSD and loads of niche operating systems.
If you like Operating systems, and hate Windows, I encourage you to read Show Stoppers about Dave Cutler making NT. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and will probably convert you from a Windows hater to an NT Kernel appreciator.
Like you, I make the above comment based on my long experience from the IBM 360 through to Assembler, CP/M, OS/2, VAX, Linux and many others including Win 95, NT, W2K through to the present.
What you fail to acknowledge is that Microsoft has changed the Windows paradigm to such an extent that many users (but far from all) can no longer accept the horribly onerous terms and conditions imposed by Microsoft for the use of its operating system.
This is now a political issue. With Windows, Microsoft has by far a monopoly on desktop operating systems which amounts to many millions of users. Its monopoly means that any effective competition by way of a truly API-compatible software product simply cannot emerge (eg: ReactOS has been lingering in the wilderness for over a quarter century). In effect, with enforced lock-in, Microsoft has now hijacked—kidnapped—the user environment and experience then exploited the spoils for its own financial benefit.
A good analogy would be an ongoing patent on the position and layout order of the brake and accelerator pedals in vehicles with royalties payable to use them. Other manufacturers cannot innovate as different systems would cause confusion and thus be unsafe. In case you're wondering that's a definition of a monopoly.
Microsoft is not only forcing users to work in ways they do not want to work but also it's now milking and robbing millions of them of their privacy for its own financial advantage. Users no longer have an option to remain as they were and are coerced to upgrade from older less restrictive versions of Windows because Microsoft deliberately invokes planned obsolescence by not updating drivers nor supporting newer hardware in those earlier versions. Simply, Microsoft forces users to move to a more controlled and restrictive environments.
Ethically and environmentally that is unacceptable, and in any political system that isn't compromised by lobbying and kickbacks such bad behavior would be penalized.
Microsoft knows full well all that and that for users to escape its clutches they have to jump over barriers and hurdles that are practically impossible to navigate, they thus destined to remain captured in their unwanted dystopian environment. That's the narrative—it's Big Tech's plan, and grudgingly I have to admit it's brilliantly effective.
To undo this enforced lock-in and for everyone to escape Microsoft's clutches it would take billions of manhours of effort—time that would be much more productive spent elsewhere. Clearly, that's not going to happen. Right, coercion and exploitation pays off big-time; again, 'kidnapping' sums up Microsoft's actions to a tee.
Given the out-of-control behavior and damage done by Microsoft and other Big Tech players a point of inflection has been reached, it's now a political matter and the perpetrators will find the momentum very difficult to reverse completely. Cory Doctorow's 'enshitification' captures the zeitgeist along what needs to be done to bring Big Tech to heel.
It may take decades but at least it's a beginning.
Not only do the Big Tech monopolies have to be broken up but those responsible for conceiving and implementing the abuse in the first instance must be bought to account, hopefully by landing them in the slammer. What's happened isn't competitive capitalism as work but sheer exploitation and Big Tech's at the center of it.
If you think I'm bitter about this then you'd be correct, I am. Whenever I think of the many thousands of hours I've spent bypassing unwarranted and unreasonable restrictions brought on by coroprate greed and fixing crappy enshitified software my blood boils. That time should have been spent on more productive endeavors such as providing users with better programs and systems. Seems you've led a charmed working life not experienced by most of us.
Given your stated experience I should not have to refresh your memory of early Microsoft Windows EULAs (NT, W2K etc.) which incorporated terms to the effect "no user information will be sent to Microsoft". Now compare that with the Windows 11 EULA/terms and conditions, forced online user accounts etc. What has now happened with Windows 11 is the antithesis—a complete reversal—of the earlier paradigm. Here, one's once independence has been traded for lock-in and expensive rent models with exit conditions that are almost impossible to exercise in any practical way.
Seems you're quite content with this.
What's relevant here is that if your experience is as you've stated then you will be well aware of these glaring issues, so that raises the question of your dismissive attitude to the problems. Thus it's reasonable to assume it's highly likely you're more than just part of the Windows Insider program, probably an employee or such. Perhaps even AI generated content.
I apologize if I'm wrong.
That's your prerogative and no one questions your right. Presumably it pays well, but I'd foreshadow that as time marches on you'll find yourself more and more on the outer.
Good luck to you, you might need it.
