Great!
Starting with Windows 11 26H2, the Start Menu will be removed and replaced with Copilot. In order to use a locally hosted app, an externally hosted LLM will need to be instructed to launch it. The reliability is phenomenal: our testing has shown it can launch the right app with 95% accuracy.
My take though is that Copilot does a better job with bash than it does with CMD.EXE or Powershell so the "AI Natives" will all ask it to install WSL 2 and then tell it to do things there.
On the other hand, Microsoft is famous for killing something good (like OneNote) but spamming the UI with numerous entry points that will make you think "this is some piece of crap that Microsoft is spamming because nobody in their right mind would want it." That they are getting some self-awareness of this is a good sign.
[1] I'd say Google's AI Mode gives consistently better answers (like use "vite-ignore" instead of writing a Vite plugin that doesn't work) than copilot with the reservation that if Google seems to get uncomfortable about a conversation it will end the conversation with a ten pack of search results whereas Copilot tries to simulate a person with healthy boundaries (e.g. "I will help you write a romance story but I won't help you write a sex scene")
And I could tell that. In one instance where I asked it to write a script that does a bunch of things, it provided a series of steps to do in the terminal. This is very off my typical experience with other chatbots. I immediately went to Claude which gave me a complete script that does exactly what I need.
At the very least, don't forget my font setting on the update.
Sorry Microsoft, some people already transfer to a different train because you offered a crazy ride.
... like every OS ever.
Don’t listen to the smooth talk. Plan an exit strategy now, before you need it later.
The idea that we'll all be forced off of Windows one day sounds like a dream, but so far we continue to be in a state where myself and many other are long past the point of wanting to leave, but we can't for some reason or another.
Microsoft knows that, which is why they've been able to do whatever they want and not worry about the consequences.
Even if you're not leaving the ecosystem anytime soon, you should always know where those lines are and what the landscape looks like on the other side of things.
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-...
Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus.
The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.
When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.
You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.
I think you and I have very different meanings of "intelligent", "understands" and "gets it done"
typing "open hackernews" into copilot instead of clicking the browser and typing hackernews?
99% of OS interactions already boil down to 2 clicks and a search phrase.
- "Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options"
- "Look at my household budget and find ways to be more frugal."
There are thousands of things I can think of when it comes to how an agentic OS would work better than the current Screen Keyboard paradigm. I mean all these things I could now do with Claude or Codex and some of these things I already do with these tools.
huh? ... this reads to me like you don't need an "agentic" OS to do the things you'd want to use an "agentic" OS for..?
like... it seems you just don't want a keyboard to do the same things you've already been doing? ... is that the crux of it?
> Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options
What part of this does an agentic OS help with? My OS doesn't know my travel preferences, family size, work schedule, etc.
These are more appropriate tasks for a smart assistant.
What specifically does an agentic OS UX look like beyond giving claude access to local files and a browser?
Providing the structure of a unified framework: APIs, safeguards, routing to the appropriate model or pipeline, and controlled access to devices and data. The capability is already there. What’s missing is a sane permission system that operates at the level of intent. Having used OpenClaw, that’s IMO the missing piece. It’s a fun experience, but in its current state I would not trust it to autonomously run any meaningful part of my life.
UX-wise, chat is kind of a crutch. It’s slow and inherently limiting. I imagine something closer to a natural, ongoing conversation paired with an execution layer: some sort of approval or review dashboard where planned actions are ready for approval or returned for refinment before they happen. Probably with a conservative moderator agent in the loop that flags things based on preferences and hard-coded policies.
Calling it an OS isn’t accurate, I agree. But that's how people will perceive it. Most people already think of the application layer on Android as "the OS," not the kernel or drivers. This will be the first-class interface on your device, so that’s what it gets called. It doesn’t mean browsers or dedicated applications go away.
Three years ago I would not have thought the IDE would stop being the application I spend most of my time in. Now it’s mostly a passive code viewer and Git browser.
Compare that to everyday workflows. Researching anything still feels incredibly antiquated. Buying a phone, planning a vacation, comparing options means opening dozens of tabs, copy-pasting specs or prices into spreadsheets, reading through fine print, dealing with low-quality or honestly untrustworthy reviews, checking distances manually on maps. It’s boring and tedious work.
Meanwhile, in a professional life, these systems already behave like a team of secretaries: always available, reasonably competent, and scalable. Not perfect, but easily good enough to offload a huge amount of cognitive overhead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmz67ErIRa4
i feel like someone high up in microsoft probably has this pinned in a epic or something somewhere
Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.
Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.
Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
As I use AI more and more to write code I find myself just implementing something myself more and more for this reason. By the time I have actually explained what I want in precise detail it's often faster to have just made the change myself.
Without enough detail SOTA models can often still get something working, but it's usually not the desired approach and causes problems later.
We've progressed an impressive lot since, say, the nineties when computers (and the internet) started to spread to the general consumer market but the last 10% or so of the way is what would really be the game changer. And if we believe Pareto, of course that is gonna be 90% of the work. We've barely scratched the surface.
perplexity keeps trying to get me to use "computer" and for the life of me I can't think of anything I'd actually do with it.
There's everything wrong when "agentic" means that the regular bread-and-butter functionality of the OS becomes unusable.
Can you provide an example of agentic functionality in Windows making regular bread-and-butter functionality become unusable?
See how that sounds a bit silly? It's because it presents a false dichotomy. That our choice is between either the current state of interfaces or an agentic system which strips away your autonomy and does it for you.
The only thing I'd add is that not only did he tweet the infamous tweet that caused the backlash, Pavan ridiculed those in the backlash (since deleted). Also, Satya still spews the same "agentic OS" narrative as recent as last week.
So, I hope for the best, but I don't plan on taking them at their word.
Look where we are now.
My reasoning is from bitter experience. I saw too many these honest talks/commitments - it always this pattern when product/company starts to decline. Suddenly somebody with technical background shows up talks about past mistakes and what need to fix. Even sometimes holds discussion, which is usually very reasonable. But as time goes there only cosmetic changes with excuses like lack of resources, market wind changed this time, too hard make changes due politics and etc.
What stands out to me is the organization needs to be accept that change is needed and 'walk the walk', and also that those efforts take time. I've no idea what things are in motion in MS, but I wonder how quickly they can turn the ship, how much momentum is in their current direction and how much force is in turning. Moving the taskbar seems like addressing a loud persistent talking point, but it's one among many. What's the timeline (even though windows version timing seems like 'when they need branding')? Win12? Win13?
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020204233701/http://www.comput...
They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.
Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.
And, yes, I am aware that Pro/Enterprise don't suffer from this, but a LOT of computers sold are Windows Home/OEM licenses. It impacts a ton of people.
How is it even possible to spend 4-5 seconds to show a list of files in a local freaking folder?
That's a why, but it raises more questions than it does answers.
I need that Drake meme here, where he's negative about the idea "Optimize the calculator layout to improve the UX" and very enthusiastic about the idea "Find ways to get incremental revenue from users of Calculator with ads or selling of data"
We're reaching Microslop levels we never thought possible. I actually think Claude Code would have done a better job.
Now all folders with media files open immediately. Also if you want no wait for video files folders, right click in the folder and select 'View -> Details or View -> List or some other option where it doesn't create thumbnails and it'll load even quicker.
Surely you don't mean remove all columns, and if you did you wouldn't have to also specify removing media metadata columns?
When such basic tasks are failing spectacularly, nobody can have any confidence that complex things can be achieved reliably. Instead of spying on their users and trying to squeeze more and more money from them, they should first focus on making a great product and work on making it better, not researching ways to enshitify things.
I'm sorry, this is very funny to me in the context of the person upthread arguing about how great "agentic OSes" are. Some people seem to believe that we're living in the future, but I'm pretty sure we're still stuck in Windows '95.
I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.
I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.
And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.
Yep. That stuff makes money (via upsells) so it will never be removed.
Online accounts are fine when optional, but unacceptable when forced.
Can you imagine actually using that as an excuse when managing one of the most important software companies in the world? I'm just in awe at how little self-relfectio they have at that company.
The implication is that they weren't focused on "genuinely useful and well-crafted" features 40 years into their company's history and it's unbelievable to read.
Maybe they thought they could get away without taskbar location customisation, but now they have to put that complexity back in.
(that's an overstatement, early OS X were buggy too, but they just switched to Unix after OS9, so, understandable.)
it's just better than Windows, which is just aggressively bad. (and I guess Linux is eating their gamers market with Proton? but I am not a gamer)
- The OS is getting buggier, with every large update getting press coverage on scary bugs.
- The OS is getting overbearing; constant nagging for upsells on Microsoft products with terrible attach rates.
- The OS is getting focused on hype; the latest trend is AI?Let's force a new button on people that will break decades-old workflows. Let's put AI everywhere.
- The OS is getting slow; there's no focus on speed and the place where 85% of the market resides (laptops) is getting completely trounced by Apple Silicon.
- The OS is getting squeezed; under 300$ it's all terrible e-waste in six months Chromebooks. Over 500$ Apple is aggressively entering the market with the Neo. Over 1,000$ Apple has owned a commanding share of the profits there for decades.
There are 994 more problems with Windows but I've made my point; there's just no end in sight to the problems with Windows. I haven't mentioned it's become a minor part of Microsoft's profits!
