> Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 are affected. Microsoft said: "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message."
How many people wrote lgtm on the security patch?
> Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, and File Explorer might also become unresponsive," Microsoft admitted.
> "Additionally, the Windows Update page might stop responding and continuously display a loading indicator."
This culture of trying to avoid showing the user an error message has to stop.
I think I’m just going to roll that machine back and turn updates off now. It’s too risky.
No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026
Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.
If the hardware you buy doesn't support Linux use then it can be a crap shoot (down to luck). Why people blame their Linux distro for that I don't really understand.
Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.
WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.
Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
Desktop Linux is like a kit plane. You can pay to have someone assemble it for you, but you still need to know how to get in there and fix it.
But the advice is still very much to research the hardware or buy a prebuilt with vendor support.
Compared to a decade ago, more stuff just works; especially noticeable with graphics drivers. But when things hiccup, which they still do, it still requires quite a lot of tech savviness to solve.
I use Linux mint on my desktop. Wifi just works. I’m using some X870 motherboard.
I got the motherboard when it was really new, and I think it took a few months before wifi worked properly in mint out of the box. (I use Ethernet anyway so it wasn’t too upsetting). But after a few months, they had it all sorted. I have never manually compiled a kernel or wifi drivers or anything on this machine. I suspect most Linux users don’t do stuff like that any more.
Not to say it’s a trouble free experience. I’ve had problems with the nvidia drivers a few times recently. In the transition to nvidia’s new driver model, I’ve somehow ended up with incompatible nvidia packages on my system and the graphical environment broke. The most recent time I asked Claude code to take a look at my system and tell me what commands I should run to fix the nvidia packages. It did a great job.
It doesn’t feel like a kit plane any more. It’s a bit temperamental from time to time, but for the most part Linux just works.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.
It "works" with 2.4 with 1 antenna, but the speed is then capped at 150Mbps instead 600Mbps/1300Mbps the hardware is capable of.
So it's like buying an AWD car, but realizing only one wheel gets power. Still technically drivable, but hardly working well. Maybe most people wouldn't even notice at all, but I figured I was technical enough to get in the weeds and fix it. Not all cars end up being Toyotas, sometimes you get a Jaguar.
It is so consistent I don’t even question if a new game will work.
Nvidia drivers on the other hand could still use some work. All wired for me, so I can’t speak to your driver troubles.
I have a windows vm for photoshop and the few programs I can not run native.
I personally run Mint and find it very reliable and capable. It has a windows style interface and my only issues are some minor things with taskbar settings and window snapping. For comparison, I could write a few novels on my issues with windows.
</meta>
The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.
At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon
For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.
Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.
The last emerge conflict I had was handled 100% by an agent.
I'm not wasting my weekend on stupid sysadmin tasks anymore.
If you buy a computer from a brand that sells computers with Linux preinstalled, you also know it's going to work.
Originaly every webcam was a special snowflake, a screwball custom interface with a screwball custom driver. Then microsoft, as much as I like to rag on them here they did something good, microsoft created the usb video standard and said if you make a webcam it has to be uvideo. and life was good, webcams just worked. on linux, mac, and even my beloved obsd.
And here we are again, shitty special snowflake interfaces and drivers and webcams barely work anymore, same story with audio.
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
It is usually called formatting the drive and reinstalling.
My current laptop is running the latest release 44 of Fedora. That install dates back to version 26 which was something like 9 or 10 years ago, can't remember the exact year. That install migrated from an ssd on a laptop to an nvme on another laptop and then moved to a larger nvme drive. I never had any breakage really. The only problem I ever had on this laptop/install is that sometimes after several long multidays sleep/wake up/sleep/wake-up cycles sound going to a bluetooth device may start having shorts stutter every 10 to 20s that is solved by a reboot. I could probably solve that by restarting pipewire and/or ubloading/reloading a bluetooth module but it doean't happen frequently enough for me to investigate further. And it is nowhere as bad as what sometimes happens on my corporate windows 11 laptop.[1]
Other computer of mine, the "gaming console", is running bazzite, an immutable variant of Fedora dedicated to gaming. Being immutable there is very little breakage possible: if you happened to had an issue with an update you could just boot from the prior version image (not happened in 3 years).