Spoken like a true AI.
Microsoft Copilot 365 Operating System App is just trash, plain and simple.
* We're going to keep shoving AI and copilot in your face in every corner of the system whether you want it or not. It's what we want after all. Please subscribe to copilot now or 3 days later.
* We're going to continue vibe coding core system components and interface elements in JavaScript to minimize our developer costs. Just get over it already.
I think it would have been useful for them to have really made a proper effort at modularising Windows along the lines of how Linux distributions and the BSDs do things. I can't see any way of recovery from the bloated mess they have created; they can't keep cramming any more in, it's an unstable, unusable and untestable mess.
> Craft
> To us, craft is the discipline that turns functional products into loved ones through usability, polish, coherence and refinement.
> This year, you will see us invest in raising the bar on the overall usability of the experience, with more opportunities for personalization, less noise, less distraction and more control across the OS. That includes being thoughtful about how and where we bring AI into Windows, leading with transparency, choice and control, so that new capabilities enhance the experience rather than complicate it.
I gave up a long time ago hoping Windows would get better. At this point, I just hope it does not get worse.
Only a public statement of "deepest possible rethink in attitude" from Satya Nadella would mean a different future for Windows.
Whatever this is - which is mostly weasel words - will fizzle and fade.
On one hand, Windows has pressure to be something that "just works" like an iPad used to be - users can't screw it up. This is what enterprises want for the daily drivers of their massive user populations.
OTOH, Windows has pressure to be this highly customizable tool for savvy high-agency individuals. This is what we all want.
I can empathize with both needs, for sure, but it is a constant war. They're doing alright, considering.
They may say they're backing off now, but it's hard to trust them. Will they just do the same thing with whatever the next tech trend is?
I think instead there's a deliberate attempt to transform the entire experience into an agentic-driven UI to replace the organization of the UI elements. In other words, tell the AI you want to open X, you want Y changed in settings, etc. Users don't want this, and it doesn't matter - it turns Windows into a sort of ad-serving, auto-updating, spying operating system that behaves more like an appliance.
I'm looking forward to ditching it as my only reason was gaming on my Nvidia hardware, and now Linux is ready (or so they tell me).
But people raised on this 'new' Windows experience will never have known anything different. People-who-are-not-us, the average people, don't mind ads, being spied on, and being told what to watch.
Isn't popularity of TikTok, the rampant posting of personal stuff on social media, and the like enough evidence?
We're going to all turn into Richard Stallman (although I heard a rumor bathing is as distasteful as Windows to him).
“More fluid and responsive app interactions: Reducing interaction latency by moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework.
* Improving the shared UI infrastructure that Windows experiences rely on, reducing interaction latency and overhead at the platform level
* Faster responsiveness in core Windows experiences like the Start menu, by moving more experiences to WinUI3”
Still, each time I install Ubuntu I discover unpolished side of Linux that makes it harder to recommend to the non technical user. After install I always need to figure something out, with Wayland the graphic stack is complex so even basic remote control (including the built in one) becomes a complex task.
For governments: We already see some shift to OSS and non-US from all sort of reasons.
For businesses: Tech companies are more agile to changing stacks and devices. But traditional business are less easy to switch.
For private users: Younger generation will shape the future of the above. But there’s no real OS lock in today for general use. The MacBook Neo is great investment by Apple. Google might also introduce eventually something that fuse ChromeOS and Android in a way that will spark this discussion again. AI companies already shaping some ideas that will change OS workflows (yet OS product managers shouldn’t try to shove things as it is now - also mentioned in the above post)
Anyway, future of OS will be very interesting
Microsoft will continue to move in that direction in various overt and covert manners, and any so-called responding to what users wants is just a charade.
Never mind just using the computer without a Microsoft account.
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer
I wonder how many PhDs that will take.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047
Microsoft's PR team is in damage control mode right now.
Some commenters have pointed out that it's in response to the release of the Macbook Neo. I would argue that, if people were satisfied with the Windows OS, they wouldn't feel the need to jump ship. Ditto for Linux/SteamOS.
Other likely confounding factors:
The unnecessarily different hardware requirements of Windows 11, combined with Windows 10 Home reaching EOL in the United States, likely left some users feeling alienated.
