It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android, not Windows, not iOS, not macOS. It's just embarrassing how companies with market caps sometimes above $1T produce workslop.
I use Windows Update Blocker on Windows 10 to keep it "protected" from upgrades (!). I can see that critical security updates are occurring despite this, so it's a good compromise. For now. When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
Yeah Debian is really stable because its so far behind the current releases, lots of testing has been done by the time it updates a package. Great for servers and stuff you just want to set and forget with auto updates.
It is equally great as a workstation when combined with a development environment manager with package installation like devenv or flox (or many other options). This combo gives you a stable (not-changing) platform with up-to-date tooling. Best of both worlds.
The point is that you don't have to: the unattended-upgrades part is separate from the major upgrades. You still get security updates for the previous stable release for a while after a new stable release, and the security updates can safely be installed the minute they're announced without bringing in unwanted features changes.
I admin a bunch of Ubuntu servers and I tend to do a major version upgrade on my laptop and then some low priority machines to see if anything has changed. Typically, the only issues I've had is when there's dropped support for older SSH/SSL protocols which is easily fixed.
However, Windows Update isn't doing a major version upgrade as far as I know - it's the equivalent of doing a kernel upgrade in Linux. Also, the typical Linux upgrade command will also pull in updates/fixes for pretty much every bit of software in the system, whereas Windows Update will ignore user installed software as far as I know.
debian stable? Yes. Debian stable is tested to the point that it's fossilized. Besides, we're not even talking about a major version update. We're talking a minor one, and the last time I'd had a simple update break linux was when arch was shipping the master branch of grub. (The dev and I had words over this practice, which resulted in me going to another distro)
On my home server, sometimes I do take some snapshots and upgrade a few VMs and LXC containers.
Sometimes I even run testing because stable will be out shortly and I don't feel like upgrading.
It's a very different experience to the single Windows laptop in my house, where the latest stable is always subtly broken in ways I notice. Last week the top half of the taskbar disappeared for an evening, for example.
They say every second version of windows is bad. 8 was so bad they skipped straight to 10. But given the current priorities of Windows i'm not holding my breath. They seem to have abandoned the idea that "things should work" as a key principle. 10 was around for an extraordinarily long time but 11 has very few good ideas.
One large contributor to modern Windows's lack of quality is that Microsoft laid off all of its dedicated QA staff in 2014, with the expectation that developers would own the OS's quality themselves, and whatever they miss would get caught by telemetry reports from Windows enthusiasts who sign up to test new versions for free. Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc (invaluable when you're dealing with a 30+ year old codebase where large portions were written prior to automated testing being standard). The free Windows enthusiast testing didn't make up for this because you can't expect them to act like how a QA tester would act.
Of course I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly start caring about product quality. The Windows user base has largely stopped growing, so MBA logic is to spend the bare minimum resources on maintenance and to funnel the existing userbase into growth areas like cloud/AI services.
I can totally see how letting go the dedicated QA roles increased the amount of bugs that ship to customers, but
> Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc
Seems incorrect from all interactions I've had with dedicated QA to day.
They usually have no idea about any of that, what they do know is how to use a software and what scenarios have previously broken, but not from a technical perspective that can reason about error scenarios. More like a power user that just learned to use a UI, without knowing what it actually does.
I feel like their recent push to AI driven development has likely had more impact in their issues in the last 2 yrs vs a decision that's at this point 11 years in the past - but they are probably both (along with other unnamed factors) contributing to this end result.
Overall saddening, as windows 10 really was a big leap forward in usability.
Microsoft's Software Development Engineer in Test position was different than the "power user QA" archetype you describe and is common.
These positions required development abilities and they would develop the testing scenarios concurrently with the team building the software. And the results were less buggy, IMHO. But it's expensiving having twice the engineering staff when you can just ask software developers to test things themselves and not follow up to make sure it happened.
I remember a different apocrypha for why they skipped from 8 to 10. They wanted avoid OS specific code that conditionally activated from the substring "windows 9" but meant for windows 95 and 98. One would imagine any code like that not being quite as helpful a few decades later.
You misread the GP. The versioning skipping from 8 to 9 was because of bad detection code for windows 95/98. The GP is talking about people staying on Windows 7 until Windows 10 came out, skipping Windows 8.
I don't know the details of that. But even if that's the correct way to determine versions, I think there might be some fraction of software that does it the less correct, more obvious way.
I thought it might be to bring Windows in line with Mac OS 10. Seems petty, but I could see a billion dollar company not liking their flagship is on version 8-9 while the competition is on 10.
Not entirely apocrypha. Among the ones we can most easily name and shame from available source files there were early versions of the Java JDK known to have tests exactly like that in low level library code. Presumably Microsoft's famous app compatibility lab found many more that were closed source that they were not allowed to name and shame.
There's also different apocrypha about the numerology aspect that 9 is a very unlucky number in some cultures and commonly skipped in version numbers (similar to but more so than 13 in the US being skipped on many elevators). (Also why it is said other companies like Apple often skip 9 to make it easier to use the same version cross-culturally without cultural taboo mistakes.)
I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.
> I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it
Last version was really bad, let's focus on fixing problems on the next ... last version was great, we need new revolutionary features to sell the next one.
That was visible on the older versions of Windows. Win 95 was kinda bad because nothing worked very well, then 98 fixed things, then ME tried to redo everything that still worked badly, what didn't work so they merged everything that worked into 2000. XP both worked badly at the beginning, and well at the end; Vista rebuilt a lot of stuff, and 7 fixed it so it worked.
Yeah, I've never really bought that meme. They probably just jumped to 10 because they wanted a bigger number than a competitor, maybe OS X. This is the company that released the first version of windows NT as 3.1 because Netware was at that version at the time and probably called the Xbox 2 the 360 so it had a larger number than Sony.
It's not anything at Microsoft that's doing it, it's just the way people are. Microsoft announces some big, new thing, and everybody hates it. When the next version of Windows comes out, people are used to that new thing, so they don't hate it. The new version has a ton of stuff they hate, but because the last version was sooo bad they ignore it all.
I must be the only person who remembers everyone shitting on W10 saying it was awful and they were staying on W7 until W11 came around and suddenly we're pretending like everyone loved it
People were indeed shitting on Windows 10, but far less than Windows 8, and most people were willing to suck up the minor enshittification of 10 compared to 8 in exchange for a more modern OS.
People sticking to 7 until 11 came out is something I've heard nothing of. The people who stuck to 7 that I knew of knew that things were very unlikely to get better.
The "every second version" rule may be a meme, but it does not reflect the actual release order of Windows, nor properly count the NT series. It only really applies to sentiment surrounding Windows 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. But that leaves out Windows 95, most versions of Windows NT, and Windows 2000.
I find this to be a mostly valid assumption, and 8.1 shouldn't be counted separately from 8 just as Vista SP2 should be counted any differently from Vista (Vista was mostly fine after companies fixed their drivers and Microsoft toned things down a bit. 7 just drove that home and put some necessary distance between itself and Vista).
> Also 95/98/me were a different line from NT/2000.
The Windows version numbers are not used often but really do help group Windows into distinct "early vs late" product cycle tiers. They didn't really skip straight to 10, they just named 9 8.1 for reasons.
The "Lets do it Later" trend of UI is one of the things i hate most about modern UI. Why cant i just say no, instead i have to say no to 10 different menus.
Not respecting a no is usually something very very bad people do.
I'm logged in to my Microsoft account, so I've not seen any of that.
The only thing that I recall popping up is those setup screens that appear after some updates for no good reason.
I also don't recall any particularly buggy experience with Windows 11.
Meanwhile my Mac mini M2 Pro is having issues all the time. From the start I could not even use my second monitor without turning off and back on the primary monitor first for the second to come on.
I get that moving the Start menu to the middle gives you a very "Iron Man in the command chair" type feeling on large monitors/multiple screens, where you spin off windows to the left and right...but is super annoying on a smaller monitor
I don't want to use a Microsoft account. I don't want to use Secure Boot. I don't want the new right click menu (good idea, bad execution). I don't want the new start menu (I want the Windows 7 one if anything). I don't want my OS calling home. I don't want AI. I don't want ads.
I went to Linux instead. I got what I wanted there.
What ideas did 10 have that weren't just purely technical updates (i.e. DX12 and the like), and weren't just undoing what Windows 8 did?
Great for ... shareholders? Because you can't possibly be talking about users. Windows is an OS that forces cloud logins, tracks and records every interaction, steals email credentials, shoves ads and full screen nags everywhere, sabotages competing software, turns perfectly good hardware into e-waste, and won't take no for an answer from users. It serves the interest of billionaires, not common people.
For paying users, this is the definition of an unmitigated disaster. Windows 11 expands on all of the worst aspects of Windows 10. Inconsistent UI, duplicated settings, two context menus, laggy start menu with React in it, and on and on and on the list goes. It's obvious why people hate it.
No other OS has shown this much level of outright contempt towards its users. Modern Windows is, without doubt, the worst desktop OS to ever exist in the history of computing.
I'm with you. I've used Windows 11 as my primary work OS since release and it is absolutely quicker than Windows 10 and nicer to use. I do, however, debloat it and remove all the cruft when I install it.
If Microsoft doesn't want to sell it, I don't see why I should care that it's illegal. I don't feel bad for downloading abandonware for the same reason. They don't want my money? Fine then. I'll just get it somewhere else then.
Running unlicensed versions of Windows has historically been pretty easy. Am I missing something with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021?
With Windows 7, once the evaluation period ran out, you just had to deal with an annoying notification about your copy not being genuine, but it never stopped me from doing whatever I needed to do after installing it on dozens of machines over the years, at this point.
2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.
(given how Microsoft has decided to “upgrade” my local account to a Microsoft account before when logging in to outlook)
> 2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I assume most people here are talking about their personal computers unless self employed.
The company IT department isn't going to be deploying oddball versions of Windows 10, unless you're shady small business.