My wife is using similar system with another immutable variant of Fedora called bluefin. It actually started its life as my own secondary laptop when I explored immutable distros under aurora (same base as bluefin but with kde desktop instead of gnome). Migrating from Aurora to Bluefin just involved rebasing image from one distro to another without having to do anything with the user data. All in all pretty robust and painless.
[1] OTOH the sound stack of the windows 11 running on my company issued laptop has had many hiccups to the point some usb or bluetooth devices looks to simoly disappear on a regular basis. A number of times I completely lost the complete sound stack in a middle.of a teams call. I could plug and unplung usb audio devices, bluetooth, usb or jack headsets to no avail. Only rebooting the laptop would make sound work again.I also experience absurd slowness of start menu and even random freezes of explorer windows from time to time on a very lightly used laptop as most of the stuff I do is done on an azure cloud windows desktop (don't get me started on this one, feels like using a raspberry pi 3) via rdp.
No it isn't. That was true maybe 20 years ago. Most distros now just work. If something isn't working, the internet solves most of the problems.
I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.
Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.
In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.
Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.
(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)
Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.
Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!
And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...
You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.
(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
They were. QA is paying Customers now.
Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok.
I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability.
Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
No it is not. It is just not to your taste. Thanksfully no linux user is forced to use it and there are plenty of alternatives.
Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.
I wonder what exactly the "quality czar" is doing, maybe he needs a good PIP?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/05/satya-nadell...
AI inverted power structures to favor action over bureaucracy and software development is historically the definition of bureaucratic— dating back to IBM backing the Holocaust.
The entire thing is just men LARPing as executives behind closed doors and kids vibing futures is forcing them to keep up while the mask of “the responsible computer adult” continues slipping.
One recent issue required cloning the user account to get file history working. Just would not work with that account while any new account worked fine.
Current status is broken - the last two security updates report file history as broken. Git hub handles code ok, but for all the other stuff on windows file history was the way to go. Now cumbersome incremental backups.
I tried using the AI recommendations in the security scanning tool being used where I work. If I were to accept some of the recommended fixes, it would simply delete all the content in the file. The actual fix required was a simple tweak on one line, but the AI wanted to take the nuclear approach.
(KB5124008)
it seems they claim to have fixed it :
> September 14, 2026—KB5129195 (OS Builds 26200.9457 and 26100.9457) Out-of-band
> [Remote Desktop Services (known issue)] Fixed: This update addresses an issue affecting Remote Desktop Services (RDS) after installing the September 2026 Windows security update (KB5122880). In affected environments, RDS might become unstable, causing RDP connection and sign-in failures or servers to become unresponsive during Remote Desktop configuration. Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, File Explorer, and the Windows Update page, might also stop responding.
Once upon a time I disagreed with this argument, insofar as I believed it wasn’t necessarily true as long as you had good peer review every step of the way.
But the shift to AI coding has made good peer review a heck of a lot harder to pull off.
I was a wuss and waited for a CD. I doged the 98 floppy install....
The shocking negative was the amount of ads and tracking I had to get rid of, like chinese budget phone tier of crap.
Once you get rid of that though, the experience is halfway decent. But there are absolute head scratchers for 2026: some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display, apps adding itself to self start at boot left and right, and so on.
The most laughable event happened after I installed windows home when my license was for windows profesional. The official way to solve this was... to turn down wifi and write a hardcoded switch-to-professional key as a fake activation. That was the most amateur workaround I've seen in decades.
Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.
Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.
The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.
At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.
It may not be the bean counting optimal, but it is a long term image they project of the company.
I'm in the latter category. As a Sunday photographer who daily drives Linux for work, I can't justify investing in Apple hardware. I used to daily drive macs, so I'm not against Apple on principle, but for my current needs it's just too expensive, since for my actual work Linux works better for me and the hardware is free (through work). Since I don't spend 8 hours a day using Windows and my income doesn't depend on it, I just put up with the shoddy quality. I can do what I need with my photos and it's good enough.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
Anyway, this is not a call for you to start listing all the stuff that's broken (though feel free!), I'm just amazed that, with years of power and freedom on Linux, you truly enjoy Mac more. Just goes to show each of us has our own workflow and tastes!