The temporary-but-still-painful hardware cost crunch puts more pressure on software developers to improve their software on existing hardware rather than hoping their users will upgrade.
I press snooze and get on with my day
The fix is upside down UI?
fire most of your leads & new programmers.
hire back anyone willing to come back with competence.
return to the Windows 10 LTSC codebase.
try again.
I used Windows since Windows 95 (back in '96, I was 5 years old).
But still having regular blue screens come back with Windows 11..
I am better off selling my 64GB of RAM, than Windows Defender eating a third of it at random times
I still don't know how to create a native app so inefficient that, it needs to take more than 500 milliseconds to open a directory
This would be great. It's still easy to freeze up File Explorer when moving thousands of files. The same operation from the command line works fine.
That said, it's completely rudderless. How important is an operating system anymore anyway when most applications are just an Electron app anyway? What does consumer Windows provide Microsoft anymore besides a gateway to Office 365 and other actually profitable services?
They also clearly fell asleep at the wheel on things like gaming. The future is clearly Linux-based.
And on the hardware front, Microsoft seemed to have given up on their own consumer gear, and their partners have left them out to dry yet again.
RHEL is mostly what you will see @ Corpo, with some occasional SUSE for Europeans. Given that Fedora is the upstream for RHEL (and no snapd), it is quite well supported. AFAIK, it's also what Linus Torvalds has ran for a long while now.
What finally pushed me to linux was because specifically in my narrow usecases it's just plain better, but if we were to completely ignore that, even if linux was worse, I just don't want to support evil companies anymore.
Now I'll admit that this is what AI would say, but it's not always about what is better, it's about sending a message, a message that microsoft appears to have heard loud and clear, however, we will have to see if this is just PR or not.
These people don’t even know their own product.
>Today, I’m sharing what we are doing in response.
Just these words are already off putting. The extremely careful wording to avoid anything minimally resembling recognizing an issue.
It's ok to say we fucked up. It's empowering. Not being able to do it is a huge red flag.
Their commitments here seem to try to bring windows back to what it was when they still had their QA teams.
Someone in the comments here said nobody loves Windows. I probably did love Windows 7. I felt that it was the best of all worlds, huge support for hardware, basically rock solid on good hardware, gaming performance was fantastic.
In my opinion, Windows has spiraled downwards ever since 7. So much so that I finally switched to Linux permanently. Windows 11 and the forced AI integration was the absolute last straw for me.
The only thing that had really kept me on Windows lately was the gaming side of it. As I've gotten older, the games became less important. Now Proton pretty much gets me compatibility on 172 of 173 games in my steam library. Sure I had to search and find and compile my own controller driver, but it wasn't super painful, probably beyond the realms of an average user still.
This already existed. You took it away. If anything, you are back peddling and re-introducing it. But I don't care anymore. Made the switch to Linux and don't look back.
I am of the opinion that if the OS is not open source, it's not your device.
I have zero windows machines now and no promises will change that.
In this case it's the MacBook Neo that's causing them to get off their butts and reinvest in the quality of their software after letting it stagnate for years, but the pattern is the same: rest on their monopolistic laurels until competition makes them feel threatened, then magically start caring about their users again all of a sudden.
[1] https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/183701230/gates-of...
It could be turned into a great OS if they simply remove some things. Get rid of the ads, make copilot an optional component, stop trying to sell 365, let me turn off telemetry, etc.
> options when to update
> less horrible and slow file explorer
Finally, a desktop with feature parity of an OS from the year 2000.
Good on them for hearing complaints after 4+ years and addressing some of them.. maybe. They say they will at least.
I've used Windows since 3.1. Win 11 was the straw that broke the camel's back. I moved to CachyOS a few months ago and I honestly can't find a reason to switch back.
There's only one complaint that practically everyone has regarding what's required "during device setup," and it's not updates. I can't say I'm shocked that it's being ignored.
No, you mean reintroducing a capability that was standard in Windows for 20+ years? Stop acting like this is some new innovation being introduced in Windows 11.
Just a handful of things that all were taken for granted in Windows previously, doesn't even scratch the surface of issues with Windows 10/11, which removed tons of useful stuff and added garbage nobody wants.
Forced to use Windows 11 at work (well, or a Mac, but Windows 11 is just barely the lesser of two evils) and I hate it. I continue to use Windows 7 at home, which remains the best workstation OS and likely will forever.