Interesting. And worrying. I see a good number of those Kamrui (and competitor) Mini PCs from Amazon replacing a lot of the far more expensive and lower-powered industrial PCs for various uses in smaller machine shops. I was not surprised since they're inexpensive and have a decent kick to the hardware, but I've noted that the version of Windows they ship with is fairly free of a lot of the usual bloat, so I assumed they were just using one of the available scripts to remove it...which likely included the KMS38 work-around? And I can tell you first-hand that most of the smaller shops are far too busy penny-pinching to spend even a few hundred dollars a year on licensing one or two of those machines properly.
I never looked that deep into it since nobody came to me with any issues about it, but you have me wondering. I don't personally use Windows, either, despite my HN handle (it's just a reference I thought was funny), and I am finding myself more and more ignorant to what Microsoft is actually pushing. Thanks for the heads up. Will spend some time looking at this deeper.
Yep, last couple of Windows versions I used as desktop OSs likely 7 and 8) were unlicensed and, other than making the desktop background black (sometimes) and an occasional watermark reminder that it's not legit, nothing stopped working.
And using Windows for free still didn't stop me from migrating to Linux exclusively (desktop and laptops and servers), and it's a decision I'm increasingly happy with.
I haven't really used Windows much for years, but doesn't it start shutting down once evaluation period is up? 'Windows will shutdown in 30 minutes unless licence key is added' etc., and the desktop background goes blue with some text about being unlicensed?
Consumer versions of Windows just put a watermark on your screen and disable changing your wallpaper and the like. You can use it indefinitely beyond that. And if you want the watermark gone, then Massgrave is your friend.
I have not experienced that, which is why I questioned the difficulty. I've installed Windows 10 on a good amount of machines at this point, bypassing the NRO during the install process, and have not had any issues that prevented me from installing software/games or just using it like a normal PC, even after connecting it to the Internet.
However, my experience may be dated. It's been awhile since I've had to freshly install Windows. Perhaps things have changed.
Yes, I believe LTSC does have a harsher shutdown setting if you're out of the 90 day "evaluation" window. Standard Windows keeps working just disabling the wallpaper and showing a watermark which you might be able to ignore.
My Windows 11 Pro installation is helpfully stuck on 23H2 since every time it attempts to install a newer version it simply gets stuck on a black screen and requires a forced power cycle and subsequent auto-restore, wasting forty minutes in the process.
Counter-point: I upgrade day 1 (or in a reasonable timeframe) because I know there's no way the company will ever "go back" on what they're doing. If the new UI nukes the pleasant atmosphere of the OS by making all the icons look glass-like, then I'd better get used to it now. I don't want to forego upgrading, then have to learn a bunch of new features ON TOP of the UI differences.
For example, iOS 26 introduced the liquid glass, which, coupled with how some UI elements work, was essentially the only change. If I wait until the inevitable iOS 36, I'll have to learn the UI paradigm on top of 10 versions worth of functional upgrades. The delta would be too large for me.
Interesting take. I've used MacOS for 30+ years, and for the last 20 years have had zero problems with updating immediately... For that matter, iOS has been flawless also.
You've either been very lucky or haven't been using much older software. macOS updates routinely cause issues early in the release cycle, particularly with backwards compatibility. Working in creative fields with lots of niche applications and plugins in use makes this a lot more apparent. Catalina in particular was a total nightmare.
The musicians suffer a lot with macOS upgrades, but I've found even if some hardware isn't supported officially, it most oftentimes works somewhat well.
lol indeed, since iOS 26 my GPS is broken on Apple Maps and Google map. It’ll just freeze the updates very few minutes making it almost useless for driving
Android has reached the state of complete maturity. For years already major version releases were mostly shifting icons around. There's zero reason to update.
Same goes for some of the desktop focused Linux distros, I had Fedora KDE break the login screen from a bad update that got pushed out. It's best to just wait to update anything important.
> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
I'm not using windows anymore, but at least since Windows XP I felt like only every other release of Windows was usable. So my upgrade path was XP, Vista, 10, completely skipping over the bad releases Vista and 8. So just skip over 11, Windows 12 might be an okay release again.
Not holding out much hope for a good Win12 given the priorities seem to be to wreck the UI/UX, remove customisation options, turn things into advertising billboards, and force AI into everything (even bloody Notepad).
We used to say this about Star Trek movies as well before determining that they're mostly bad. I've moved on from Trek and I'm fine with moving on from Windows.
I'm a major version behind on LineageOS. So far behind that it just gave up on offering me updates.
And honestly I'm going to keep it this way until something breaks. I'm absolutely fucking sick of my phone nagging me to update every couple of weeks. Besides, at this point I have to manually flash the new version and I just can't be bothered.
The only way to back up your phone is with some weirdass encryption. It generates a long password for you that you MUST write on physical paper in the real world with your actual hands. They disabled any and all method to digitally record this password.
It's all so disrespectful. This is my goddamn phone, I paid for it on cold hard cash, and it is mine to do with as I please. Fuck absolutely anyone who tries to force some particular interaction.
I have a few windows 10 VMs around and they all are firewalled from Microsoft. They don't like it, which pleases me.
Its not, instead you should install security updates in a timely fashion. People blocking windows update and being left super vulnerable isn't the solution. This bug was from an august update that affected some people. I think people are overplaying this to justify a dangerous 'dont fix if not broken.' No, your system is broken if its vulnerable.
Unfortunately companies use the "security boogeyman" to push ever-increasing ads, telemetry, performance degradation, features you probably don't want that disrupt your workflow and muscle memory, breaking API changes to libraries, etc.
If you could sign a contract with e.g. Microsoft (or hell, NPM) to only receive updates that explicitly fix bugs and security holes, that'd be amazing - but I've rarely if ever seen it.
During the early XP days Windows had granular updates where you could decline everything but security updates if you wanted. Even when they pushed out the Windows Genuine Advantage update (Which offered a user no genuine advantages at all, just possibly hassles) you could still decline it.
Exactly--if I could guarantee that I was getting just security updates and bug fixes, I'd be happy to turn on automatic Windows updates (and application updates too, for that matter).
If the choice is between being broken behind the scenes and broken in your face, it's no wonder people pick the former.
If Microsoft and the like really cared about security, they'd push security completely separately from feature updates, allowing people to get the benefit of updates, without the negatives of those update breaking their environment.
Or better yet, not push updates that break that break their environment in the first place. Security is a nice excuse for Microsoft to get you to update, but it's been used so many times to push hostile experiences to users that I can't blame the users for not wanting to be burned. The fault lies entirely with Microsoft and other companies for pushing hostile changes and chipping away at their goodwill.
It hurts, Microsoft. Why are you doing this to us? (It's money. It's always money.)
It's a suite of powershell scripts and tweaks that are open source for inspection frontended by a nifty powershell multi tabbed TUI (Text User Interface) widget.
There's a tab for upgrades and installs of common dev / tech / power user tools; a tab for tweaks; a tab for windows update options; a tab for building install disks / VM's (eg: minimal for gaming or for hosting windows applications in Qubes, etc).
Update Tab can select all updates / only critical / none ever / advise and let you choose.
To use, you do need to 'trust' (or inspect the work of and download source and self apply) a pool of windows tech nerds - you literally open a powershell admin window and pipe raw boot script over the internet and give it control to bring up the TUI.
This could be malware (but isn't, last I checked) - same risk with all such tools d/loaded from internet of course.
See Usage on github page - various writeups and youtube tutorials.
It'll rip the AI addons, Copilot, and Snapshot and Spy stuff right out of Windows 10 / 11.
Anyone know if this stops the truly diabolical Windows 11 behavior where it removes the options to "Shut Down without updating" and "Reboot without updating?" At some point, the only option to shut down your computer is "Shut Down and update." I've gotten to the point where I just yank the power cord to turn off my computer, because Microsoft doesn't permit any other way.
Linux works with updates however you want it to - e.g. Arch is a 'rolling release' distro, so compatibility is always expected at the latest of all packages; any update to any package is expected to have been tested with the latest at that time of any other relevant package. Of course bugs occur, sometimes something will be missed, but then it's just an update away to correct it. Or say Debian is not; a release is cut, tested, beta'd, and then made generally available - arguably more testing and a higher chance of finding a compatibility issue, but a slower cycle, potentially harder and slower to fix when something is missed.
Run Debian Stable and it basically doesn't happen - only updates are actual security ones.
Run any rolling distro and you basically accept "with newest version comes the newest bugs"
And there is a whole bunch of distros between those extremes ,depending on how new you need your software to be (that being said, Debian Testing hits nice mix between "new enough" and "someone actually tested stuff before publishing").
Not only that, but compared to Windows 10, any Linux distro has objectively more bugs. Things like bluetooth not working, GPU-related failures, update issues, all the classics. While the current status of Linux is amazing, I still cannot recommend it to a non-tech person because I know something will fail at some point and then it's going to be my problem.
Intel dropped support for older WiFi chips in the newer drivers some time ago.
After successfully installing Windows 11 and connecting to a WiFi network, Windows automatically upgraded all drivers, which resulted in WiFi not being able to detect some WiFi networks.
Solution was to manually downgrade to an older Intel driver, but figuring out the root cause took quite a while.
Last Friday I went to the office and my 5 yo fully intel win11 laptop only detected the full resolution of my external screen if it was connected during boot. Unplug it or even just let it sleep when going to the bathroom, and I’d return to a blurry mess of an image. Sometimes, if there’s a driver update, it can also fix the issue until the next time the screen turns off. This used to work somewhat reliably before.
It also refuses to connect to my Shure and Sony BT headphones. It sees them, says it’s connected, then immediately says it’s disconnected. The BT keyboard works fine. No issue whatsoever under Linux, so the hardware works fine.
I can, just recently Windows update installed a firmware update to my network card (without asking) and made it unusable on both Windows and Linux. I had to run a manufacturer tool to get the network adapter to work again.
YMMV today I literally lost all sound in the middle of an MS teams meeting on my win11 works laptop. When opening the mixer, I could see the little vumeter when sound should have been played. Unplugged the trs cable to my amp, sound would not play from the external speaker, connected my bluetooth headset, nothing (still that vumeter moving when playing random youtube videos to test), tried with cabled headphones, selecting thw default devices manually, different apps, nope, not any better.