* There is only one systemd --user session per user with one D-Bus instance. So you can only have one desktop instance active at a time.
* There is no way for privileged apps/scripts to generically control the desktop or other apps in Wayland. (so no accessibility, AI computer use or even general scripting)
* There is no differentiation between configuration that should be active on (user, machine) tuple, and configuration that should be active on (user, *) tuple. (even Windows gets this right!)
* Desktop apps do not report rich activity information so they cannot be smartly memory managed.
* Desktop apps cannot generally be restored after getting killed/system shutdown.
* No application identity, PIDs voluntarily take on application identities in Wayland and on D-Bus, but PIDs that don't can easily escape observability, and if they consume resources but not enough to show up high in top, good luck knowing about them.
Which is an interesting assertion by itself, since I have a local deep-seek model that routinely uses scripting to fire up servers, browsers, take screenshots, and assess how it's converging on a solution. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had about how all of that is just a dirty hack, but for my purposes, it's been working excellently.
And more importantly, MacOS (like Windows) are still poorly translated compared to your average Linux desktop with some leftover always in English. It's okay for me as a software engineer but it's not acceptable enough to give to my parents.
Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely that Microsoft mainly designed Windows 95 for compatibility. (The contemporary Windows NT on the other hand was a much cleaner design, though still questionable above its kernel layer).
You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were.
In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).
Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion?
My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.
* at "random", during regular use
* when installing something, sometimes
* when removing something, sometimes
* slowly, over time
They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.
What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.
This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For decades people would go online on Patch Tuesday to look to see if people were reporting problems with the newest round of Windows updates. Maybe there'd be a problem with an update and a specific network card, or a certain video driver, but Windows didn't usually break Windows.
Even if it did, you at least had the option to just not update. These days Microsoft doesn't care about problems with their updates. Even when they are warned ahead of time that there are problems they're happy to shove them down our throats, at any time of the day or night, and break Windows or even delete your personal files (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-d...) in the process.
Out of all the vague and unprovable things that never happened, that one never happened the most.
I'm sure you can find users on any OS complaining with "random" breakages but unless you can show any data that proves it was due to the OS and not your HW or third party apps or your own actions, this means nothing.
I was doing random college kid stuff:
* Surfing the web
* Using Eudora lite for email
* Playing Quake1 and GLQuake, probably some Quake 2 and StarCraft around that time
* Using mIRC a ton to chat on undernet
* Using Xylinx to do my coursework for CS314
* Using MS Visual J++ do do more coursework (good riddance!)
* Writing papers in (I think) StarOffice, but it might have been just "Word" at that point.
Looking back, the writing was on the wall...
That betrayal was arguably the first step towards the near-total enshittification of Windows that we see today, if you don't count the introduction of product activation with Windows XP.
I am happy to tell that gaming is in pretty good state in Linux these days.
For me it's worse: I grew up on stuff like the C64 and then the Amiga. Switching to DOS was a serious step backwards.
> I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?
Never: they've always been mediocre.
> As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back.
I switched to Linux in the early Slackware days (then Debian 1.1). Most of the world followed and now tens of billions of devices are running Linux, not Windows.
It’s so bad, the windows engineers in my company are on MacBooks and work in jump boxes.
So now, just-in-time debugging only works if I happen to remember my password.
"Windows 10 October 2018 Update no longer deletes your data"
There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it.
This. We had Electron hell before AI. It's infuriating when you consider that we used to have access to so many easy to design native GUI solutions.
They have always been so low. I cannot believe a software company can be so hilariously bad at their core business and yet rise so high.
Just spawned did you :)
What an absolute fucking shit show.
I don't know what kind of reality distortion field Microsoft generates, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, people will literally simply forget every single awful thing Windows does.