Saying and doing are very different. They have passed through the "fuck around" phase, and are entering the "find out" phase of this AI journey. Lots of companies are, suddenly.
My employer trained us all on the Gartner hype cycle, tested us on how to remain level-headed before and during the peak of unreasonable expectations and now every single manager in the company is drooling over AI, saying that "this is the future, join us or find another job" and I cannot wait for the curve to come back down to a sane level where intelligence rules behavior as much as it used to. We'll see.
We’ve certainly done the “fucking around” and now we'll see if we "find out" enough to regain our sanity and our humanity.
No. "Commitment" in corporate speak is a synonym for "absolute lack of intention". That's why corps 'commit' to reducing emissions, treating employees fairly, etc, ie. to all the things they will not do. But no suit 'commits' to making money. They just make money. It's just a superficial linguistic gesture. Shakespeare got it.
They are not 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.
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.
That's what a corporation does.
These people don’t even know their own product.
I wonder if this will include being able to put it on the non-primary display once again. It's not mentioned, but that was one of the biggest frustrations with Windows 11. It seems their focus is exclusively on single display devices.
It also ruined my flow for my flight sim until I found a workaround. The fullscreen window wishes to launch to the primary display, which means losing the useful bits of the taskbar.
I love what they're saying, but my faith in them is very, very is low.
I also have set the classic right-click menus.
There are some things about Windows 11 I like but a lot of it seems to be designed by people who use Mac OS (graphic designers).
I had to dig around because I could not remember since when I take this stuff - putting as many toolbars as you'd like anywhere on multiple monitors you feel like as granted and yes, 14 years ago xfce 4.10 was released. Time flies, I guess.
I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very frankly I prefer the developer experience on Windows, where you can write a (relatively) high-quality native desktop application with purely first-party tooling and release a single, tiny (~10^4 bytes) executable that quite literally runs anywhere. The Windows API surface area is huge and developers can write entire multi-domain programs without ever looking for a third-party library.
This probably sounds like a lot of copium, but I feel like recent events like the rising costs of memory and competition like the MacBook Neo will light a fire under Microsoft's arse. I really hope some of the AI overboard in Windows 11 is rolled back over the near future. They should migrate core Windows applications back to native and CLI technologies, actually support and maintain these without chasing the next big thing, and release frameworks for safer compiled languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin, and allocate more resources to F#.
Better support for F#, or really any language other than C# is a longshot though. Those resources were likely 'reallocated' to AI R&D indefinitely.
A good way to put it.
There are third-party tools that Microsoft really need to adopt to make Windows a bit nicer (WizTree, VoidTools Everything, adopt improvements from Total Commander, make more PowerToys default), but broadly it is still a decent OS. There are issues like slow `CloseHandle()` because of Defender (which needs to be a bit less zealous), and maybe more first-party adoption of WinGet.
On the other hand, every time I use desktop Linux I get some paper cut because some edge case that I just don't ever think about is broken on Linux, whether it be my multi-monitor high pixel density layout, my USB audio interface and peripherals, or my touchpad sensitivity and gestures that Windows was widely derided for in the early 2010s and suddenly after 'Precision Touchpads'[1] no one ever complained about again, or random GPU glitches even on Intel/AMD integrated graphics that I have literally never seen on the Windows desktop, or poor battery life (Windows somehow gets 2-3x the battery life of Linux).
Five years of Windows Insider made me pretty weary, though. Being downstream of Microsoft's changes is like reading tea leaves, WSL2 had broken networking for four years before any fix ever came up. I can appreciate the work that Microsoft does to ship a stable OS to millions of users, but my impatience got the better of me in the end. I switched to Linux waiting for WSL2 to get fixed, and while it's not a perfect experience it does consistently improve in a transparent and open manner.
Nah, NT always had... mostly... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved inside of an operating system that actively hates me. But the core OS is cool.
NTFS is plenty fast, even for thousands of small files; it is the Windows Defender file system filter driver that slows things down. Specifically, it slows down CloseHandle[1].
> NT's core tech
I'm not just talking about NT. I think most of the user mode is great, too. Office blows the pants off most other 'office' suites. D3D is generally very forward-looking, and many extensions are released on D3D first, sometimes years before they're ported to Vulkan (ray-tracing, mesh shaders, descriptor heaps, etc). Windows has had a superb low-latency audio subsystem in WASAPI since Vista, which is something like a decade before Linux got Pipewire. There are many other examples of random cool stuff in Windows that Linux 'rediscovered independently' but Windows got there much earlier just because of the sheer install base and surface area.
[1]: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/06/surprisingly-slow/
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.
- MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating...
- Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.
Also, why couldn't they make this announcement as they release the taskbar change. Taking away the most basic features and bringing a few back doesn't mean things are improving, it means things are getting petty.
There is no reason for the start menu to take 2 seconds to show up on a computer with 8 CPUs running at 4GHz. We all know that they're completely half-assing everything now.
Would you settle for 2 out of 3? UX is improving, and things get more polished every year, but we've mostly settled on shoving things into some sort of package (container, flatpak, snap) alongside all its dependencies specifically so we don't have to actually stabilize any sort of ABI
I was coincidentally just updating old softare I wrote, and I just ripped out the snap, RPM and Debs because I can't be bothered to maintain all of them.
But also, why wouldn't UI changes be possible if the source was open? I remember WindowBlinds and patched uxTheme.dll in the XP days, and that was /without/ source being available. So in this hypothetical, what's stopping hackers from backporting the things they like about 7 to 10 or adding more rounded translucency?
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.
> 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 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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
Windows 11 is finally catching up to MATE desktop (which is maintained possibly by a single guy from their basement), what a time to be alive!
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_microsoftwindows951994...
(only slightly sarcastic here ^^)
… 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?!
There’s nothing about C++ which makes it “the only programming language which can draw things on the left”.
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'.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/12/macos-sequoia-window-ti...
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.
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.
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...
“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”
How about, turn it off by default?
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 actually trust the Apple Intelligence, when off, doesn't exfiltrate my data.
I too would not want any unprompted access to my files.
At the end of the day this issue is that we don't trust the OS and we cannot easily validate how it is designed to behave.
Baked into the OS implies that it's integral to its operation in a way that the two are fundamentally inseparable. Having a global off switch implies that's not true.
There are other irritating baked in aspects of the newest macos and other recent versions that are arguably less avoidable, like Tahoe's entire UI design, or the Settings app.
Maybe it's doing stuff that doesn't rise to my level of attention, but it isn't actively annoying me.
Of course this might change in future. And Mac OS has other popups where there is no “skip” and only “remind me later”.
Nobody can predict what Apple will do tomorrow, but as of today, they aren't really pushing Siri/Apple intelligence really hard particularly after initial setup. None of most of the above for example.
I don't know what happens with Home Edition, but I though the pushback was mainly from Insider Preview?
You can't even select a cell on notepad without a freaking copilot button pooping up every single time. Same on word, that's maddening !
You could argue that windows isn't Microsoft copilot 365, but then, why do people even use windows ? It's always because of the office, my bad, copilot 365 suite.
I don’t use it often, but occasionally use the proofread option. Other than that, it stays out of my way.
In fact, basically any feature added since Windows 10 is probably unwanted.
Edit: but I am somewhat surprised that it’s qt and not the typical react electron bloat that Microsoft is slopping out. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
However if your interests lie in indie games or games that require a keyboard and mouse interface (precision shooters, grand strategy games, RTS games, etc) then having a PC that can play games is completely necessary. (I say this as someone who runs linux btw, not a windows defender).
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.
I think OS level integrations that are opt-in, not opt-out, may even be popular. But they have to be done carefully and tastefully.
Do you know what you'll be moving to to replace what Workspace provides (email/IdP/calendar/Chrome policy management?)
The whole Gemini thing is just a massive embarrassment for Google I really can't follow their thinking, you'd think that after the Google '+' debacle that they would have learned their lesson not to cannibalize your old products to launch a new one.
The closest to useful it's been is in the GCP console, but it seems to decide at random to forget context, and it might just be Gemini Flash with minimal thinking, which tends to mean it's just repeating things it's already said.
Funnily enough, there's a bug that's affecting all MacBook users in my company (does not wake after lid down overnight). Apparently the culprit is windows defender installed in the MacBooks. Corporate, you know...
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.
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.
"Can you help me reorganize my files?"
"Lol, no."
The fix is upside down UI?
https://web.archive.org/web/20080626154537/http://blog.seatt...
> So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is
> this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?
>
> So they told me that using the download page to
> download something was not something they anticipated.
>
> They told me to go to the main page search button
> and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).
>
> I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after
> 6 seconds of waiting up it came.
>
> I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go
> do the download.
>
> In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to
> solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a
> bunch of incantations.
> 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.
LMAO
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.
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.
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.
source: been there.
As a result, I do not currently think that Microsoft is consumer-oriented. They have reinforced my opinion by doing anti-consumer changes in XBOX and then saying that they were pro-gamer. Seems like a pattern.
Maybe they will prove me wrong; I am sun-setting my final host that's running their software soon.
Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.
So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.
MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.
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.
1. That's not how businesses work - the 10-year-old will be 28 when he becomes an IT manager, and their 40yo boss will say "LOL no, learn to use Active Directory, we're not switching the entire company to Chromebooks/MacBook Neos because you 'grew up with' them." They will then adapt and learn to use what the business has.