In the end I rebooted and sound was working again. Something related to sound (driver, subsystem) had probably crashed randomly.
It was the third time I lost sound in the last 2 months. That is not counting the many windows updates that fail randomly with obscure codes, the randomly undetected monitors, windows Apps that randomly change my selected monitors after I lock and unlock my session and a number of other bugs I encountered in the last 6 months
This never happened in the last 6 years I had been making videocalls with MS Teams on Linux. Only issues I had back then was Teams not always showing new plugged/connected audio devices but this also happens frequently on windows so I fault MS Teams, not the OS in this case.
I won't say Linux never has bugs but statistically it seems to me that on well supported laptops (thinkpads), Linux is much more reliable than windows.
YMMV, I have 2 headsets I've never been able to make working reliably under windows 10 and 11. Cheap stuff, but they are are flawless under linux and with my phone on android.
Not to say there are no issue on Linux, but these days it's way better than 15 years ago.
The past 5 years I’ve used the atomic Fedora Silverblue, and I wouldn’t go back to anything else.
Last month I have experienced the first major kernel bug in two decades, and all I had to do was reboot into the previous system update. Pretty painless.
I'm personally partial to Arch Linux, haven't had an issue with upgrades since I moved to it in ~2017, which was the last year I let Ubuntu's dist-upgrade break my work computer.
I've been using Debian:Stable on servers and occasionally on desktop for many years. I can't say I've ever had a problem due to a bad update.
IIRC there have been a couple, but they've not affected the packages I was using, or I hadn't updated before the issues were spotted and resolved. The last half of that point is important: most Linux distros can be trusted to be left alone for 24 hours without coming back to find they've rebooted themselves, potentially losing work (or if not work, at least context so getting back to work takes longer than it should), without permission. Forcing updates and reboots might be acceptable when they cover a serious remote attack exposure bug, but Windows will reboot itself without permission even for relatively minor updates, and the fact it needs to reboot for so many minor things, where under Linux the updates might just need to restart a daemon or two rather than the whole OS, is irritating. Yes, there are ways to block Windows doing that, but you shouldn't have to fight your OS like that.
I miss running Slackware, if for no other reason that the weird look you get.
For a decade I was running Slackware and a weird "package manager"(1). It was an incredible cool learning environment, but people though it was pretty strange.
I had a colleague once that was an absolute anthropomorphic distro. This man was Linux personified, and he literally walked around town with a Slackware live CD at all times. This man refused to use any other operating system, or any other programming language outside D or Erlang. He was pretty fun.
You can still use it. In fact it has never been easier because flatpak (available as a slackbuild) allows you to easily install apps you would have had to compile yourself many years ago.
In my case it is Fedora, only problem I had in 10 years was an nvidia driver issue after one uodate on a pro laptop I didn't choose. The only thing I had to do was reboot to the previous kernel and use that n-1 kernel for a few days until the next kernel update.
All my personal computers using intel and amd graphic cards have been faultless using same distro for the last decade.
My desktop Debian was installed in 2008. I just upgraded it every major release.
I am running on Testing so I had some very minor issues (mostly related to proprietary NVIDIA drivers, but even that got better), but at same time my NAS ran on Stable and it was problem-free.
> It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android,
If you even have control... I have a Google Pixel 8 which was nagging me to update to the latest and greatest Android when my phone was already working just fine. I kept putting it off and rescheduling it until two weeks ago. I was driving home from work, phone in the cup holder, listening to music when the music suddenly stopped. I picked up my phone to see if it was a call or the shitty Honda Bluetooth crapped out again but to my surprise, my phone was powered off. Huh? Never had a phone just turn off like that. I let it sit for a bit to see if it was rebooting but no, it was off. So I powered it back on and suddenly I'm looking at new animations and realize that somehow the OS update forcefully installed itself. WTF. I am not sure if I accidentally scheduled the install, highly doubt it, but there it is, I had the update forced on to me.
IThe best p[art is this latest and greatest Android that I did not need or want has a regression where swiping down the notification menu has a 5+ seconds delay to populate the menu with the notifications. So yeah, totally worth it... /s
Not true! The AI revolution has led to an explosion in software quality. The amount of fixed bugs and testing that AI-leaders such as MS have achieved is unprecedented. We will look back on this era as the golden age of software quality.
I think that you missed a /s at the end of the post. I can continue it with "Yes, we had an explosion in software quality and it's in shards all over the place."
I disagree with "the golden age of software quality". For example, right now, on the front page of HN, is this article, "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116567. I could be wrong, but it feels as if this egregious error is AI workslop?!
AI boosters pose a bit of a Poe's Law problem; the poster here is probably joking, but also there almost certainly exist AI boosters gullible enough to actually believe something similar to that.
“[Print] To meet security goals and support new print capabilities, this update transitions Windows printing components from MSVCRT to a modern Universal C Runtime Library.
As a result of this change, print clients running versions of Windows prior to Windows 10, version 2004 and Windows Server, version 2004 (Build number 19041) will intentionally fail to print to remote print servers running Windows 11, versions 24H2 or 25H2, and Windows Server 2025, that have installed this update, or later updates. Attempting to print from an unsupported print client to an updated print server will fail with one of the following errors: ”
You stopped quoting too soon; the best part is the error message that straight-up lies! “The printer driver is not installed on this computer.” Absolutely classic Windows right there.
I have a mild preference for leaving off part of the quote when a subset of the quote is sufficient to demonstrate my point, and the continuation will amplify it: it's a little reward for people who actually check the source material, and preempts anyone who might otherwise be tempted to accuse me of taking the quote out of context :D
Apart from the obvious compatibility disaster, what kind of skeletons does Microsoft have in their printing system that the choice of C library creates those compatibility issues in the first place?
The UCRT is just the newer, Windows-component version of the MSVCRT, the one they’re worried about. It’s even available for XP.
> will intentionally fail to print to remote print servers
Why would a more secure local print driver refuse to talk to _remote_ print servers? What is so untrustable about what comes over the wire, and if it is, how can they trust the print server is or is not one is claims to be and can be talked to?
My guess is it’s riddled with vulnerabilities. I used to write some print management software and found it very easy to crash the spooler just from routine API calls.
Not only that but it seemed every time they fixed a vulnerability some piece of functionality broke.
Typically there's always been an implicit "unless the security risk is wild".
Even though it's in-fashion to hate them, Microsoft has been pretty amazing at keeping compatibility. This one is pretty painful, but I really don't think they're doing it just to fuck with people or force you onto Windows 11 (as some people seem to think).
Windows 10 2004 itself has been out of support for 4 years. At some point, they have to drop code that's maintaining compatibility with obsoleted older version of Windows.
If you are using it in a business setting it's $30/month per license (there are unfortunately no non subscription licenses for windows 11 IoT).
Alternatively you can install AtlasOS and disable automatic updates and rely on maintaining a strong firewall or/and switching every application to run sandboxed using sandboxie for security. Take note that for an average person you can run without updates as long as your computing device never leaves your home and your local network / networks you trust, use external tool for driver updates.
it's also using the exact same kernel, the only difference is explorer.exe and default apps funny enough. But I have to admit that the file explorer (not to be confused with explorer.exe the desktop), is nicer with the new tab functionality.
I know it's subjective, but I care less about the tabs and more about the missing right click options. I'm also annoyed that 11's explorer uses literally double the memory to perform the same function with less options.
I know you can add the missing right click options back. I just shouldn't have to.
Just to double check... I loaded the same folder in Windows 10 IOT LTSC and Windows 11 Pro retail. Explorer.exe used ~500Mb peak working memory. In Windows 10 it was less than 200Mb. In windows 10 it also loaded about 2x faster, despite the system I'm using being objectively worse hardware in every single measurable way.
Oh no, its going to use 1.8% more of my system's memory, what a nightmare, totally unusable.
Why is 200MB acceptable but peaking to 500MB just totally unacceptable and problematic? The original Macintosh had a graphical desktop with 128KB of RAM, shouldn't anything more than 50KB be unacceptable?
EDIT: Just checked on a couple of my Windows 11 machines, all of them have Explorer using <200MB of memory. So no, explorer.exe isn't necessarily using 500MB of memory. Something else is going on with that system.
Keep in mind that explorer now uses 100% more resources than it did 5 years ago, but it still can not do basic things that Mac and open source competitors can do. It's almost 40 years old, and doesn't really do more than it did back then.
I don't think MS cares to be competitive at all. Here is a small list of things other file managers can do that MS would never dream of (because it would require effort):
* Batch rename files
* File metadata/tag support
* Sessions/saved layouts (sort of exists in a half finished state)
* Fish/SSH Support
* Builtin hash/checksum support
* Native dual pane views
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts
* Built-in terminal
* Handle compressed files (outside limited zip compatibility)
* Search with advanced features (offers limited support)
* File versioning
* The ability to navigate entirely with the keyboard
* File transfer queue management (think Terracopy)
I noticed you weren't specific, because you know you're wrong.
EDIT - To clarify, since we're many levels deep now. I'm specifically talking about file explorer. After 40 years of windows we have an explorer.exe that is still inferior to midnight commander in many ways and uses more memory than Windows XP used in total just to show us the files.
This is incorrect. explorer.exe does more than just "show us the files", it is essentially the entire desktop environment. The taskbar, the start menu, file explorer windows, all the notification area, the quick settings area, etc. are all "explorer.exe".
A number of those features do exist in Explorer, a number can be trivially added with PowerToys, but I take it you're not actually interested in truth or reality.
Which ones? Name it and I'll show you how broken or weak it is compared to free alternatives.
Powertoys doesn't count anymore than just downloading a better file manager does. If I have to download something to replace or enhance it, you don't get credit.
> Name it and I'll show you how broken or weak it is compared to free alternatives
We've now gone from "these features can't possibly ever exist because M$ so bad" to "they're not the absolute best possible implementation that could ever exist". I'm sure you'll continue to move the goalposts.