More in the topic. Good that Windows Update will suck less. Did the Discover-something-or-other-imply less start-memu ads, I couldn't tell..
For now, I am so bitter about windows, that I just want it to stop being a thing
Guess not.
It's a shame, I'd appreciate more than a single 9 of uptime from GitHub (luckily I don't need to interact with anything else Microsoft related)
Even for gaming, the only reason why I would stick with windows is not an issue anymore. Thanks to Steam gaming just works on Linux. I'm using Omarchy and it's very easy.
I can't see ever going back to windows personally.
You could skip the "almost" if you had stuck to your guns on Windows Phone. It was a good phone OS, and we could have done without the iOS/Android duopoly, but MS chickened out.
I'd wish they did a more modular OS (explorer, browser, etc), keep it simple and streamline installing requirements as needed.
Why can't it be the opposite? Why can't I expect an update to run faster than the previous version?
I did not know you can't move the taskbar in windows 11... I literally lol'd. That type of shit is why I dumped gnome 3 a long time ago.
So they threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall, and this is the bit where some of it falls off.
Thankfully Ballmer failed and this isn’t even close to true. I, like a lot of highly technical professionals, have been Windows sober for many years now.
I think I'll return to moving my PC to Linux :)
The last performant Windows version was Windows 8, despite its UX flaws. It actually made old computers faster and it started going downhill with the very first Windows 10 Technical Preview. I doubt that MS will reach that level of performance and stability again.
Linux support for video games will eat their dinner.
As a happy Ubuntu user for 3 years who finally transitioned to macOS, I can't care less about the abomination that Windows became.
Typing three letters of the program name, seeing the program I want to start, typing the forth letter, and it’s gone.
Instead many suggestions for a web search
“Windows has lost its way! Move the task bar!”
Say what you want, but Microsoft has always explored and pushed boundaries of computing, but the company's aggressive nature is ultimately their downfall IMHO. Catering to business needs is understandable, but if all your relationships are adversarial, you're doomed to fail because nobody loves you.
Taskbar position? El-Oh-El. Sucks to be tone-deaf I guess. Good luck with adding more widget controls.
What a list of bangers!
Glad they're putting taskbar back into whatever sides. I despise my work Mac's single location at the bottom, wasteful waste of space. I've had icons on the left since Windows 95 and I like them there.
More control over ads? The whole widgets screen is quite literally just ads.
At this point I genuinely think people would be blown away at how much of a functional improvement it would be.
There would also be a lot of bewilderment for the younger generations, and people who aren't interested in actually using computers who don't think it looks "sleek" enough or whatever. But in terms of day to day quality of life, those old UIs just got the fuck out the way, and were obvious when you had to interact with it. I have some earned hate for the underlying windows OS, but in terms of UI and desktop, we didn't know what we had until it was taken away.
It's not sitting at 60-65% and has been slowly bleeding for the last 20 years or so. In my opinion, anyone who have figured out how to move his processes, has left the building and never checked back.
Now Windows is being attacked aggressively from multiple fronts:
- macbook neo. Apple is projected to sell roughly 5million of these this year. This is a segment that couldn't previously move out of Windows because of cost not Office.
- improvement in Linux (Desktop/Gaming): This will eat another chunk for people whom Linux didn't function previously.
- HarmonyOS Next. This is underestimated by the rest of the Western world. I think by 5-10 years most of China would have moved to its own OS. Windows highest marketshare is in Asia.
The idea that Microsoft can exist on Azure/Office alone is not valid, in my opinion. Especially for Office, Windows is your portal to the rest of Microsoft stack. If you use HarmonyOS, you'll like use their own Office system. From there, they'll own the rest of the stack.
tl;dr: MSFT is screwed and they know it. They are also going to do nothing about it.
Your commitment to quality is skin deep.
We’re not first time users, we don’t want Microsoft BOB as our UI, we don’t want ads and internet search “functionality” in our Start menu, we don’t want AI everywhere and we don’t want things hidden from us.
Make Windows 11 Pro for real pro users and 11 Home for new users. I hope a few people from MS are reading this, especially Mr Engineer.
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but I don’t care.
P.S. Yeah yeah guys, I know about Linux ;-)
Nothing
When did they get rid of that?