2. Even assuming charitably that our 10yo will be founding a company one day and making all purchasing decisions for themselves, it's worth pointing out that neither Google nor especially Apple has shown even slight interest in delivering "Enterprise" anything. Even MDM Apple farms out to third parties, likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though). A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only.
The MacBook Neo is a cute PC for a student or a grandma or indeed any casual user. But despite it giving Apple (for the first time in Apple's existence) a price point for an entire computer that's under the amount where you'd be embarrassed to propose adopting it for your whole fleet... the hardware is but one part of a larger ecosystem, and Apple has demonstrated that they have no interest into selling into "The Enterprise" except for tiny niches (relative to the whole PC market) such as "web and mobile" software engineers, video editors, VFX shops etc.
Contrast that with a decade ago. All systems accessed via networked PCs using Windows native clients. I had to use RDP to a desktop to access anything from outside the network.
One day someone is going to realise that the organisation does not have to spend £££ replacing every PC just to keep running a Web browser.
> A startup may be all-Mac. Eventually if it's successful though, it'll be too big to use 'consumer' tools only... likewise they have no realistic counterpart for Active Directory, nor business email or collaboration (at least Google has that though).
Between the two, they have those needs pretty much completely covered (also, Apple does have increasingly good support for MDM now). To me this reads more as a complaint that neither of them is trying to execute the same bundling/business model as Microsoft, or selling the same kind of security model as what makes sense for an old school IT shop that literally could never leave Microsoft products if it even wanted to.
Every single mobile device in "Enterprise" is using MDM provided and supported by those two companies for business users at multiple layers of the stack required to provide that functionality, they just don't make a business out of selling it directly as a Serious Enterprise Product to IT departments (the least important part of the stack, ie where a guy in a collared shirt with a web app takes a middle manager out for a steak dinner).
I set up MDM for the first time while standing in line for a flight at the airport, on my iphone and for my iphone. My company uses an enterprise IdP with a zero trust security model, which I saw executed firsthand by both Microsoft and Google for their own companies, neither of which made a fuss about giving me a mac device to work with. Somehow, it worked.
You make a bold claim and then kind of refute it yourself. Apple Business and School Manager, Managed Apple Ids, Google-managed Enterprises with the admin console. The thing that Microsoft has is Entra Conditional Access and it is powerful, but also this thing is actively crumbling under its own complexity weight. From my experience the future of Enterprise solutions does not belong to Microsoft.
edit: typos
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
Seems more like FUD.
Microsoft Copilot 365 Operating System App is just trash, plain and simple.
Spoken like a true AI.
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.
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.
Based on that, I'd say: go for a popular distro with KDE. I'm sure there are other very polished options out there, but my recommendation is Kubuntu, even though it's not the one I use today (I use Arch mostly), as it's very simple to set up and well supported.
Then check whether you prefer Gnome or KDE as the looks and go with what you find cooler.
I've used Ubuntu most of my career and it's solid, these days I'm testing Fedora at home due to some nitpicks I have, but both are good options.
So the only superiority is that it runs the apps most people want to run?
And this is why geeks are always the “Less space than Nomad. No Wireless. Lame” types or the HN equivalent when talking about DropBox:
“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
Even Microsofts esteemed moat (office) is “Web only” on the lowest tier.
But even if all most people want is browser, why go through the hassle of running Linux?
I usually recommended a Windows PC to most people because on the low end, they are cheap, disposable, and if the one odd program they might want to run isn’t available, I didn’t have to hear about it.
If they know what they want, I didn’t have a problem recommending an Air and now for a lot of use cases, a Neo.
Chicken and egg problem.
Valve is making enough headway that game makers take Linux seriously. We’ll likely see a lot more native releases over time. (once the worry about anticheat subsides).
He doesn't really want to care but Microsoft's decisions have made their main product into an annoyance.
When it comes to games, Linux has an OS/2 problem.
If Steam Deck, the new Steam Machine etc take a significant part of market share, I think it will be more enticing for game developer to release a native version for Linux. Providing a native version should still be more robust and performant.
Why? The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
There is a new game with no support? So sorry. Can't be done
If you've ever used it before, you'd quickly come to the conclusion that web only Office is only useful for someone writing essays for school.
The moment you need to do anything more complex than that, the document renders completely differently on web vs app-- not to mention there are tons of critical features that aren't even available on the web version.
Excel is really The Thing. So many businesses and departments rely on it.
My most memorable MS Word experiences are all the times I accidentally put my document into a weird state and didn't notice something was wrong until I've spent 3 more hours on it, at which point I was forced to re-create the document by copy pasting text into an earlier copy.
And the only reason I knew something was subtly wrong was because the weird VB extension I was required to use would stop working correctly. Basically this would happen when some random key element of the document had ended up with a very subtly different style. If I didn't have to worry about the VB extension breaking, I'd just have a document with some weird bug somewhere.
If I wanted a professional looking document, I would use some modern LaTeX variant maybe with Pandoc to generate most of it from something more restricted like Markdown.
If I wanted total control over the content of a page, I would use some kind of graphical publishing software with text and vector graphics.
I have zero idea what kind of Stockholm syndrome you must have to think that Microsoft Office (or any other similar WYSIWYG editor for that matter) is power user software.
It has lots of features, that's for sure. But the features form a Jenga tower. That makes it a toy.
I meant that Microsoft is intentionally removing their own moat.
That the tools are awful is just the standard microsoft affair. (with some notable exceptions, which ironically include Excel).
It’s true that most stuff is in the browser, but basically every user has a couple things that are native apps which don’t work on Linux.
Wine has come a long way for gaming, but my experience is for regular programs, most stuff doesn’t work. Even the simple apps are usually critically broken.
On the Mac side, either way I spent all of my day in VSCode and the browser - we use GSuite - Zoom and Slack. It wouldn’t make that much of a different either way.
The only integrations I use between my work Mac and my personal Apple life are my iPad for a second screen, shared subset of passwords. I have a separate Apple Account for my work computer and I share work related passwords.
I don't really mind Windows that much for non-development use, once you disable all the bloat. But for development... It seems obviously a distant third behind Linux and Mac, and I don't think I've ever heard any developer say otherwise. And I say this as someone who is forced to use it at work, so it's not out of ignorance (thank god for WSL).
But that's why I ask what kind of development you do, because I suppose there are areas where Windows really is a good option.
VSCode with WSL and Docker Desktop was fine.
There were so many things in previous versions of Windows that were done with thought and care. Probably the blogs helped make me appreciate it (especially Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing). Windows 11 feels like an insult created by people who hate Windows and never use it
I really wish we could keep the modern underpinnings with a prior shell
The right click menu never once showed me “loading…” when I just want to click “properties”
A not too overly flashy UI that made efficient use of your screen space.
It didn’t used to by default shove “news and entertainment” bing suggestions. Nobody wants to open their browser after an update to be greeted by tabloid rags.
The search used to work. You could find files instead of bing results. You could grep text files with the explorer search bar (across the network too) and it just worked. Good luck doing that today.
Search just worked. (It still works if you use ClassicShell / OpenShell). Now it's braindead; even if the start menu shows results, half the time if you click one, Explorer pops up and just sits there broken, contemplating its life choices that led it to this rock bottom
Today, people don't love the iPod or Dropbox. Both products became completely commoditized once consumers realized that there is actually nothing special about using MP3 files or hosted NFS. Windows is a commoditized OS, it's unapologetic post-desktop slopware. And it sells.
Steve Jobs himself said “Dropbox is a feature not a product”. Dropbox is the same cost for 5TB of storage as GSuite + 5TB of storage or Office365 with 1TB each for 5 (6?) users.
Saying the iPod was commoditized is like saying 8 track tape players were commoditized.
So what argument could you give Joe Normal about how Linux is better than Windows ?
I think the reason Windows is so successful is because it's stable, bulletproof and easy. You don't have to burn an ISO to a USB and boot from it, partition a disk and install it. You don't have to grep grub at any time. You rarely have to use PowerShell for much of anything at all, including device management, managing services and even tweaking the registry.
The "desktop environment" is the operating system, not a seperate abstraction around it. There's no research required on what distro works best for you, what package manager is ideal, what file system to use, what window manager to use, what desktop environment to use. There's no messing with repositories either. No issues with drivers that require compiling from source, no marking an executable as "executable" through chmod.
I like Linux, but the Linux community overestimate how usable it is outside of their meta, and underappreciate their own mental model of what a computer is and how it differs from the layman. Most people want to open their laptop, double click a browser and watch Family Guy funny moments on facebook.com without having to troubleshoot PulseAudio because it's suddenly gone super quiet.
Android “won” as pyrrhic of a victory as it is since Android manufacturers besides Samsung make very little profit and every one who has money (again to a first approximation) buys iPhones. It won because Google gave it away, shared ad revenue with OEMs and it bent over backwards to the carriers and Apple wouldn’t.
And yes Linux would save OEMs maybe $30 on licensing Windows. But OEMs make mire than that on bundleware.
None of this has anything to do with the quality of the desktop of Linux or windows. If Linux had 75% market share I promise you all those things above would quickly become true for Linux as well.
I feel like people dramatically overestimate their impact on "the world" by way of making niche software choices or consumer products or whatever.