But sure, I'll name a few.
Only having limited ZIP support for archives. Its not true, it supports tar and 7z archives natively now as well, supporting a number of different compression formats including Zstandard and xz. Are there other compression utilities out there that support more? Sure. But saying it only has limited zip support and that's it is just a lie.
File versioning? File History has been a feature since Windows 8.
I just tested and was able to navigate to any part of the File Explorer window with nothing but a keyboard. I've used it a number of times with only a keyboard, but I wasn't sure that every thing was selectable. But yes, can confirm, you can use the whole thing with only a keyboard.
A Preview Pane? Really? Yes, File Explorer has a preview pane. Go to View > Preview Pane. This one really just gets me though. Are you truly this ignorant of extremely basic obvious features, or are you just making things up to complain about?
OTOH I reveived a password protected zip file at work on win11 today and I had to install 7zip because explorer couldn't present me the password dialog to extract it.
Also it is true there are features that exist but are half assed. Like virtual desktops. I use them all the time on Linux but on windows they are so inconvenient and unpractical especially if you have multiple monitors. One simole example is you can't move a window from one screen to another while also moving it from one virtual desktop to another, you have to do it in 2 pass.
> But saying it only has limited zip support and that's it is just a lie.
I wasn't aware of that. It wasn't a lie, I'm just old. Mea Culpa. The last time I checked it only did ZIP, and only did that poorly as it lacked support for encrypted archives (only supporting older easily crackable archives). I've been installing 7zip out of habit for so long I failed to notice it improved. I'll give the new features a try.
> File History has been a feature since Windows 8.
File history is an OS level feature that's disabled by default, and that I believe requires admin to enable. It doesn't really feel like it's fair, since the average user can't.. use it. Change control should just be something explorer does natively (at least optionally) when moving/copying/renaming/etc. Ctl-z just isn't enough in 2025. But that's fine, you can have credit for this one too.
That said, I do give MS credit for adding multiple undo steps sometime around Windows XP. Being able to ctl-z multiple times was a feature people actually wanted.
> I just tested and was able to navigate to any part of the File Explorer window with nothing but a keyboard.
AFAIK you still cannot group files, sort the view, create a zip file, create a new file, burn a disc, etc without clumsily navigating menus intended for mouse only usage with the keyboard. Yes, it's possible but it's incredibly painful, slow, and difficult to understand. All of those things should either have hotkeys or let you assign hotkeys of your own. In fact, every part of the UI should, but mostly does not. This is terrible for accessibility AND for productivity.
MS has to be aware that it's essentially unusable with a keyboard, they obviously just decided not to care for the last 20+ years.
> Are you truly this ignorant of extremely basic obvious features, or are you just making things up to complain about?
Yeah, I should have been more specific. I was specifically think of Mac's finder and "Quick Look" or whatever it's called. You press space and you get an instant preview, for however many files you have selected.
In windows you have to turn on this clunky sidebar that takes up screen real-estate all day every day until you need it (or never need it). Worse it doesn't really work for a lot of file types so you just end up opening the full application, and mayeb worst of all it stinks out loud from a security perspective. I don't want to preview every piece of malware from the internet. I want to preview the one thing that needs previewed.
It's a terrible, clunky 90's UI for something that is, as you describe it, extremely basic and obvious. Hell, windows can't even preview markdown properly. Sometimes it feels like a time warp to the 90's.
So yes. Ignorance, goal post moving, acknowledging these features did exist just not to your standards so you claimed they didn't exist, and then pointing out a completely different application as a feature missing from a file browser. Finder doesn't have that "Preview" or "Quick Look" applications in MacOS, they're separate apps. And they're definitely not a "Preview pane" as you listed in your requirements.
More ignorance about the preview pane as well in this comment. You can quickly open and close the preview pane with Win+P. Files marked as downloaded from the internet or from file shares are blocked by default these days, one needs to unblock them for them to be opened by the Preview pane.
FWIW, beta builds have Notepad with markdown support. Sure, that's still not File Explorer having markdown support, but neither does Finder. But its whatever, you're shifting the goalposts to features for File Explorer compared to Finder + any other arbitrary application on the system.
What's the single keyboard shortcut on Finder to burn a new CD? If Finder doesn't have it, I guess MacOS is a trash OS with no redeemable value, since that's an obviously critical feature for people to have productive use of their operating systems in 2025.
I'm done here man. You just want to rant and complain features don't exist rather than spending two seconds to see if the feature is there or not.
I appreciate the conversation either way. I did learn a few things.
Ultimately I complain because I like windows and want it to improve. I'm just incredibly frustrated that after 20 years of explorer.exe this is the best a trillion dollar company can manage.
You might start with actually looking at the features being implemented and the other tools the company publishes instead of ignoring them and brushing them off. You wrote off the idea of installing PowerToys, but they're literally published and fully endorsed by Microsoft. They'd cover a lot of those gaps you're complaining about and have existed for a long while.
Instead of being so combative and proclaiming these things can't possibly exist, maybe you should look at what is actually there. And I admit, maybe I shouldn't be so rough, I'm sorry for how negative I've been in this exchange. I get frustrated when people say obviously false things. I'll try and work on that. I hope you work on growing as well.
Shouldn't you then also complain that explorer.exe is consuming 200MB when previous graphical desktops managed it in handfuls of kilobytes? Once again, why is 200MB OK, but 500MB, oh boy, that's just far too much. Couldn't that CAD software also make use of that other 200MB? Why not demand 20MB? Or 2MB? Or 20KB?
How much of that extra 300MB is paged out and not actually in active memory? On both systems, how much of the total is actually paged out and not in current system memory?
Are you trying to run a modern CAD system on a device with only 512MB of RAM or something?
What do I get out of it using double the memory? It has zero new features that a normal human would want. There's supposed to be a benefit in a cost/benefit comparison or you just get a divide by zero error.
See my other comment in this thread for a list of the many, many, many ways Microsoft continues to chose not to improve.
You were speaking of explorer.exe's memory usage. That includes practically all the desktop experience. The right click menu, the desktop, the taskbar, the start menu, and more. Kill the process and see what all disappears. So no, you weren't speaking specifically about the file explorer, though it would take having some knowledge to understand that.
> So no, you weren't speaking specifically about the file explorer, though it would take having some knowledge to understand that.
Don't blame me if the architecture stinks.
The fact is it's unnecessarily large, complex, and wasteful of resources isn't the consumers fault. Deciding to use a single monolithic block of whack code that uses all my memory instead of separating those functions wasn't my choice and I'm not gonna change my expectations to suit that weird decision.
You don't have any idea of what it actually is or what its actually doing but you're 100% certain its overly large, complex, and wasteful.
Incredible.
And as mentioned, on my other Win11 machines I couldn't get explorer.exe to use more than ~200MB, with most of its usage around 110-130MB. I think you've got something else going on there, potentially lots of other 3rd party applications hooked into it causing excessive memory usage. Win11 doesn't inherently use 500MB of memory compared to Win10 only using a bit under 200MB. That's something with your machines.
There are two issues to consider: security updates and software compatibility.
The LTSC version is good for security updates, but I worry that software could stop supporting Windows 10 despite the LTSC version existing.
Coincidentally I am about to install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC! I was experimenting (and struggling) with PXE boot with iSCSI. An update broke iscsi boot in Windows 11 25H2 (26200.6901 works, 26200.7019 fails) as well as LTSC (26100.6905 works, 26100.7178 fails). There were other issues with iscsi boot on the LTSC version - the network hardware needs to be enumerated before the first boot, but can't boot because it needs network (a chicken-and-egg style problem).
To expand upon the second issue: I believe Nvidia stopped releasing driver updates for the version of Windows 10 a still supported version of LTSB was based upon at one point leaving users with no further driver updates for a Microsoft supported system. I don't know how common of a problem this is but it did seem to happen once. I also use LTSC but this is a potential pitfall.
int Counter = 5;
while (--Counter >= 0 && Prompt("Take a screenshot. Do you see a lock icon on this picture? Answer "Yes" or "No". Be concise. No fluff. Refrain from saying 'You’re absolutely right'. Try to ignore stuff that looks like lock icons in the background.") != "Yes") {
// Try resetting the icon
LockScreenLockIconSet("fa fa-lock");
LockScreenForceRedraw();
Sleep(2000);
// We've seen better results when refreshing a second time after a delay. Don't know why. AI suggested it.
LockScreenForceRedraw();
}
> How hard is that to fix? Aren't they using CoPilot? Just ask it to fix the invisible icon.
Maybe that's the problem? Imagine a Microsoft employee allowed to program only by using a CoPilot prompt, screaming and begging to just apply a patch he already written without touching anything else :D
This might not be too far from what's happening. In the dotnet repos you can see MS employees constantly fighting it across hundreds of PRs: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/120637
After all that noise, the clanker just says it can't do it and the PR is abandoned. I'd say it would have been easier to literally do nothing and have the same result.
If a human wrote it, at least there would have been a possibility for learning or growth. This just looks like a waste of time for everyone.
Sometimes the icons in the dock are also invisible. I thought that it was my RDP client playing bad with the server on Windows but eventually I found bug reports about that. This is exactly what I see 50% of the times https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1bdgym6/windows_...
Expanding the "Gradual rollout" section is … interesting. I could hardly read it, let alone understand it straight away. For me a clear indicator that I am trying to ingest AI generated content. It's so embarrasing - is quality in documentation now a foreign concept in the age of AI, or does nobody simply care?
No one cares? I am confident someone got a promotion out of AI automating that. It is the metric being tracked in performance reviews. What is not tracked is how the readers experience it, so no point in putting effort into that.
Bottom line is employees do what they're incentivised to do.
Moved to Arch 6+ months ago after 25+ years in Windows, it's been SO nice. My computer belongs to me again, lightning fast, no ads and BS every update, no 500 background processes.
Definitely took some setup work - I have a lot of scripts and custom tools. But so worth it! Happy trails.