In 10 and prior you could even move it to other monitors, just by dragging and dropping it. It's baffling they thought that functionality was a bug that people wanted 'fixed'.
Back a decade or so, the Visual Studio experience was terrible, the team promised they were going to fix a lot of it, I didn't believe them, and they actually delivered. No VS is not perfect. But it was on a downward spiral and they got it out.
I hope they deliver now, and bring back my inner Windows fan which they eroded and then killed with the abomination that is current Win11.
The pushback which you are only now starting to perceive is being caused by an entire generation of Microsoft intentionally and actively positioning itself in conflict with its customers.
I understand that once you have a million customers, you can't really treat them right anymore. But Microsoft has not given a single shit about customer feedback, even in aggregate for decades now.
As I read this, all I can think is "too little, too late." I have watched in my workplace Windows go from being a product that we are happy to purchase to yet another piece of technology that we would simply replace were we not yoked to it.
I guess even now they probably still don't care. Microsoft will continue printing money until the sun burns out.
Ehm, what? Windows XP had this feature. Pretty sure that Vista and 7 did too. I had plenty of friends who used the taskbar in non-standard edges.
Did they recently REMOVE the feature and are now bragging about introducing this "new" feature, or am I missing something?
It completely ignores the huge UI regressions Windows has suffered over the last... 20 years?
Windows's UI ineptitude has reached crippling levels. Application windows lack title bars, so you frequently don't know what application you're looking at. Applications lack menus; critical functions are scattered all over the place behind hamburger buttons... and sometimes even further, under a "more" item in the menu the hamburger invokes (try saving a file you're viewing in Edge).
Applications eschew the tidy, readily comprehensible, familiar, and efficient File dialog in favor of a bizarre text-based pane consisting of crude, unlabeled boxes and horizontal lines... with no context as to where you are in the file system.
Then there are the baffling functional regressions. Here's one that wastes my time daily: You can't select multiple files in Explorer and say "Open with." WTF, this was old hat 30 years ago. Want to open several PNGs in Photoshop? NOPE, not anymore!
Just dismal.
This is how goodwill works. Easy to burn, hard to earn back. I’m not touching any products by Meta, Google or Microsoft, and none of them are getting me back on board with a cute blog post.
Otherwise it wouldn't take years to unbreak the simple stuff like taskbar positioning!
> Thank you for holding us to a high standard
"We" apologize for failing to do that!
> moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework.
Is that the framework that's incapable of the most basic frameworky thing - displaying non-blurry text and hopes that high-dpi screens will save us?
> Enhancing Search: Delivering faster, more accurate results with consistent search experience across Windows surfaces > Substantially lower latency for search,
Everything has existed for many years and solved the speed/latency! Some file managers were even smart enough to integrate it!
> Improving the Start and Taskbar experience: Making these core Windows surfaces more reliable, flexible and personalized
Similarly, Windhawk already exist, take that power and make it built-in and easier to mod/apply!
P.S. By the way, when have we retired programs and apps?
> File Explorer is one of the most used surfaces
Microsoft has proven itself the undisputed king of enshittification and a blog post will not change my mind on that.
Maybe my grandkids will give it a shot.
- Turn Notepad back into a text editor.
- Remove ads from your operating system. Yes it feels like a license to print money, but it makes your users hate your product.
- Stop charging money for Freecell and Minesweeper.
- Converge your three control panels back into one. The classic control panel was not broken.
- Drop the mandatory Microsoft User accounts. Nobody wants this except your bean counters.
- native quick launch bar
- killing telemetry
- killing UI kludge
- permitting non-MS apps again
Also there is one huge glaring omission in the article. The sneaky integration of ads embedded in the OS. I have thankfully never experienced this myself since I abandoned Windows before the ads became a thing.
I sometimes have to use Enterprise Windows 11 professionally, but I can’t ever see myself going back to it for any kind of personal computing. Basically Microsoft had a good thing and decided to enshitify it to death.
Really? it took "user feedback" for one of the world's best software companies to realize one of the most fundamental parts of the OS was broken?
I have been long on $MSFT for a while now, but my faith as an investor stands shook.
> Windows is as much yours as it is ours.