But this is kind of like the 'great man' theory of history where you can also argue that the markets would have converged on this outcome regardless of what the specific device was that we attribute to it.
Even the then CEO of Google used BlackBerry devices years after Android came out as opposed to SJ who used the iPhone before it was released and after it was announced, saw that the screen was easily scratched and publicly did a press release that they were going to change it to use Gorilla Glass from plastic.
This was the same post he said he wouldn’t license Apple’s DRM. But if the music industry would license their music DRM free, the interoperability goals would be achieved an Apple would sell DRM free music.
One of the major record labels and some independent labels took him up on it immediately. It took two years for the rest to come onboard.
iMessage always supported SMS and now RCS. What more did you expect Apple to do?
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.
You can really sense the SF-centric bubble HN lives in.
Anyone with any illusions about this name quickly the top vendor for the third item in the materials itinerary of the first thing with a materials itinerary you get your hands on (for me it’s usually food. Who is the main vendor for citric acid? Or sugar. Or that red dye that causes adhd. I have no clue)
General consumers could not care less about open source.
It’s component.
Not a product.
What is the benefit of 'GUI native' if things are broken and people cannot fix them?
(Or just open Hyper-V Manager, then from the Actions pane choose Virtual Switch Manager then select the virtual switch and configure it.)
And I think this is one reason why, for those of us who grew up with "computers" modern UI trends are, to quote https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm, "like we woke up one day to find our Legos had been replaced with Duplos"
Time for some Internet researching...
The only computers they tend to own are phones, tablets, and maybe a game console.
Heck, my millennial sister in law got her first computer because of covid. Until that point the only computers she was using was her work computer and her phone.
I agree, a tablet isn't as capable as a laptop. However, a very large portion of the population doesn't need those capabilities. They just want something to watch netflix on.
I'm an older millennial with a ton of genz family (nieces and nephews, I have 50 total. Mormon family). Very few of them have or want computers. I see the same thing with my in-laws. They have family computers which the kids have no interest in. It's the Gen x and millennials, mostly, that are obsessed with it.
Edit: I've been looking for stats to back my claim and this is frustratingly hard to find. Perhaps because genz is just starting to fully mature. 14 to 29 is just a large gap in terms of life experience.
The best I can find is the vast majority of Gen z have phones and access to laptops/PCs. One study I saw absolutely backed up what you are saying that Gen z tends to own laptops.
It's like asking why a non-mechanic would ever need to use a car.
I know more and more people who are editing photos and videos on their phone/tablet - not movie producers, sure. But lots of YouTubers, influencers, etc.
It was extremely common to get Q/A like:
Me: Who is your internet serviced provider?
Them: I just click the 'e'.
Translation: They were telling me they use internet explorer.
Me: OK, bring in your computer and I can look at it.
Them: (arrives some time later, plops their CRT monitor on the table).
It was always like that. It took me a while to figure out how to ask the right questions to get the information I needed from them. TBH, this was most of the job.
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.
He wrote a programming language for his master thesis, so obviously he used it to write all his software. His first project was the POS/management system for his father's music store (Now famous as the Mexican company that acquired Sam Ash). I believe they didn't switch until around 2005 or so (so about 30 years maintaining it or training a software developer on it as a side thought)
He then started a large sized customs software company with i that ended up getting acquired.. Everytime the language required a new feature the devs would just ask him (like when he had to write a graphical toolkit for it because it started as a text only runtime). There is no record of this language anywhere as far as I know.
I believe around the 2000s as part of the sale of the company he rewrote the whole stack in C#. And he's been using it ever since, including the company we started together in 2013 (together doing a lot of work here). Still with good old Notepad and CSC.exe just like year 1.He curses everytime the ecosystem has big required changes (async, nuget) though I've managed to coerce him into keeping up with the times, dragging and screaming.
But at home - I use Jet Brains Rider (free non commercial) for C# .Net projects on Linux machines (Debian + KDE or Mint depending on machine)
I wonder if you mean Notepad++ not Notepad - I find KATE on KDE is good enough, when I just want to edit a file, but I've run Notepad++ under wine before.
He tried textpad (the other included text editor ) at some point and hated it
If you mean WordPad, which was on Windows - that is a simple Word Processor , so not suitable for writing code in.
Not sure how he will get along with all the stuff MS is adding to I'd suggest getting to look at NotePad++. On Linux Mint Xed behaves similar to Notepad
A super basic text editor is available anywhere. He's comfortable with many of them when editing other things (like vim/nano/ed on Linux)
He just likes Notepad for his personal use. Now that you mention it I do believe he used Notepad++ at some point (only 3rd party editor he's tried). I don't remember at what point he dropped it but he didn't use it long.
Like you said, with Windows 11 replacing Notepad with a rewritten version, he's probably going to have to switch to Notepad++.
I was hoping he'd just switch to Linux. Even tried baiting him by giving a pre Linux installed fully configured laptop with a beautiful OLED panel and great keyboard. He loved the hardware and reinstalled Windows.
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.
I'm not a Windows fanboy by any stretch, but it is a remarkably resilient OS. Case in point: I took the OS drive (SATA SSD) from my old workstation and installed it into a laptop. This was a Dell 7910, with a dual CPU Xeon configuration, NVidia graphics card and ECC memory. The laptop the drive was transplanted into was an old T520. The OS was Windows 10. Firing it up, I expected a kernel panic given how different the drivers would be between the two and resigned myself to a couple of hours using the Recovery partition. To my surprise, it booted up to the desktop and automatically started installing the missing drivers. In the meantime, I could actually use the darn thing.
In all my years of using Linux, I have yet to see that work without a hitch. A chroot to modify fstab is usually the starting point, then comes the inevitable blacklist and driver removal. Linux LiveCDs come close, but this was a full fledged Windows install with custom swap file configurations, 10G network card, etc.
Barring all this user-hostile behaviour from MS, at the OS level, Windows seems well-engineered.
I also wouldn't expect a kernel panic on Linux... Maybe no video though.
For what it's worth, I used the same Arch install from 2014 to 2024, with it spending time in three desktops and a VM across that time.
It powered on, I could decrypt my drive and login into GUI.
First i downloaded all the firmware (three commandline commands), then I rebooted it, then run dnf update.....
.... And that was it. Fedora.
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
The OS is definitely stable and perfectly fine to use.
Honestly, I knew I was in a tech bubble but not that much. I mean, if you want your hardware to work with Windows/Linux/MacOS, you just buy it with the OS preinstalled. If you install something unsupported, non-working devices is your problem, not problem of the OS or hardware.
Just like MacOS will probably not work on a Windows laptop, Linux will not necessarily work on a Windows laptop.
I don’t know that i’d expect windows to be much better either, but that’s my experience.
And do you mean hardware issue or hardware incompatibility?
The former would most likely manifest itself across many operating systems, but if you mean the latter... why would that matter in terms of a given person deciding whether to switch to Linux?
Yes the hardware you chose or is given will heavily influence your linux experience. I kinda wished the community was more proactive making lists of "certified" hardware that is likely to cause the least amount of problems...
And of course when I look up the problem, the threads I land on don't point me to a thing to toggle in the UI. No, instead one of them directs me to create a config file for pipewire while another says the remove a specific package entirely. And they're not presented as a set of clear steps to follow, so good luck to your average person trying to fix the problem for themselves.
I have the same experience on Fedora, and most distros. Arch is the only distro that it's 100% smooth for me.
OpenSuse comes second.
My guess it's just the default kernel settings that Arch use instead of Fedora. Arch uses zswap, while Fedora use zram... there's other stuff as well.
It's linux in the end, so you could just change several settings on Fedora... But then... why if you can just install arch?
I think some people are very used to high RAM devices, and doesn't realize these days how some distros can be very bad on low-end systems.
Like, packagekit on Fedora it's a ram hog (and they acknowledge that). Windows these years been bad, but the situation in some linux distros is not great either.
What Linux does better, it's respecting user choice and UX.
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.
On Windows you often have to download and install drivers, which is always a headache.
Manufacturers selling Linux computers could attach little stickers with ""As long as..." Inside", to commemorate the official motto of "The Year of the Linux Desktop", for the last 30 years. :P
*except HP
There's very little reason to install print drivers anymore on Windows.
My grandma does this all the time from her Linux laptop. My grandpa needed help getting it to work the first time under Windows.
This is just absolutely beautiful. My grandmother would often identify stitching on my slacks. I was, quite literally, blind to it!
I'm telling myself that this is an intentional "blind hem" joke.
I don't care about the hem on my pants. My pants either work, or I get a new pair. This is most people's relationship with their computer.
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.
The hardware is great and it's impressive Asahi Linux works at all but it's not for everyone.
The question is when? How many generations behind will they be then? Will they have to skip support for some generations to keep up?
> m2 MacBook still outperforms any other kit I have
That's fair but you should consider what happens when Apple decides to lock down the boot process on newer hardware. I'm sure most people would give in and use macOS instead of going back to worse hardware.
If you don't see that happening just remember that all of Apple's other devices have a locked down boot process. They possibly only allowed it on Mac hardware to ease possible concerns people may have had during the Apple Silicon transition. Apple does not provide documentation for the hardware so Linux support is based on reverse engineering. If third-party operating systems do not support any of the recent hardware what is stopping Apple from cutting that unused feature from new hardware?