I have my taskbar set up to be the small view on the bottom but I have the double stacked time + date so I can always see what time it is and today's date. It does this without making the taskbar taller.
50% of the time when I reboot, the date disappears and re-appears on its own after some time (sometimes hours, sometimes days, even without another reboot).
I'm taking 2 weeks off around Christmas and I'm absolutely dedicating some of those days to finally switch to native Linux to be control of my machine. I was trying for almost 10 years but was always road blocked on something not working. I think things are good enough now. I'll be making serious compromises on my video editing workflow but everything else is much better minus games with kernel level anti-cheat and I'm willing to take that hit.
Oh boy, wait till you see Windows 11's UI quriks.. They butchered the taskbar and replaced it with some cheap (presumably AI coded) imitation.
Firstly, you can't move it to the top or sides. Okay, bottom taskbar I can live with.. but if you enable small icons and show all names - like how it used to be back in the day - it doesn't shrink the taskbar's height, so it ends up looking weirdly out-of-proportion. Even more weirder is this inexplicable blank space to the far-right (between the tray and where the taskbar buttons end), this space refuses to be used up even if my taskbar is full - sometime this space just expands for no reason, reducing the space available for the taskbar buttons by almost 50%! So 50% of the taskbar is blank, and the remaining buttons shrink and get shoved into the tiny tray overflow space, thereby almost killing the whole point of the taskbar. It's like, they don't want you to use the old title view any more and want to force you to use the icon-only, centered-taskbar...
Roblox was the last thing keeping my Windows 11 partition alive. Today, I found Sober that runs the Android Version on Linux. Took no effort to install and feels just like the desktop windows version using KBM. Goodbye forever MS!
Minecraft was what originally triggered me to dual boot Linux. I couldn't run either version in Windows 11 without also signing into the MS store, so I decided Java version was better than nothing. My kid doesn't play much MC anymore, but if we do, we'll start a Java world next time.
I use MCPelauncher to play android bedrock minecraft on linux and use a controller. Jankiest part was having to resurrect a very old, deeply unused google account to buy the game, but as goes without saying, YMMV.
Does this happen every time after the update or only sometimes? if it happens every time, how does that slip through? It would literally be noticed on the first test boot, no?
also:
"To remove the LCU after installing the combined SSU and LCU package, use the DISM/Remove-Package command line option with the LCU package name as the argument. You can find the package name by using this command: DISM /online /get-packages.
Running Windows Update Standalone Installer (wusa.exe) with the /uninstall switch on the combined package will not work because the combined package contains the SSU. You cannot remove the SSU from the system after installation."
Always these linux users wanting to fix everything in the terminal, luckily i dont need it to use (or install without internet/MS account) Windows at all :)
Yes, we just have to wait until the random word generator hits the right combination of words to fix this. Can't be long now! It's being motivated with billions of dollars, after all.
Did Microsoft just completely give up on QA in the name of accelerated slop delivery? They are in the news once a month for a serious windows bug. My disdain for windows id getting immense, at this point I'd rather have a linux computer, if I can't have a macbook. (But don't get me started on OSX & iOS, which are also total messes)
Microsoft is just relying on the feedback they collect from Windows Insider Program (a.k.a. program for volunteers beta testers) to fix bugs before a new version is released widely.
Once upon a time, you were able to get a free Windows 8 license if you join that program. And yes, when I was young and naive and couldn't care less about random things breaking, I joined the program, just like when I used to root Android phones and flash ROMs every other week.
(On the other hand, corporate IT almost certainly only roll out updates half or one year after they become available, when these bugs are likely already fixed.)
Anyone who would opt-in to use a buggier version of an already buggy and unreliable OS without being paid should be psychologically evaluated but instead they're trusted to be QA testers for the most widespread desktop OS in the world which is also a critically important tool in businesses and government organizations that keep most countries running.
They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.
These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.
They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.
You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.
(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)
MS needs a 'windows xp sp2' moment. Where they stop jamming new things in and just fix as much junk as possible. They still have a mixed control panel situation. Things just randomly work/break for no real reason. Camera here one day gone the next oh look its back again. Hey my sound is broken again. Linux/MacOS in many benchmarks is faster. Hundreds of old programs now just flake out for random reasons. But then will work again sometimes. Backwards compat is a reason to stick with them. But if it doesnt work, why am I here? SteamOS is going to remove one of the large reasons people keep windows.
MS is losing the people who cared about using them. Those people are migrating to linux/macos. I dont blame em.
They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.
We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.
One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
Man. I’d pay actual money to be able to just install security updates and nothing else indefinitely for this pile of shit. Really does suck that 90% of my workflow on my Windows PC remains Windows-only.
Second, it's open source. You and your AI army can inspect the code if you wish. The same is true for literary every other software, so I don't see a point you are making.
Oh, are they famous? Who are they and where would I know them from?
>"You and your AI army can inspect the code if you wish."
Nah. Though, if you want to pay a consulting fee, sure!
>"The same is true for literary every other software, so I don't see a point you are making."
The point I'm making is that if you care about security, you shouldn't install an update manager from some random dude, especially when it hasn't been touched in 6 years.
And if you don't recognize why software that manages your updates is riskier than most software, you really shouldn't install an update manager from some random dude.
Like a dog shaking fleas, Microsoft seeks to concentrate on paying customers, leaving granny to fend for herself in a world full of scams and misinformation.
I mean, shouldn't we all be encouraging people to hit Enter or Return? No need to click blindly if we just use keyboard input properly. Unless the form doesn't correctly respond to those keys… dunno if that's the case or not.
It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android, not Windows, not iOS, not macOS. It's just embarrassing how companies with market caps sometimes above $1T produce workslop.
I use Windows Update Blocker on Windows 10 to keep it "protected" from upgrades (!). I can see that critical security updates are occurring despite this, so it's a good compromise. For now. When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
It's such a stark contrast, my home servers just run unattended-upgrade (on Debian) with no problems, I just do the major version upgrade every year.
Meanwhile everything consumer and most enterprise is as you said, "don't upgrade if it is not broken, else you WILL feel pain".
Companies basically trained bad security habits into their user base
Yeah Debian is really stable because its so far behind the current releases, lots of testing has been done by the time it updates a package. Great for servers and stuff you just want to set and forget with auto updates.
Ironically, servers should be the most disposable and easily to replace from scratch after a bad upgrade but the world is a silly place.
If hardware is failing fair enough. If you can't restore bare-metal within two hours then you're doing something wrong.
It is equally great as a workstation when combined with a development environment manager with package installation like devenv or flox (or many other options). This combo gives you a stable (not-changing) platform with up-to-date tooling. Best of both worlds.
It's also why I'm a fan of atomic distros, easier to roll back from a major bug like my login screen no longer functioning.
Do you do the major version upgrade the minute it's announced? Be honest.
The point is that you don't have to: the unattended-upgrades part is separate from the major upgrades. You still get security updates for the previous stable release for a while after a new stable release, and the security updates can safely be installed the minute they're announced without bringing in unwanted features changes.
I admin a bunch of Ubuntu servers and I tend to do a major version upgrade on my laptop and then some low priority machines to see if anything has changed. Typically, the only issues I've had is when there's dropped support for older SSH/SSL protocols which is easily fixed.
However, Windows Update isn't doing a major version upgrade as far as I know - it's the equivalent of doing a kernel upgrade in Linux. Also, the typical Linux upgrade command will also pull in updates/fixes for pretty much every bit of software in the system, whereas Windows Update will ignore user installed software as far as I know.
debian stable? Yes. Debian stable is tested to the point that it's fossilized. Besides, we're not even talking about a major version update. We're talking a minor one, and the last time I'd had a simple update break linux was when arch was shipping the master branch of grub. (The dev and I had words over this practice, which resulted in me going to another distro)
On my home server, sometimes I do take some snapshots and upgrade a few VMs and LXC containers.
Sometimes I even run testing because stable will be out shortly and I don't feel like upgrading.
It's a very different experience to the single Windows laptop in my house, where the latest stable is always subtly broken in ways I notice. Last week the top half of the taskbar disappeared for an evening, for example.
Once a new major version hits stable, it's been hammered on quite a bit. Debian has a reputation for being behind the curve, for this reason.
Since I switched to nixos some years ago, yes. My fear level dropped from 80% to 1%.
He did say Debian, being stable is the one thing it's good at.
> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
I think it will still be objectively bad. But maybe compared to Windows 12, it will seem good.
They say every second version of windows is bad. 8 was so bad they skipped straight to 10. But given the current priorities of Windows i'm not holding my breath. They seem to have abandoned the idea that "things should work" as a key principle. 10 was around for an extraordinarily long time but 11 has very few good ideas.
One large contributor to modern Windows's lack of quality is that Microsoft laid off all of its dedicated QA staff in 2014, with the expectation that developers would own the OS's quality themselves, and whatever they miss would get caught by telemetry reports from Windows enthusiasts who sign up to test new versions for free. Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc (invaluable when you're dealing with a 30+ year old codebase where large portions were written prior to automated testing being standard). The free Windows enthusiast testing didn't make up for this because you can't expect them to act like how a QA tester would act.
Of course I don't expect Microsoft to suddenly start caring about product quality. The Windows user base has largely stopped growing, so MBA logic is to spend the bare minimum resources on maintenance and to funnel the existing userbase into growth areas like cloud/AI services.
I can totally see how letting go the dedicated QA roles increased the amount of bugs that ship to customers, but
> Getting rid of QA eliminated Microsoft's institutional knowledge of what causes bugs, what areas to look at, etc
Seems incorrect from all interactions I've had with dedicated QA to day.
They usually have no idea about any of that, what they do know is how to use a software and what scenarios have previously broken, but not from a technical perspective that can reason about error scenarios. More like a power user that just learned to use a UI, without knowing what it actually does.
I feel like their recent push to AI driven development has likely had more impact in their issues in the last 2 yrs vs a decision that's at this point 11 years in the past - but they are probably both (along with other unnamed factors) contributing to this end result.
Overall saddening, as windows 10 really was a big leap forward in usability.