People will (correctly) call out the jankiness of desktop Linux, but tacitly imply that Windows doesn't have jankiness. They will forget all the times that Windows Update bricked their computer, or all the time that their "repair" tools were literally just no-ops, or their copy-paste feature not working, or Microsoft literally breaking fucking Notepad, or the "System Restore" tool not actually restoring anything.
Desktop Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not so deluded as to say that it's perfect, but I really feel like its bullshit-level is lower. Oh, and since it supports filesystems that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, the snapshotting actually works.
Instead, I'll be stuck playing tech support for Microsoft's shitty products for my parents until the heat death of the universe.
Another reason that users put up with Windows is simply because that's what the computers at their job have. The employer has decided on Windows, and when the Windows/Office users get back home from work they don't even touch a computer.
I think desktop Linux has improved significantly, and I do think that most people would be fine with one of the more normy-friendly distros like Mint, but I think macOS is a lot more approachable for most people.
I set up my mother in law with Mint, and she seems to like it just fine, but honestly if the MacBook Neo had been around when I bought her that laptop I probably would have just done that instead.
In a bit of fairness to my dad, he does use most of the features of the Windows version of Excel more than literally anyone I know, including the VBA and the like, so there would be a learning curve going to the Mac version of Office or migrating to OnlyOffice or something.
I tried showing him my laptop running Winboat but he was unimpressed. Maybe eventually Valve will figure out how to get full-fat Office working with Proton.
Amazingly it's U.S. users who are taking the lead in installing Linux Mint and other Linux distros. I assume it's because there are few consumer privacy and protection laws and tech companies can abuse their users as they see fit. Many have had enough and are jumping ship towards Linux.
EDIT: Well, should have searched first before posting: https://itsfoss.com/news/bottles-microsoft-365-early-look/
Edit: for reference: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ
No such reference to LLMs possibly being trained on Windows code however. Well maybe AI companies were careful to remove problematic data from the training set.
On another hand, I'd be curious about Microsoft's reaction if somebody let an agent write a "perfect" Windows emulator/compatibility layer eating away at Windows's market share (assuming that's possible; since it does not exist it's probably not currently). Would not do much for kernel anti-cheats but would help for productivity software. Microsoft could either choose to say this is not a white box implementation and take down the project but it would hurt anything LLM-related since all LLM-based projects could be targeted, or let it live and eat away at Windows (I suspect they'd choose the latter because it's the shiny new thing and would probably not hurt Windows that much).
I find Linux far easier to use because you never have to install device drivers. It either works with your hardware or it doesn't.
The people have enough of Microsoft's shenanigans.
I’m not convinced that’s a positive. Users don’t necessarily even perceive those lower-value changes as features, so much as unnecessary bloat.
And even with AI I’m still pretty sure that building and maintaining the automation ended up being more expensive than just continuing to do this particular task by hand. The real business value is one more thing to list as an accomplishment at performance review time, and nothing more.
The initial debacle that was the Recall recall and announcing the level of AI stuffing of win 11 that made me actively try out Linux mint (which has been quite nice and smooth). LLMs help to diagnose and fix items if you aren’t familiar with Linux. You no longer have to scour message boards for up-front answers (only use them as a “confirmation backstop”).
For work I now use macOS which feels like a toy but is ok overall (probably still some personal habit-based things).
If it weren’t for the fact I still develop plugins for a single, very specific windows-only app in my spare time, I would completely ditch windows, with contempt. Outside of Windows I am continually stubbing my toe on every single use of every single MSFT product with which I interact; primarily outlook, teams, and some azure stuff. Their products feel highly “feature optimized” with absolutely zero (perhaps negative) cross-feature cohesion. e.g. it’s as if the various outlook panes and the boxes of content were designed so modularly and independently that they don’t re-size or scale themselves cooperatively.
I perpetually experience stark jamais vu using their products, i.e. I am forced to use them every day and each time feels as unfamiliar, clunky, and unintuitive as the first time I ever touched them.
Windows 11 is so comically slow that I sometimes feel the warm nostalgia of using the Intel Pentium desktop shared by the entire family when I was a kid -- click, wait 3 seconds, click, wait 3 seconds, click...