> preliminary m3 support just landed upstream in Linux this past week
Still way too early to actually use. GPU support is not there yet.
Naturally, a hardware vendor can lock down whatever they want in their future hardware, that's their call, but specifically Apple hasn't. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but in either case there are still millions of m1, m2 and m3 mackbooks already out there, why _not_ use them?
If/when Apple chooses to lock down future 3p boot options, it won't affect that pre-existing pool of hardware. Sure, eventually that pool of will dry up, or maybe in a decade I'll need something faster than an m3 (assuming it takes less than a decade to get m3 to where m2 is at today, which is fairly conservative), but maybe not. My requirements are fairly modest with the personal dev work I do, I'm sure plenty of folks are in the same boat. We might as well use what decent hardware already exists and is available now. If appearing to support Apple is the problem just cover your kit in silly stickers, that's what I do.
After all, it's not like Apple will make a dime off me buying their shit second-hand anyways...
macOS though, that's getting worse each year.
I don't know what it is, but UI on Linux always feels too disjoint from the rest of the system.
It's a bit like how Windows 3.11 was just UI-on-DOS. I get the same feeling.
Don't get me wrong - I love Linux for all its CLI use but for some reason I've never been able to primary drive it without going insane after a week.
Windows just seems to feel more put-together and I guess that's because the kernel probably has hacks to support Office, and Explorer probably has hacks to support the kernel, etc.
The only other system I've felt this level of unity in is FreeBSD with its userland+kernel harmony.
Maybe I need to try a Linux desktop again as I haven't done it in ~10y but the other comment here about Fedora not feeling production ready doesn't inspire much hope...
Any ideas?
You really should, yeah. I've given up Linux as a daily driver in favor of a MacBook but I do have a work mandated Windows machine and I hate that thing with a passion. I cannot think of a single thing that's better on it than on my MacBook or any Linux distro I've ran as a daily driver.
In fact, most of the time I want to do any tasks which are not directly Teams or MS office related I find it easier to just use WSL.
But every Linux distro has its own UI, and pretty much every distro makes it easy to configure it to look how you want, with tens of thousands of themes out there developed over the past 20 years by people wanting their os to look a certain way.
The most glaring inconsistencies are going to be user-inflicted. If I spend a weekend tweaking defaults to look just right I need to be ok with possibly tweaking any new software I download to fit my theme.
But even from a non-power-user perspective, if my mom runs into problems with her computer it's much easier to walk her through a fix over the phone if she's on Windows or a Mac.
My dad, who is very tech-literate, once tried Linux and all the trouble shooting guides required him to open a command prompt (because there isn't a consistent GUI you can use to fix things across distros). He never forgave it.
You can run KDE but depending on the app and containerization you open you'll get a Qt environment, a Qt environment that doesn't respect the system theme, random GTK apps that don't follow the system theme, random GTK apps that only follow a light/dark mode toggle. The GTK apps render their own window decorations too. Sometimes the cursor will change size and theme depending on the window it's on top of.
I can’t place my finger on it, but Bazzite feels more “coherent” despite using the exact same GUI.
I had the misfortune of using a Windows 11 machine the other day and I didn’t even recognise it. They’ve taken a huge misstep with the Copilot rollout.
Many Linux users seem to like upgrading (if you can call it that) to the latest eye candy every time Gnome or KDE or whoever puts out a new release. I'm the opposite. I do think much of the UI work in Linux has done more harm than good. But that's the nice thing about Linux: I don't have to care, precisely because of the lack of such close coupling between the GUI and the underlying OS. I can't stand the GUI that comes by default with Ubuntu, but I just don't use it; I use something else instead.
I felt the same as you, up until quite recently, although I was using Xbuntu which uses a very barebones desktop environment. Since changed to CachyOS + KDE Plasma late last year and haven't booted up Windows for 3 months other than to extract a few files. I"m a MacOS laptop user, Windows desktop user, but these days I much prefer CachyOS for speed, responsiveness, easy customisation. You may still find you prefer Windows but it's worth a revisit I think and easy to try via a USB Boot as you know (although running it off USB is way more sluggish I find).
Right up until you try to access any settings menus.
I want to have a computer with stable vendor supported OS so _I can do my stuff_ not tweak some os level configs.
I _don’t_ want to spend my time playing an os systems programmer.
OS is a _component_. Like the wifi driver. I think it’s great some people love developing wifi drivers but personally I just want network that-just-works because there are billion other cool things you can do with a computer.
Similarly I want an OS that just works! Without asking me to do a anything! Because _i don’t really care_. (I mean i care it works but i expect the engineers actually developing an os offering to have a far better idea than myself what is a good stable default config for the system)
This is exactly why modern Windows is problematic. MacOS is better. A right Linux distro (e.g. Fedora Silverblue) on right hardware (e.g. Thinkpad T series) also just works™; this basically the same kind of limitation as with MacOS.
I wish they issued a Windows Rock Stable edition. Ancient as rocks (Win7 look, or maybe even WinXP look), every known bug fixed, every feature either supported fully, or explicitly not supported. No new features added. Security updates issued regularly. It could be highly popular.
That is an unforgivable sin in my eyes.
I think it’s the role of the software vendor to offer a package for a modern platform.
Not the role of OS vendor to support infinite legacy tail.
I don’t personally ever need generational program binary compatibility. What I generally want is data compatibility.
I don’t want to operate on my data with decades old packages.
My point of view is either you innovate or offer backward compatibility. I much prefer forward thinking innovation with clear data migration path rather than having binary compatibility.
If I want 100% reproducible computing I think viable options are open source or super stable vendors - and in the latter case one can license the latest build. Or using Windows which mostly _does_ support backward binaries and I agree it is not a useless feature.
Most software that was ever written was done so by companies that no longer exist, or by people (not working for a software company) no longer associated with those company they wrote the tool for. In many of these cases the source is not available, so there is no way to recompile it or update it for a new platform, but the tool works as good as ever.
Binary backcompat is incredibly important.
There are lots of other ways to run old binaries than at your main OS level.
There are tons of other platforms that precede the current ones.
I would not like the requirements from those platforms to hamper the current gen os.
I do think it's valuable to be able to run the programs from those platforms.
Enterprise Windows config that comes eg in Thinkpads is more ready out of the box than the consumer OEM configss.
1. Lots of rough edges "yeah it almost works if you tweak it a little" yeah thank you but no.
2. CLI is better for doing the thing you want, but GUI is better for discovering what options you have in the first place. The fact that GUI is an afterthought on Linux says a lot.
Unless the GUI buries what you want to do in five or six levels of menus and options--and then changes where they're buried in the next release, so you have to re-learn everything all over again. That's happened to me with work computers more times than I care to remember.
By contrast, my collection of shell scripts on my home Linux computers is still serving me well after more than twenty years.
"Claude, change the libre office file picker to the system default"
"Beep boop it is done"
Linux has a big leg up over windows in this regard because all the GUIs are essentially wrappers around CLIs and text files that LLMs can deal with quite well.
MS has made hacking out the BS harder and harder with each new version of Windows. Back in the Windows XP days, yes, I could avoid a lot of the BS on my home Windows computer (although I still had to deal with it at work because work computers are usually locked down so employees don't even have admin rights to them--if I have an issue with my work computer I have to put in a support ticket to the IT department). But even then there was enough friction on my Windows home computer to make me start using Linux at home. For a few years I was running both OSs at home, but even that got to be too difficult, and I simply stopped using the Windows computer at home, at least for my own use (see below). I've never looked back.
I do still have one Windows laptop at home, because some of the Python programs I write (I write them on the Linux computer) have to run on Windows, so I have to have a way of testing them. Even that is clunky compared to how easy it is to do things on my Linux computers. That laptop runs Windows 10, and if I am ever forced to upgrade it to Windows 11, I will probably just stop testing my programs on Windows (fortunately my livelihood does not depend on being able to do that), because Windows 11 is a nonstarter for me; the BS level has just gotten too high.
> Linux frequently demands that I spend hours chasing down issues.
As someone who has been running Linux at home for well over twenty years now, this has not been my experience. Back when I still had Windows computers at home, I spent more time dealing with issues with them than I have spent dealing with issues with my Linux computers at home.
I would make similar comments about the rest of your post.
I installed Linux instead, Fedora specifically, and everything just worked. It actually cleared up some weird hardware issues I had on Windows that I could never manage to track down. I'm pretty sure I didn't need to do any CLI or config file tinkering for anything that wasn't getting an actual CLI app I wanted to use running. Beats the dozens of different registry hacks and powershell scripts downloaded off random Github repos people kept telling me I needed to do to make Windows 11 work and not be too annoying.
proxomitron is a rewriting proxy, which I always thought was a very nice approach to webpage filtering. again, I remember it having very good UI/UX as well as being fast and capable.
When I need to compare large text files I use diffuse instead of meld.
1) Somehow both GNOME and KDE got much better in the last 2 years. It's very smooth and polished experience that I now prefer to both MacOS and Windows. I only need to install 1 or 2 extensions and it's good to go for me.
2) AI! It's orders of magnitudes easier to fix any Linux issue now compared to 3 years ago. The issues that would take a whole afternoon of fighting are now just a couple back-and-forths with the LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini.