Microsoft's Software Development Engineer in Test position was different than the "power user QA" archetype you describe and is common.
These positions required development abilities and they would develop the testing scenarios concurrently with the team building the software. And the results were less buggy, IMHO. But it's expensiving having twice the engineering staff when you can just ask software developers to test things themselves and not follow up to make sure it happened.
I remember a different apocrypha for why they skipped from 8 to 10. They wanted avoid OS specific code that conditionally activated from the substring "windows 9" but meant for windows 95 and 98. One would imagine any code like that not being quite as helpful a few decades later.
If true, this would align with Microsoft’s historic dedication to backward compatibility in the face of horribly-written third party software.
You misread the GP. The versioning skipping from 8 to 9 was because of bad detection code for windows 95/98. The GP is talking about people staying on Windows 7 until Windows 10 came out, skipping Windows 8.
Windows 95 and 98 VersionStrings were 4.00.nn and 4.10.nn
I don't know the details of that. But even if that's the correct way to determine versions, I think there might be some fraction of software that does it the less correct, more obvious way.
I thought it might be to bring Windows in line with Mac OS 10. Seems petty, but I could see a billion dollar company not liking their flagship is on version 8-9 while the competition is on 10.
I thought that was why the second Xbox was “Xbox 360” so it did not seem a lesser number than PlayStation 3.
That too
Not entirely apocrypha. Among the ones we can most easily name and shame from available source files there were early versions of the Java JDK known to have tests exactly like that in low level library code. Presumably Microsoft's famous app compatibility lab found many more that were closed source that they were not allowed to name and shame.
There's also different apocrypha about the numerology aspect that 9 is a very unlucky number in some cultures and commonly skipped in version numbers (similar to but more so than 13 in the US being skipped on many elevators). (Also why it is said other companies like Apple often skip 9 to make it easier to use the same version cross-culturally without cultural taboo mistakes.)
I wish convenient ideas like that which become memes would die off as I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it, for example I doubt they have alternating teams for every other version. More to the point, from an outside perspective I don't see any change in direction that would drastically change windows for the better within foreseeable future or the timespan a "windows 12" would release.
> I really doubt there's any rhythm at Microsoft that causes it
Last version was really bad, let's focus on fixing problems on the next ... last version was great, we need new revolutionary features to sell the next one.
That was visible on the older versions of Windows. Win 95 was kinda bad because nothing worked very well, then 98 fixed things, then ME tried to redo everything that still worked badly, what didn't work so they merged everything that worked into 2000. XP both worked badly at the beginning, and well at the end; Vista rebuilt a lot of stuff, and 7 fixed it so it worked.
And then the rhythm completely stopped.
Yeah, I've never really bought that meme. They probably just jumped to 10 because they wanted a bigger number than a competitor, maybe OS X. This is the company that released the first version of windows NT as 3.1 because Netware was at that version at the time and probably called the Xbox 2 the 360 so it had a larger number than Sony.
It's not anything at Microsoft that's doing it, it's just the way people are. Microsoft announces some big, new thing, and everybody hates it. When the next version of Windows comes out, people are used to that new thing, so they don't hate it. The new version has a ton of stuff they hate, but because the last version was sooo bad they ignore it all.
Could be, but I had lots of complaints about Vista, and 7 worked much better for me.
I stuck on 7 for a long time, not because I was waiting for 11, but because I was waiting for some annoyances with 10 to get addressed.
I still would rather have an updated W7 than W10 or W11.
Updated means - security updates, clipboard manager, dism (W7's dism was limited).
I must be the only person who remembers everyone shitting on W10 saying it was awful and they were staying on W7 until W11 came around and suddenly we're pretending like everyone loved it
People were indeed shitting on Windows 10, but far less than Windows 8, and most people were willing to suck up the minor enshittification of 10 compared to 8 in exchange for a more modern OS.
People sticking to 7 until 11 came out is something I've heard nothing of. The people who stuck to 7 that I knew of knew that things were very unlikely to get better.
The "every second version" rule may be a meme, but it does not reflect the actual release order of Windows, nor properly count the NT series. It only really applies to sentiment surrounding Windows 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11. But that leaves out Windows 95, most versions of Windows NT, and Windows 2000.
It works with 95/2000.
95 - good,
98 - bad,
2000 - good,
ME - bad,
XP - good,
Vista - bad,
7 - Good,
8 - bad,
10 - good,
11 - bad.
That assumes 10 was good and misses 8.1.
Also 95/98/me were a different line from NT/2000.
It sounds like a good theory but there isn’t much substance to it.
> That assumes 10 was good and misses 8.1.
I find this to be a mostly valid assumption, and 8.1 shouldn't be counted separately from 8 just as Vista SP2 should be counted any differently from Vista (Vista was mostly fine after companies fixed their drivers and Microsoft toned things down a bit. 7 just drove that home and put some necessary distance between itself and Vista).
> Also 95/98/me were a different line from NT/2000.
I fail to see why this matters.
The Windows version numbers are not used often but really do help group Windows into distinct "early vs late" product cycle tiers. They didn't really skip straight to 10, they just named 9 8.1 for reasons.
Windows 5.0-5.2 is Win 2000, Win XP, Win XP64.
Windows 6.0-6.3 is Vista, 7, 8, 8.1.
Windows 11 is pretty great though, it keeps all the good ideas from 10 and improves on them. I don't get the hate.
It's a buggy mess that harasses you. I understand the hate.
This morning I got three screens asking if I wanted to log in and configure backup. There is still not an option to say no, only ask me later.
Last week the top half of the taskbar disappeared for an evening.
The "Lets do it Later" trend of UI is one of the things i hate most about modern UI. Why cant i just say no, instead i have to say no to 10 different menus.
Not respecting a no is usually something very very bad people do.
Yes, I'm pretty sure not respecting "no" is a sign of abuse in a relationship. So is being told "no" but changing it to "yes" anyway.
I'm logged in to my Microsoft account, so I've not seen any of that.
The only thing that I recall popping up is those setup screens that appear after some updates for no good reason.
I also don't recall any particularly buggy experience with Windows 11.
Meanwhile my Mac mini M2 Pro is having issues all the time. From the start I could not even use my second monitor without turning off and back on the primary monitor first for the second to come on.
I get that moving the Start menu to the middle gives you a very "Iron Man in the command chair" type feeling on large monitors/multiple screens, where you spin off windows to the left and right...but is super annoying on a smaller monitor
I don't want to use a Microsoft account. I don't want to use Secure Boot. I don't want the new right click menu (good idea, bad execution). I don't want the new start menu (I want the Windows 7 one if anything). I don't want my OS calling home. I don't want AI. I don't want ads.
I went to Linux instead. I got what I wanted there.
What ideas did 10 have that weren't just purely technical updates (i.e. DX12 and the like), and weren't just undoing what Windows 8 did?
Great for ... shareholders? Because you can't possibly be talking about users. Windows is an OS that forces cloud logins, tracks and records every interaction, steals email credentials, shoves ads and full screen nags everywhere, sabotages competing software, turns perfectly good hardware into e-waste, and won't take no for an answer from users. It serves the interest of billionaires, not common people.
For paying users, this is the definition of an unmitigated disaster. Windows 11 expands on all of the worst aspects of Windows 10. Inconsistent UI, duplicated settings, two context menus, laggy start menu with React in it, and on and on and on the list goes. It's obvious why people hate it.
No other OS has shown this much level of outright contempt towards its users. Modern Windows is, without doubt, the worst desktop OS to ever exist in the history of computing.
Don't forget the greatly reduced hardware support in return for no actual new features. It's a rat trap with no cheese on it.
> it keeps all the good ideas from 10 and improves on them.
Are there any good ideas in Windows 10 ?
Volume mixer
Volume mixer has been around at least since Windows 7. Maybe earlier but I don't remember.
My parents older windows 10 laptop was getting slow and battery wasn't great.
They bought a new windows 11 laptop from Costco for $600. Yes cheap, but not total garbage.
Tried using it for a few weeks. Worse performance that their 6 year old similarly cheap laptop running windows 10.
Returned new computer. I installed Linux Mint Mate and bought an Chinese battery for $30. Laptop better than new.
I'm with you. I've used Windows 11 as my primary work OS since release and it is absolutely quicker than Windows 10 and nicer to use. I do, however, debloat it and remove all the cruft when I install it.
23H2 was pretty close to being solid and stable but 24H2 has been a disaster.
If you're forced to use Windows, just use Windows 10 LTSC 2021 IoT. Gets security updates until 2031 but none of the new "features".
its not easy to use this legally though.
If Microsoft doesn't want to sell it, I don't see why I should care that it's illegal. I don't feel bad for downloading abandonware for the same reason. They don't want my money? Fine then. I'll just get it somewhere else then.
If they aren't willing to sell it to those of us who want it I don't see a problem with not paying.
Running unlicensed versions of Windows has historically been pretty easy. Am I missing something with Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021?
With Windows 7, once the evaluation period ran out, you just had to deal with an annoying notification about your copy not being genuine, but it never stopped me from doing whatever I needed to do after installing it on dozens of machines over the years, at this point.
1) They’ve started again to crack down on black-market activation methods
https://windowsforum.com/threads/kms38-shut-down-windows-act...
2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.
(given how Microsoft has decided to “upgrade” my local account to a Microsoft account before when logging in to outlook)
> 2) It’s not legal, obviously. I’d always have a tinge of worry that if I join a Teams call or something then my employer is on the hook for me doing something naughty.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I assume most people here are talking about their personal computers unless self employed.
The company IT department isn't going to be deploying oddball versions of Windows 10, unless you're shady small business.
Interesting. And worrying. I see a good number of those Kamrui (and competitor) Mini PCs from Amazon replacing a lot of the far more expensive and lower-powered industrial PCs for various uses in smaller machine shops. I was not surprised since they're inexpensive and have a decent kick to the hardware, but I've noted that the version of Windows they ship with is fairly free of a lot of the usual bloat, so I assumed they were just using one of the available scripts to remove it...which likely included the KMS38 work-around? And I can tell you first-hand that most of the smaller shops are far too busy penny-pinching to spend even a few hundred dollars a year on licensing one or two of those machines properly.