Microsoft has been inflicting unwanted crap on me for years now, and they keep expanding with more unwanted crap (even to the point of wanting to force people to have Microsoft accounts) as time goes on. Reading this line actually made me laugh out loud. No, Microsoft, you don't believe this even a little.
They aren’t trying to add Copilot in useful ways for their users. They’re forcing it into Notepad when they know it doesn’t fit there, because it might be your “entry” into their slop generator.
User experience be damned, these shareholders must have their value.
At work, I'm switching to Mac for the first time in my life. At home, I'm already gaming on Linux. Windows is dead to me.
Fix settings. Fix UI customization. Fix notifications. Fix search. Fix multitasking and network blocking. Fix sleep behavior.
I could go on. They need an entire year of house-cleaning before they add AI.
*reintroducing
Windows is terminal. Taskbar on the top isn't changing that. It has product manager rot. Good luck ousting the people with the power these days.
Also, Linux (via Android, micro computers everywhere and the vast internet) touches way more lives then Microsoft.
At this point in the article I realized I didn't care one bit and stopped reading
Tell us why it was removed in the first place, why it takes years to put it back and it's still future promises as of March 2026. That's just a clown show.
This can not possibly be true, in several dimensions/metrics. I understand that this is mostly marketing bluster, but holy cow are they delusional here.
I can't remember when Update became so intrusive and aggressive - Vista? - but it was the top annoyance for me personally.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:
Pfft. Still slow, react-based, and ad-riddled
> reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
Must have failed to meet the metrics goals
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
You can bet they will still flash the screen take-over riddled with all the dark patterns in the world to get you to upload all your files to their cloud "for backup"
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer [..] quicker launch experience:
Oh, the preloading of explorer into ram before it's launched? Lmao. Entirely embarassed by File Pilot https://filepilot.tech
gtfo.
Oh and stop resetting preferences on update.
""" ok copilot, implement these changes, make no mistakes """
Having learned absolutely nothing from their existing sins.
Seems more like FUD.
Welcome to the 90s?
They are so far off track. I'm basically never leaving Windows 10.
They are still investing in AI, when they should be investing in ARM.
Apple silon is winning developers, even enterprise and with NEO the entry level market where MS was king.
Frankly, the things they've listed as action items for the future are things that they should have been doing FROM THE BEGINNING.
Like, how on earth was
> Faster and more responsive Windows experiences
NOT a part of just the general release cycle of a major windows update? How was it they didn't notice that the file explorer experience in 11 was noticeably worse than windows 10 and the same hardware?
We all know the answer, it's because the highest priority wasn't a good UX, it was to make sure copilot was integrated into everything.
So long as microsoft management doesn't prioritize performance (and they clearly do not) this is just a natural endstate of any software. If you aren't focusing and paying your developers to make things faster and smoother, you'll get this sort of high memory consumption and janky applications. Making things not janky requires someone in management to care about that.
Fuck your weasel words
I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very frankly I prefer the developer experience on Windows, where you can write a (relatively) high-quality native desktop application with purely first-party tooling and release a single, tiny (~10^4 bytes) executable that quite literally runs anywhere. The Windows API surface area is huge and developers can write entire multi-domain programs without ever looking for a third-party library.
This probably sounds like a lot of copium, but I feel like recent events like the rising costs of memory and competition like the MacBook Neo will light a fire under Microsoft's arse. I really hope some of the AI overboard in Windows 11 is rolled back over the near future. They should migrate core Windows applications back to native and CLI technologies, actually support and maintain these without chasing the next big thing, and release frameworks for safer compiled languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin, and allocate more resources to F#.
Better support for F#, or really any language other than C# is a longshot though. Those resources were likely 'reallocated' to AI R&D indefinitely.
Nah, NT always had... mostly... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved inside of an operating system that actively hates me. But the core OS is cool.
On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.
> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus
Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions
This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer
See comment on task bar above.
> More control over widgets and feed experiences
Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.
On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:
- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.
- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.
- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.
- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.
- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.
- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps
- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.
- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.
- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.
I think the real issue is that MS doesn't view Windows primarily as an OS that should be invisible, out of the way -- with minimal "innovation" geared to sell MS products. The problem is that MS views Windows as a sales/marketing channel for their ads/apps/services.
LMAO
Can I change it's color, too? Amazing! /s
Microsoft appears completely bereft of creativity and innovation now.