3) Valve and SteamOS. The large and mostly successful push by Valve to make Linux be the platform for gaming has cleared many Linux issues and hurdles on the way. I think this will have ripple effects in the industry. My prediction is that thanks to Valve and SteamOS we will see a viable, widely used Linux based phone in the next 3 years.
As a separate point, it seems quite feasible to run Android apps in VM on Linux based phone and make the experience fairly seamless. Something like what Waydroid provides.
But why?
The premise of Waydroid seems to be to bring Android apps you want to your Linux desktop. But why would you want the phone in your pocket to run Desktop Linux so that you could then run Android apps on your Desktop Linux mobile phone instead of just running Android on your phone?
What desktop Linux features do you want on your phone that would justify this complexity?
My hope is that installation of the Android apps on Linux phone could be made seamless.
I’m sure Google would deny Google Play Services to any popular fork that didn’t follow their rules. But they would do the same to any Linux desktop or whatever that didn’t follow their rules, too, if it became popular.
There are open UI shells from KDE and GNOME, multitouch gesture support, Android emulation... it's all there.
The happy path has improved a lot. When Linux is working it's reasonably usable. But once something breaks it breaks HARD and recovery is still miserable.
For reference I've been using Linux since Red Hat 5.2 circa 2000. I cut my teeth debugging problems without internet access. I ran an LTSP lab at my high school. I remember the hell that was XF86Config (I was there, Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago).
....and like the previous commenter I run Windows on my personal machines because I want to spend my free time using them, not debugging them.
I have been using Linux since 2000s as well. I do remember the rpm hell, dealing with x config issues etc. It is NOT the same experience now a days. I don't have the time or inclination to mess around so I use Fedora + KDE and that basically stays out of my way. I don't rice my desktop or do any hacking around beyond basic automation and I have had zero instances of the system just breaking.
* I wanted to update a Raspberry Pi from Ubuntu LTS 22 to LTS 24. Turns out this is basically impossible. Ubuntu themselves tell you not to do it and their recommended solution is to wipe the system and try again. I ignored them and tried to do it anyway and my Pi ended up refusing to boot. Great.
* I needed to update a Raspberry Pi to change the list of WiFi networks it knew about. Except apparently there are two different networking stacks for Linux with different config files and I edited the wrong one.
* I built a new TrueNAS server. Turns out that you absolutely cannot configure the networking from the GUI. There's a section there, sure, but every time it refuses to save the information until you "test the changes" and that fails to reconnect every single time. You have to locally plug a monitor into the machine, boot it, and log in with a keyboard to get to the config there.
* Not strictly a bug, but I installed Debian in WSL and it doesn't include `man` by default. So I get a command line and no help for it. Brilliant.
* I want to install jj
* Its docs say to use cargo-binstall
* How do I get that? With cargo, so sudo apt install cargo
* `cargo binstall --strategies crate-meta-data jj-cli` -> `error: no such command: `binstall``
* `cargo install binstall` -> `error: cannot install package `cargo-binstall 1.17.7`, it requires rustc 1.79.0 or newer, while the currently active rustc version is 1.75.0`
* `sudo apt install rust` -> E: Unable to locate package rust
* `sudo apt install rustc` -> `rustc is already the newest version (1.75.0+dfsg0ubuntu1~bpo0-0ubuntu0.22.04).`
Apparently the guidance is to manage your rust versions with a tool other than apt that you install with `curl ... | sh` because no one ever learns anything about security
.....yep, just as user friendly as I remember.
The other path I can see (looking at https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/#windows) is that you could maybe instead use winget directly.
Though honestly IMO this is more of a failure on the jj devs to not provide something that can be installed straight using apt, I guess (looking at https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/#linux). For Arch for example you just install it from the official repos.
"Ubuntu themselves tell you not to do it" - you do see it right? Let us see how you forgive Windows for breaking things by ignoring Microsoft's advice and blame them anyway when it breaks.
> * I needed to update a Raspberry Pi to change the list of WiFi networks it knew about. Except apparently there are two different networking stacks for Linux with different config files and I edited the wrong one.
Why? Why not connect it to the network you want so that it just connects to that going forward?
> * I built a new TrueNAS server. Turns out that you absolutely cannot configure the networking from the GUI. There's a section there, sure, but every time it refuses to save the information until you "test the changes" and that fails to reconnect every single time. You have to locally plug a monitor into the machine, boot it, and log in with a keyboard to get to the config there.
And TrueNAS's shortcomings are somehow Linux's fault just like every Windows thirdparty software issue is Windows' fault?
> * I want to install jj * Its docs say to use cargo-binstall
No, they don't ask that as the first choice - this is what they say in https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/:
Installation¶
Download pre-built binaries for a release¶
There are pre-built binaries of the last released version of jj for Windows, Mac, or Linux (the "musl" version should work on all distributions).
Cargo Binstall¶
If you use cargo-binstall, ....
$ > curl -L --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cargo-bins/cargo-binstall/main/install-from-binstall-release.sh | bash
+ set -o pipefail
+ set -o pipefail
+ case "${BINSTALL_VERSION:-}" in
++ mktemp -d
+ cd /tmp/tmp.8IdPJtQBlE
+ '[' -z '' ']'
...
+ case ":$PATH:" in
+ '[' -n '' ']'
$ > cargo binstall --strategies crate-meta-data jj-cli
INFO the current QuickInstall statistics endpoint url="https://cargo-quickinstall-stats-server.fly.dev/record-install"
Binstall would like to collect install statistics for the QuickInstall project
to help inform which packages should be included in its index in the future.
If you agree, please type 'yes'. If you disagree, telemetry will not be sent.
...
INFO resolve: Resolving package: 'jj-cli'
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-bisector is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-diff-editor is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-echo is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-editor is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN resolve: When resolving jj-cli bin fake-formatter is not found. But since it requires features test-fakes, this bin is ignored.
WARN The package jj-cli v0.39.0 (x86_64-unknown-linux-musl) has been downloaded from github.com
INFO This will install the following binaries:
INFO - jj => /home/xxxxx/.cargo/bin/jj
Do you wish to continue? [yes]/no yes
INFO Installing binaries...
INFO Done in 7.549505679s
$ > jj version
jj 0.39.0-d9689cd9b51b4139d2842fcf6c30f65f4eed8cd1
$ >
Having said all that, none of this stuff you mentioned even remotely resembled an average user's workflow who just uses his computer for listening to music and browsing the internet with some occasional document editing thrown in. Despite its warts and shortcomings, Linux does a much better job today than it used to.
Not giving a supported upgrade path between version N and N+1 of your operating system is unacceptable, user hostile, and not something a home user could deal with. "Install from scratch, wipe all your files, and set everything up again" is not OK. You can upgrade Windows from 1.0 through 11 without Microsoft saying "nah, this is impossible": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwXX5FQEl88
> No, they don't ask that as the first choice - this is what they say in https://docs.jj-vcs.dev/latest/install-and-setup/:
"the binaries" are a tarball whose instructions refer back to the previous document, whose "Install > Linux" section starts "from source" and says "go obtain Rust > 1.88", so all of the previous problems still apply.
Again with the assertions without checking things. This is the path of "the binaries":
https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/releases/tag/v0.39.0
I downloaded the file myself and extracted to see:
$ > ls -l jj-v0.39.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 xxxx xxxx 10373711 Mar xx xx:xx jj-v0.39.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
$ > tar xzvf jj-v0.39.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
./
./README.md
./LICENSE
./jj
$ > ls -l jj
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 xxxx xxxx 27122184 Mar 5 02:33 jj
$ > file jj
jj: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), static-pie linked, BuildID[sha1]=70d48428bc2100069e6813aff97e3dce8d2bb4a0, not stripped
$ > ./jj version
jj 0.39.0-d9689cd9b51b4139d2842fcf6c30f65f4eed8cd1
$ >
Not "figure out how to extract a tarball, find somewhere unspecified on your path to put things blah blah" but "to get started go read this doc whose first step is to install rust, which your package manager isn't capable of".
This is a fairly standard Linux experience, not one reserved for developer tools.
On Windows, if you're not going through an app store you get an EXE or MSI installer that you double click and it does everything else necessary. Every time.
I note you also dropped the line of argument about the OS updating, where you were chiding them, saying they did need to follow instructions in that case. Of course, the instructions in that case are indefensible - you cannot seriously suggest an OS is production-ready for the real world if the instructions are "this cannot be updated. Seriously, don't even try.".
Yes, because as per the poster, they are not a novice:
> For reference I've been using Linux since Red Hat 5.2 circa 2000. I cut my teeth debugging problems without internet access. I ran an LTSP lab at my high school. I remember the hell that was XF86Config (I was there, Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago).
No one is expecting a novice to know how to run curl, untar and compile. This is not that situation by the very admission above.
> For somebody who just started using it, "following the install instructions at the top of the page" is a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing. It is not the user's fault if those instructions are bad and you could totally get it working more easily if only you already knew what you were doing.
Did you actually go to jj's github which the poster mentioned? This is what is literally the top of the Installation page:
Installation and setup¶
Installation¶
Download pre-built binaries for a release¶
There are pre-built binaries of the last released version of jj for Windows, Mac, or Linux (the "musl" version should work on all distributions).