I never looked that deep into it since nobody came to me with any issues about it, but you have me wondering. I don't personally use Windows, either, despite my HN handle (it's just a reference I thought was funny), and I am finding myself more and more ignorant to what Microsoft is actually pushing. Thanks for the heads up. Will spend some time looking at this deeper.
>https://windowsforum.com/threads/kms38-shut-down-windows-act...
Seems AI generated?
The author of the post is ‘ChatGPT’
Ahh. Well, I feel stupid.
I'd say it's increasingly hard to tell anymore, in my defense, but my god, it's right on the page.
Yep, last couple of Windows versions I used as desktop OSs likely 7 and 8) were unlicensed and, other than making the desktop background black (sometimes) and an occasional watermark reminder that it's not legit, nothing stopped working.
And using Windows for free still didn't stop me from migrating to Linux exclusively (desktop and laptops and servers), and it's a decision I'm increasingly happy with.
I haven't really used Windows much for years, but doesn't it start shutting down once evaluation period is up? 'Windows will shutdown in 30 minutes unless licence key is added' etc., and the desktop background goes blue with some text about being unlicensed?
https://massgrave.dev
Also don't use the evaluation images.
Consumer versions of Windows just put a watermark on your screen and disable changing your wallpaper and the like. You can use it indefinitely beyond that. And if you want the watermark gone, then Massgrave is your friend.
I have not experienced that, which is why I questioned the difficulty. I've installed Windows 10 on a good amount of machines at this point, bypassing the NRO during the install process, and have not had any issues that prevented me from installing software/games or just using it like a normal PC, even after connecting it to the Internet.
However, my experience may be dated. It's been awhile since I've had to freshly install Windows. Perhaps things have changed.
Yes, I believe LTSC does have a harsher shutdown setting if you're out of the 90 day "evaluation" window. Standard Windows keeps working just disabling the wallpaper and showing a watermark which you might be able to ignore.
You are missing that it is not legal to do so.
The tracking they do is also not legal. Do they care?
Does the LTSC have all the features needed for mainstream programs and games?
Yes. The one place you may run into issues is with Microsoft-specific services, for example I'm not sure if Gamepass works.
But if you're just using Steam (or any other third party storefront) you won't have any problems at all.
By Microsoft's own admission, it sounds like it:
> Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is built on the Windows 10 / 11 code base so it’s natively compatible with the software and solutions you use today.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-...
I've not tried to use it specifically, which is why I'm curious.
Yes, and it's easy to strip out the garbage you don't want like Games Center and App Store.
My Windows 11 Pro installation is helpfully stuck on 23H2 since every time it attempts to install a newer version it simply gets stuck on a black screen and requires a forced power cycle and subsequent auto-restore, wasting forty minutes in the process.
Counter-point: I upgrade day 1 (or in a reasonable timeframe) because I know there's no way the company will ever "go back" on what they're doing. If the new UI nukes the pleasant atmosphere of the OS by making all the icons look glass-like, then I'd better get used to it now. I don't want to forego upgrading, then have to learn a bunch of new features ON TOP of the UI differences.
For example, iOS 26 introduced the liquid glass, which, coupled with how some UI elements work, was essentially the only change. If I wait until the inevitable iOS 36, I'll have to learn the UI paradigm on top of 10 versions worth of functional upgrades. The delta would be too large for me.
Interesting take. I've used MacOS for 30+ years, and for the last 20 years have had zero problems with updating immediately... For that matter, iOS has been flawless also.
You've either been very lucky or haven't been using much older software. macOS updates routinely cause issues early in the release cycle, particularly with backwards compatibility. Working in creative fields with lots of niche applications and plugins in use makes this a lot more apparent. Catalina in particular was a total nightmare.
I guess you have a point. I just use core system applications and a few browsers other than Safari. Sorry you guys have so much pain.
The musicians suffer a lot with macOS upgrades, but I've found even if some hardware isn't supported officially, it most oftentimes works somewhat well.
flawless is a wild take.
lol indeed, since iOS 26 my GPS is broken on Apple Maps and Google map. It’ll just freeze the updates very few minutes making it almost useless for driving
Nice. Yours didn't work, yet mine did. Sorry mine works, bro.
Are you running Sequoia or Tahoe now?
Tahoe 26.1
cool story, bro.
Thanks, friend. ;-)
Android has reached the state of complete maturity. For years already major version releases were mostly shifting icons around. There's zero reason to update.
Security.
For fun, try a version of Windows Server 2025 with the desktop GUI. Its actually kind of awesome to see what they can do when they care to.
Same goes for some of the desktop focused Linux distros, I had Fedora KDE break the login screen from a bad update that got pushed out. It's best to just wait to update anything important.
> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
I'm not using windows anymore, but at least since Windows XP I felt like only every other release of Windows was usable. So my upgrade path was XP, Vista, 10, completely skipping over the bad releases Vista and 8. So just skip over 11, Windows 12 might be an okay release again.
Not holding out much hope for a good Win12 given the priorities seem to be to wreck the UI/UX, remove customisation options, turn things into advertising billboards, and force AI into everything (even bloody Notepad).
We used to say this about Star Trek movies as well before determining that they're mostly bad. I've moved on from Trek and I'm fine with moving on from Windows.
> When Windows 12 is announced, Windows 11 may finally be usable.
Knowing Microsoft, feels like they’ll just make it a mandatory security update.
I'm a major version behind on LineageOS. So far behind that it just gave up on offering me updates.
And honestly I'm going to keep it this way until something breaks. I'm absolutely fucking sick of my phone nagging me to update every couple of weeks. Besides, at this point I have to manually flash the new version and I just can't be bothered.
The only way to back up your phone is with some weirdass encryption. It generates a long password for you that you MUST write on physical paper in the real world with your actual hands. They disabled any and all method to digitally record this password.
It's all so disrespectful. This is my goddamn phone, I paid for it on cold hard cash, and it is mine to do with as I please. Fuck absolutely anyone who tries to force some particular interaction.
I have a few windows 10 VMs around and they all are firewalled from Microsoft. They don't like it, which pleases me.
Its not, instead you should install security updates in a timely fashion. People blocking windows update and being left super vulnerable isn't the solution. This bug was from an august update that affected some people. I think people are overplaying this to justify a dangerous 'dont fix if not broken.' No, your system is broken if its vulnerable.
Unfortunately companies use the "security boogeyman" to push ever-increasing ads, telemetry, performance degradation, features you probably don't want that disrupt your workflow and muscle memory, breaking API changes to libraries, etc.
If you could sign a contract with e.g. Microsoft (or hell, NPM) to only receive updates that explicitly fix bugs and security holes, that'd be amazing - but I've rarely if ever seen it.
During the early XP days Windows had granular updates where you could decline everything but security updates if you wanted. Even when they pushed out the Windows Genuine Advantage update (Which offered a user no genuine advantages at all, just possibly hassles) you could still decline it.
Exactly--if I could guarantee that I was getting just security updates and bug fixes, I'd be happy to turn on automatic Windows updates (and application updates too, for that matter).
Unfortunately it’s not just a boogeyman. That’s why it’s worked so well historically.
You are less secure if you wave off years of security patches.
If the choice is between being broken behind the scenes and broken in your face, it's no wonder people pick the former.
If Microsoft and the like really cared about security, they'd push security completely separately from feature updates, allowing people to get the benefit of updates, without the negatives of those update breaking their environment.
Or better yet, not push updates that break that break their environment in the first place. Security is a nice excuse for Microsoft to get you to update, but it's been used so many times to push hostile experiences to users that I can't blame the users for not wanting to be burned. The fault lies entirely with Microsoft and other companies for pushing hostile changes and chipping away at their goodwill.
It hurts, Microsoft. Why are you doing this to us? (It's money. It's always money.)
because we all continue showing back up for it, yes.
which windows update blocker do you use?
All around, for everything, I cannot recommend the Chris Titus (and friends) WinUtil enough:
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
It's a suite of powershell scripts and tweaks that are open source for inspection frontended by a nifty powershell multi tabbed TUI (Text User Interface) widget.
There's a tab for upgrades and installs of common dev / tech / power user tools; a tab for tweaks; a tab for windows update options; a tab for building install disks / VM's (eg: minimal for gaming or for hosting windows applications in Qubes, etc).
Update Tab can select all updates / only critical / none ever / advise and let you choose.
To use, you do need to 'trust' (or inspect the work of and download source and self apply) a pool of windows tech nerds - you literally open a powershell admin window and pipe raw boot script over the internet and give it control to bring up the TUI.
This could be malware (but isn't, last I checked) - same risk with all such tools d/loaded from internet of course.
See Usage on github page - various writeups and youtube tutorials.
It'll rip the AI addons, Copilot, and Snapshot and Spy stuff right out of Windows 10 / 11.
Easy to use and follow.
Anyone know if this stops the truly diabolical Windows 11 behavior where it removes the options to "Shut Down without updating" and "Reboot without updating?" At some point, the only option to shut down your computer is "Shut Down and update." I've gotten to the point where I just yank the power cord to turn off my computer, because Microsoft doesn't permit any other way.
Good question - I'm still running 10 daily, I'm busy today and only tangentially follow the community - but it is still an issue being tracked:
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil/issues/2358
( it might be resolved via another number - worth checking by d/loading to 11 and checking the hotlink notes in the update tab ... )
I feel like cmd or Powershell will allow a magical incantation to shut the machine down immediately.
Edit: Yes, here we are, in Powershell,
Stop-Computer -Force
Go to system32 and take ownership of wuaeng.dll and qmgr.dll and restrict access to only your user. Works on 10 and 11.
Windows will chug along as if Windows Update never existed (forever).
I have this one https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-8/
I will check out the Chris Titus link someone else posted below, too, but that seems more risky.