> I note you also dropped the line of argument about the OS updating, where you were chiding them, saying they did need to follow instructions in that case. Of course, the instructions in that case are indefensible - you cannot seriously suggest an OS is production-ready for the real world if the instructions are "this cannot be updated. Seriously, don't even try.".
I admit that I was shallow on this point. I did research further and Raspberry Pi situation isn't great when it comes to upgrades. Most people are using separate SD cards to host the OS and doing a hard upgrade. I admit and apologise to @Arainach for not checking further on this point and ignoring it.
Edit: I guess today was the day I couldn't ignore Linux bashing from an experienced user and got somewhat carried away. My tone could and should have been softer.
Have you tried that lately? It was probably true for Windows 10, but not 11. There is no supported path to install 11 if you don't have the Microsoft-approved hardware with TPM etc, which would certainly include Raspberry Pis. Installing Windows 11 on non-Microsoft-approved hardware seems to require levels of jank at least as bad as anything I've seen in Linux. Advice is all over the place, usually involving full reinstalls, setting random registry keys, running Powershell scripts downloaded from a random Github repo as Admin, or something along those lines. And no telling which if any work at any particular time, since Microsoft is constantly fighting them apparently.
I'm not the guy who wrote that, but I had the same use-case myself. (Except that I happened to choose the correct networking stack so I didn't have a problem). I wanted to set up a Raspberry Pi in my parents' house that would run Tailscale so I could use it as an exit node. (With my parents' full knowledge and permission). I wanted to pre-configure it with their WiFi password so that when I showed up for Christmas, I didn't have to spend any time configuring the device, just plug it in and go have dinner. (Then they changed ISPs, got a new router with a new WiFi password, and I had to ask them to plug it into the wired network so I could connect to it remotely and change the WiFi password again, so I had to do that work twice. But thankfully, I didn't have to walk them through the steps, just say "Hey, please plug it into the router with an Ethernet cable until you get an email from me telling you I've reconfigured the WiFi".)
I’ve certainly run into some odd situations on my desktop Linux machine over the past 6 years since I started using it full time, but I think most of them were related to the nature of how I use the machine more than inherent instability. I think I’ve spent many more hours of my life unwinding piles of malware and bloat from non-technical folks’ Windows machines than debugging this one.
They don’t know what Linux is, and know nothing about tech, they just know that we had a 30 minute lesson on “here’s Firefox, this icon means you need to install updates, here’s how you print”.
Oh and this was Linux Mint back in ~2016
Things have only gotten easier since then
When something breaks,
Fixing Linux means running some commands that LLM suggests.
Fixing Windows means downloading some shady .exe that may or may not fix the problem and it may or may not backdoor your machine.
Fixing MacOS means paying $5 for some app that maybe does the thing.
....which is why Chromebooks took over the consumer market. Oh, wait.
Isn't there already a viable, widely used Linux based phone OS called Android?
The folks who care about privacy can't agree on the definition of a privacy respecting phone, so whatever you make some of them will be unhappy. 99.9% users care way more about price, availability of apps, and hardware, in that order. App developers will only write apps for the platform once it has sufficient users, and users will only switch if the platform has sufficient apps.
Not sure I can buy that one
I have 64 GB RAM on my workstation, yet i still have swap enabled (but with lowered swappiness value).
This is one of the points where people have vastly different experiences. I'm one of those that has fewer issues with Linux, and I definitely don't spend hours fixing problems. And this despite the fact that I use Arch, which is supposed to be an unstable distro. Why is that different users report so different experiences I don't know. I think that this might be partly due to perception: we tend to forgive more the OS we like. But your case doesn't seem to be just about perception. So I wonder how much the hardware could play a role here. I think Linux has quite good hardware support nowadays, but maybe I was just lucky so far.
You don't have problems with Arch presumably because you've avoided building your system into a neutron star of corporate shitware, while that's the default state for most distributions.
I'm not blaming anything on the kernel (other than memory management). The userland ecosystem is part of what makes an OS, a perfect kernel with no userland is of no value to the general populace. You don't really get to discount everyone's complaints about the Linux experience because they aren't complaints about the kernel, or at least you won't convince anyone by doing so. It is clearly possible to solve many of the issues I have on top of the Linux kernel, because Android used to be decent, but it seems the desktop ecosystem is just locked in to too many bad choices at this point.
The vast majority of complaints about Windows have nothing to do with the NT kernel, either, which by most accounts is actually quite good.
But it has regressed so far from where it was 25 (or more) years ago that every day I'm still infuriated and depressed that I've had to return to it for work. The idiotic UI blunders alone must waste hours of my life per week.
Aside from the absolutely baffling functionality removals, there are the hateful petty ones. Great example: the removal of Remote Desktop. I erred in getting my parents Windows laptops, thinking they'd benefit from the familiarity. NOPE. And when they encounter some defective bullshit that stops them from doing what they're trying to do, they call me for help but I can't log in from 2400 miles away because MICROSOFT REMOVED THAT ABILITY. Disgraceful.
Endless chasing of the versions upgrades/matching, to the point of rendering itself unusable.
For one-off I use something else.
For more persistent access needed I use either Tailscale with mstsc or *VNC.
I can't remember exactly what the last name was that they gave the remote-assistance tool, but they removed it from all but so-called "pro" Windows... the one used by the LEAST-likely people to need it.
More anti-user BS from Microsoft. The baffling aspect is how Microsoft thinks it benefits from screwing users like this. I can't wait to buy my parents a Neo and shitcan Windows from their home forever.
Go ahead, try to delete the useless Microsoft Edge browser if you're not in a select few EU countries.
In my experience, you can't do it cleanly. Asking LLMs will tell you the following:
1)Modify a certain registry key to enable deletion. Which I did, but the only thing that accomplished is un-gray the delete button in the Control Panel. Once you press it nothing happens.
2)Windows will eventually reinstall Edge. So you're basically screwed.
The only winning move is not to play - leave behind all the Windows and Apples garbage, and life gets remarkably better. I'm almost 6 months in switching from Windows to Linux and it's so awesome that my computer doesn't fight me anymore. I've done 10% of the troubleshooting under Linux that I had to do under Windows, and that was just early on; once things work, they stay working, and there's no sense of dread about what was going to break next after every patch Tuesday.
For the masses, it's pure practicality.
My mother calls up geeksquad when she has a problem with windows. Who do you call when you have a problem with debian or ubuntu or arch setup to use kde or gnome or xfc using wayland or x11 with systemd or launchd or ...
When her printer dies, does she go to the store and buy a new one, or does she get online to research what's compatible with her distro?
The expertise required to cover the surface area known as "linux on the desktop" is going to make that a much more expensive call, and a "i can't help you with that" from anywhere she can buy a printer in person.
I honestly think there are many distros that are more than up to the task of handling normal users and providing an objectively better, easier, less hassling experience than windows out of the box.
Windows is horrifically awful. Everything it does is completely, thoroughly enshittified. User experience and quality control are a distant memory. If you're so jaded to it and just letting it happen, I highly recommend getting on Linux ASAP- it's not like it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago; the desktop experience is just good. If you absolutely need Excel or some other Windows software, look for the cloud version, find an alternate workflow.
>>Who do you call when you have a problem with debian or ubuntu or arch setup to use kde or gnome or xfc using wayland or x11 with systemd or launchd or ...
Any AI. they all have libraries worth of troubleshooting sessions and successful linux troubleshooting workflows and documentation and so on in the training data. Agentic training and operator training flows often include Linux environments, specifically. Any IT person worth half a damn is going to be using AI and will be more than capable of resolving anything it is possible to resolve. Support your local independent IT businesses, too.
But again, get the Linux PC working and I'd bet a good donut that it takes less work to maintain and is easier to use - even for our moms.
I think you're incredibly disconnected from how most people use computers, and how most people hate computers, because they're a means to an end that often just get in the way.
My mom isn't going to use AI, or go to a library and read books, or read documentation about who knows what, to fix her computer. She's going to do as most people do: if something goes wrong, you take it to a place to fix it. And, that's good. Computers should be boring things that help you get actual things done, with the OS being something that lets you open apps, just as all the subsystems in your car are just something that lets you push the gas and get somewhere.
> that it takes less work to maintain
What is "maintain"? This concept does not exist for the average user. What they see is that their system sometimes reboots, or takes a bit longer to turn on, for some sort of update. Who knows, it just does that sometimes. There's literally nothing beyond turning it on and off, and opening apps.
Look.
I guess we all care about software business here.
And computer? It’s what consumers buy from store. Preferably in cybermonday or similar sale.
To run the software they ran on their previous computer.
They hope slightly faster. But honestly? They couldnt tell. Anyway the new computer is shinier.
OS? What’s that? (They honestly could not care less)
They dont buy apple for the os. They buy it for the brand.
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
Mint might be the wrong choice. AFAIR on both Fedora and Ubuntu you can just add "nonfree" repositories (one checkmark) and you'll have proprietary, closed source binaries installed. At least this is how it worked kn my Linux laptops. I've never had to specifically install NVIDIA drivers and conversely, firmware upgrade was comes from the repository as well, so the installation is one commandline command and reboot, no obscure websites and weird firmware installers.
I've completely replaced Windows with Bazzite since November and it's been great for me, but it's not been without issues. Those issues are doable for me, but if I put Bazzite, Fedora, Linux Mint or any of the other beginner friendly distros on anybody else's PC they'll encounter a roadblock that they won't know how to resolve and that'll taint their Linux experience. Not to mention spotty hardware drivers (I've had several wifi drivers just stop working with an update, which is infuriating if you don't have a reliable wired connection), volunteer software for many configurations (OpenRGB doesn't support my motherboard), nVidia drivers and finding alternatives to software people know and use like Office and Photoshop.
These might not seem like a big deal, but they're dealbreakers for many and they'd rather put up with some dodgy window resize behaviour or their OS spying on them.
The 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)
This is the same with expertise in any field that requires decades of education.
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.
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.
If your biggest innovation of a decade is a carbon copy of a feature introduced in NT 3.5 in 1994 AND THEN it turns out most serious people disable it because you cannot even copy a feature without introducing new vulnerabilities - that's a sign of quality.
Technology-wise, Windows NT and it's APIs is well developed and designed.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that the market (though it is certainly irrational) is moving away from windows. It's very likely the reason why this post was written and they're now (4+ years after the release windows 11) addressing even the most basic complaints (like the taskbar). I have zero faith that the attitudes driving the fundamental problems that brought us to the point where MS has to be genuinely worried about the future of Window's market share have changed.
Microsoft still sees your computer as belonging to them. They still feel entitled to all of your data and the contents of your hard drive. They still want to use their OS as an ad platform. They're still deeply envious of Apple and want an app store with similar control over what you can and can't install on your computer.
Like you, they've lost me. The moment any meaningful amount of gaming was viable on linux they lost the only thing that could have kept me using Windows in any capacity (and even then my gaming PC would have been treated like a console. Almost zero personal info and mostly offline).
They fucked up badly and promises like "you can move your taskbar" or "we'll be less obnoxious with updates" is not going to being me back.
Especially considering you could move the taskbar until Windows 11 when they inexplicably killed it. It only took them 5 goddamn years to put it back.
To be fair, this does indeed demonstrate their "commitment to quality", just as they intended.
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.
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"?
Pop! OS is definitely not ready for the average user in my opinion. Some common work-related apps I need like Citrix Workspace straight up don't work. Audio + Camera randomly give out in the middle of video conferences, only fixable by a complete reboot. Some things are only fixable in the terminal.
I use it as much as I can, but there is still work to be done. I agree that Windows is on the wrong path.
The 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.
I gave up a long time ago hoping Windows would get better. At this point, I just hope it does not get worse.
I press snooze and get on with my day
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.
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.
""" ok copilot, implement these changes, make no mistakes """
Having learned absolutely nothing from their existing sins.
> 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.
The kebab button next to the search results takes you to Settings -> Privacy & security -> Search
Switch off Bing.
Unclean uninstalled programs also don't impact performance. Unless it really isn't uninstalled and still runs in the background, but that can easily be fixed by a person competent enough to reinstall Windows once a year.
Settings you don't find, will still be not found after reinstalling Windows.
But to each their own...
I've used Windows as my primary desktop for ~35 years and I do my absolute best to housekeep, but I still need to reinstall about once a year or so. I'm militant about installing almost nothing on my primary PC and putting all the janky apps on another PC via RDP too.
edit: oh, here it is!
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/can-upgrade-ms-dos-6-22-window...
Why wouldn't it still work?
The obvious reason is that Microsoft decided Windows 11 would not install on CPUs dating back beyond about 2017.
Last year I switched to NixOS and while my impression is that it's going to be much more stable even than Ubuntu, installation also only takes me 5 minutes. That is, 5 min until my system is in exactly the state I want, including installed software, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, desktop wallpaper, GUI theme, etc.
Of course I'm still on Windows 10 and will be for the foreseeable future.
Switched to cachyos - I've spoken with at least 5 people who have had the same bsod after updates situation in the last 6 months. If windows at least embraced proper update techniques like with immutable Linux - and enough polish to make the random bsod loop after updates impossible to accur without hardware damage id likely go back for my gaming rig at least - but right now, it feels like garbage ngl
This happened to mine too. I suspect this might be the real cause for the blog post in question.
`dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth`
`sfc /scannow`
>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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Windows has some apparel to hot-patch functions. A regular reboot is recommended just for higienic purposes but should be possible to reduce them.
My guess is that the shit ton of only-for-legal-reasons-useful “security” and surveillance programs demand way more restarts. My company laptop and VM are similar.
No one should be able to have control over his computer.
Average computer owners don't really care about their machines, let alone understand them. Computers are appliances to them like their washing machines and microwaves.
I was forced to work on windows for years too, it's like working with a tool that's broken and repaired with duct tape. You can't stop thinking it's amateurish and this product should have perished a long time ago.
Switching everything to apple was like a breath of air, sadly it's starting to become bad. Every updates brought stuff that felt out of place but last one is complete nonsense..
And it's not like there is much competition, it's either'duct tape' windows, macos or 'broken' Linux.
There is the forced aspect, which alone is problematic. I can imagine that Linux forced upon millions of casual users would bring more clients to consult with a doctor if they were to use it personally, and 8h per day for a living.
What makes Windows particularly guilty, is that while lambda Linux users would get better at understanding how computer is work, the opposite is true on windows, it is dumbing down and obscuring how things work.
The growing number of invasive ads for other MS products and their partners.
The revamping of core OS navigation features, UX for things like launching apps, the fact that in Windows 10 (maybe first version of 11) a lookup for a local app would trigger a web search with a spinner indistinguishable from local search, followed by the display MSN news..
The forced reboot when you have 12 applications running a long task, and downloads that are at 80%, after a 4h long wait on a slow server that doesn't offer download management.
the regular blue screen to prompt you for privilege escalation permission even though you had just granted it 35 seconds ago for that same app, and about to see that inception blue screen again since the very same app will keep crashing until you figure out where the bugs lurk.
I literally call the compounded effects of these: mental health hazard.
It resumes when wanted /by MS/ - to protect their brand from cyberattack.
The user preference is now secondary.
No automatic restarts! I understand that in our security patching world that patching and restarting automatically is the default, fine, but there absolutely should be a dead simple way of disabling auto restarts in settings. I'm fine if it pesters me to restart or whatever, perhaps with growing alarm the longer I wait, but it should always be optional in the end. There are just no words for how bad it can be for mission critical workloads when your computer restarts without your consent. Please make disabling this simple.
If you make it possible to defer updates indefinitely, users will. Guaranteed. Doesn't matter how urgent or critical the update is, how bad the bug or vulnerability it patches is, how disastrous the consequences may be: they'll never, ever voluntarily apply them.
If you're running a server, and willing to accept the risk of deferral because 1) you're in a better position to assess the risk and apply compensating controls than a regular user is, and 2) you're OK accepting the personal risk of having to explain to your boss why you kept deferring the urgent patch until after it blew up in your face, then yes, you should have a control to delay or disable it.
But end users? No. I use to believe otherwise, but now I've seen far, far too many cases where people train themselves to click "Delay 1 day" without even consciously seeing the dialog.
Most security-only updates have a low risk of interfering with with the user or causing instability. Most feature updates have a high risk of doing so.
(1) Although I think there should be some way of disabling even those, even if that way is hard to find and/or cumbersome to keep the regular users away.
Even the Server Core edition, which has a much smaller "surface area" needs reboots almost every month.
It's also good since you can't swap out the kernel without rebooting.
I assume Microsoft took the same approach, just replace everything offline then reboot into a fully up-to-date system without any chance of things in RAM still being outdated.
Yeah you can. Ksplice.com We got bought by Oracle so it's in their ecosystem but the technology exists.
And who determines what is an "end-user device" vs a "server"?
> 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.
So you do want choice after all it seems. Who do you think should make this choice on risk vs. workload/criticality?
I would say you actually agree with me mostly based on your comments, but you have not clarified _who_ makes these choices. I'm saying as the consumer, _I_ should get to make that choice. In the enterprise, my admin will make that choice via group policy, but I do not want Microsoft determining what I'm allowed to do with my OS. They are of course free to keep doing that, but then I also have the right to keep not buying their products.
Someone who decides to buy a Windows 20whatever Server license for the related hardware.
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.
I have zero windows machines now and no promises will change that.
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 think this is good, because they're talking about removing (hideously inappropriate) react and other web technologies from core OS components, and using proper native OS calls instead. But I'm not familiar with WinUI3. I only know Win32. Is WinUI3 a flash-in-the-pan system like their other UI attempts, or is it decent and stable?
If you stay in the happy path, it's decent, better than it used to be. Microsoft does seem committed to it, they're slowly converting Windows apps to WinUI 3.
That said, the team is clearly understaffed; there are long-standing unresolved bugs, just search for "memory leak" on their GitHub issue tracker. Also, native, non-.NET support is definitely an afterthought, it's barely documented and the tooling is super awkward. But at least, unlike WPF, it exists.
To remain compatible with Android and iPhones they removed or simplified a bunch of features, ironically stripping out HDR support just when practically all phones got wide gamut and HDR, OLED screens, etc.
In the era when mobile phones are getting amazing, Microsoft is still racing towards the bottom along with every laptop maker other than Apple.
There's nothing wrong with Win32 (and everything wrong with the newer stuff); "interaction latency" was just fine on a single-core 33MHz 486 running Windows 95.
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.
For now, I am so bitter about windows, that I just want it to stop being a thing
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.