This one not only blocks OTB update but lets you cherry-pick whatever is available afterward. From the creator of Sandboxie, another must have tool.
https://github.com/DavidXanatos/wumgr
I think it's Windows Update Blocker:
https://www.sordum.org/downloads/?st-windows-update-blocker
Isn't it microsoft who blocks updates after it discontinued windows 10?
You still get a lovely, full-screen advertisement for upgrading to Windows 11 on boot every few weeks.
I fully expect at some point for it to ninja-download and ninja-install because I meet the system requirements.
Arch Linux user here...
Except Linux
To be fair, Linux has always been like this, breaking things with updates. Linux was ahead of commercial companies, but they caught up with it.
Linux works with updates however you want it to - e.g. Arch is a 'rolling release' distro, so compatibility is always expected at the latest of all packages; any update to any package is expected to have been tested with the latest at that time of any other relevant package. Of course bugs occur, sometimes something will be missed, but then it's just an update away to correct it. Or say Debian is not; a release is cut, tested, beta'd, and then made generally available - arguably more testing and a higher chance of finding a compatibility issue, but a slower cycle, potentially harder and slower to fix when something is missed.
Linux is very much "pick your poison"
Run Debian Stable and it basically doesn't happen - only updates are actual security ones.
Run any rolling distro and you basically accept "with newest version comes the newest bugs"
And there is a whole bunch of distros between those extremes ,depending on how new you need your software to be (that being said, Debian Testing hits nice mix between "new enough" and "someone actually tested stuff before publishing").
Not only that, but compared to Windows 10, any Linux distro has objectively more bugs. Things like bluetooth not working, GPU-related failures, update issues, all the classics. While the current status of Linux is amazing, I still cannot recommend it to a non-tech person because I know something will fail at some point and then it's going to be my problem.
Windows has tons of problem, but you don’t see them. That is, you see the problems, but attribute them to bad hardware. It works like this:
Headset does not work on Linux: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from Linux!”
Headset does not work on Windows: “This is crap, I’ll tell everybody I know to stay away from these headphones!”
(Re-post from 2022: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32541772>)
But invariably, the hardware does work on Windows. I can't remember the last time I had that problem.
Intel dropped support for older WiFi chips in the newer drivers some time ago.
After successfully installing Windows 11 and connecting to a WiFi network, Windows automatically upgraded all drivers, which resulted in WiFi not being able to detect some WiFi networks.
Solution was to manually downgrade to an older Intel driver, but figuring out the root cause took quite a while.
I can.
Last Friday I went to the office and my 5 yo fully intel win11 laptop only detected the full resolution of my external screen if it was connected during boot. Unplug it or even just let it sleep when going to the bathroom, and I’d return to a blurry mess of an image. Sometimes, if there’s a driver update, it can also fix the issue until the next time the screen turns off. This used to work somewhat reliably before.
It also refuses to connect to my Shure and Sony BT headphones. It sees them, says it’s connected, then immediately says it’s disconnected. The BT keyboard works fine. No issue whatsoever under Linux, so the hardware works fine.
I can, just recently Windows update installed a firmware update to my network card (without asking) and made it unusable on both Windows and Linux. I had to run a manufacturer tool to get the network adapter to work again.
YMMV today I literally lost all sound in the middle of an MS teams meeting on my win11 works laptop. When opening the mixer, I could see the little vumeter when sound should have been played. Unplugged the trs cable to my amp, sound would not play from the external speaker, connected my bluetooth headset, nothing (still that vumeter moving when playing random youtube videos to test), tried with cabled headphones, selecting thw default devices manually, different apps, nope, not any better.
In the end I rebooted and sound was working again. Something related to sound (driver, subsystem) had probably crashed randomly.
It was the third time I lost sound in the last 2 months. That is not counting the many windows updates that fail randomly with obscure codes, the randomly undetected monitors, windows Apps that randomly change my selected monitors after I lock and unlock my session and a number of other bugs I encountered in the last 6 months
This never happened in the last 6 years I had been making videocalls with MS Teams on Linux. Only issues I had back then was Teams not always showing new plugged/connected audio devices but this also happens frequently on windows so I fault MS Teams, not the OS in this case.
I won't say Linux never has bugs but statistically it seems to me that on well supported laptops (thinkpads), Linux is much more reliable than windows.
YMMV, I have 2 headsets I've never been able to make working reliably under windows 10 and 11. Cheap stuff, but they are are flawless under linux and with my phone on android. Not to say there are no issue on Linux, but these days it's way better than 15 years ago.
Use better distros. I haven’t had a broken workstation since 2014 or so.
Which is that Linux desktop distro that never has issues?
The past 5 years I’ve used the atomic Fedora Silverblue, and I wouldn’t go back to anything else.
Last month I have experienced the first major kernel bug in two decades, and all I had to do was reboot into the previous system update. Pretty painless.
A recent HN submission has 300 comments, many talking about the stability about various distributions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46095585
I'm personally partial to Arch Linux, haven't had an issue with upgrades since I moved to it in ~2017, which was the last year I let Ubuntu's dist-upgrade break my work computer.
I've been using Debian:Stable on servers and occasionally on desktop for many years. I can't say I've ever had a problem due to a bad update.
IIRC there have been a couple, but they've not affected the packages I was using, or I hadn't updated before the issues were spotted and resolved. The last half of that point is important: most Linux distros can be trusted to be left alone for 24 hours without coming back to find they've rebooted themselves, potentially losing work (or if not work, at least context so getting back to work takes longer than it should), without permission. Forcing updates and reboots might be acceptable when they cover a serious remote attack exposure bug, but Windows will reboot itself without permission even for relatively minor updates, and the fact it needs to reboot for so many minor things, where under Linux the updates might just need to restart a daemon or two rather than the whole OS, is irritating. Yes, there are ways to block Windows doing that, but you shouldn't have to fight your OS like that.
Nothing beats the stale, pragmatic platitude of Slackware.
I miss running Slackware, if for no other reason that the weird look you get. For a decade I was running Slackware and a weird "package manager"(1). It was an incredible cool learning environment, but people though it was pretty strange.
1) https://web.archive.org/web/20040730204123/http://pack.sunsi...
I had a colleague once that was an absolute anthropomorphic distro. This man was Linux personified, and he literally walked around town with a Slackware live CD at all times. This man refused to use any other operating system, or any other programming language outside D or Erlang. He was pretty fun.
You can still use it. In fact it has never been easier because flatpak (available as a slackbuild) allows you to easily install apps you would have had to compile yourself many years ago.
I've never had issues with Debian based distros.
In my case it is Fedora, only problem I had in 10 years was an nvidia driver issue after one uodate on a pro laptop I didn't choose. The only thing I had to do was reboot to the previous kernel and use that n-1 kernel for a few days until the next kernel update.
All my personal computers using intel and amd graphic cards have been faultless using same distro for the last decade.
My desktop Debian was installed in 2008. I just upgraded it every major release. I am running on Testing so I had some very minor issues (mostly related to proprietary NVIDIA drivers, but even that got better), but at same time my NAS ran on Stable and it was problem-free.
I've been running Arch (on my desktop and servers) for over a decade, and never had issues. Just read their homepage before upgrading.
Debian Stable.
This is 2000s era FUD.
Yeah, exactly. We all know that Linux removed all bugs and made themselves bug-proof in the 2010s.
Im always happy to update my arch install, because I usually get new features to play with, and my system has not broken due to updates in 4 years.
Better stick to LTS distros and even then....
> It's become a universal truth that you should probably not upgrade to the latest and non-greatest version of ANYTHING these days. Not Android,
If you even have control... I have a Google Pixel 8 which was nagging me to update to the latest and greatest Android when my phone was already working just fine. I kept putting it off and rescheduling it until two weeks ago. I was driving home from work, phone in the cup holder, listening to music when the music suddenly stopped. I picked up my phone to see if it was a call or the shitty Honda Bluetooth crapped out again but to my surprise, my phone was powered off. Huh? Never had a phone just turn off like that. I let it sit for a bit to see if it was rebooting but no, it was off. So I powered it back on and suddenly I'm looking at new animations and realize that somehow the OS update forcefully installed itself. WTF. I am not sure if I accidentally scheduled the install, highly doubt it, but there it is, I had the update forced on to me.
IThe best p[art is this latest and greatest Android that I did not need or want has a regression where swiping down the notification menu has a 5+ seconds delay to populate the menu with the notifications. So yeah, totally worth it... /s
Not true! The AI revolution has led to an explosion in software quality. The amount of fixed bugs and testing that AI-leaders such as MS have achieved is unprecedented. We will look back on this era as the golden age of software quality.
I think that you missed a /s at the end of the post. I can continue it with "Yes, we had an explosion in software quality and it's in shards all over the place."
It was sarcasm, they didn't forget the /s, it was intentional. (I downvote on /s)
> The AI revolution has led to an explosion in software quality
Right, the software quality literally exploded. But, unfortunately, this was before AI. It came roughly at the same time Agile was becoming mainstream
I disagree with "the golden age of software quality". For example, right now, on the front page of HN, is this article, "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46116567. I could be wrong, but it feels as if this egregious error is AI workslop?!
Reference? My anecdotal experience so far leads me to believe the opposite.
This is irony. Right? This is irony?
AI boosters pose a bit of a Poe's Law problem; the poster here is probably joking, but also there almost certainly exist AI boosters gullible enough to actually believe something similar to that.
Sarcasm, not irony.
“[Print] To meet security goals and support new print capabilities, this update transitions Windows printing components from MSVCRT to a modern Universal C Runtime Library.
As a result of this change, print clients running versions of Windows prior to Windows 10, version 2004 and Windows Server, version 2004 (Build number 19041) will intentionally fail to print to remote print servers running Windows 11, versions 24H2 or 25H2, and Windows Server 2025, that have installed this update, or later updates. Attempting to print from an unsupported print client to an updated print server will fail with one of the following errors: ”
Wow.
You stopped quoting too soon; the best part is the error message that straight-up lies! “The printer driver is not installed on this computer.” Absolutely classic Windows right there.
I have a mild preference for leaving off part of the quote when a subset of the quote is sufficient to demonstrate my point, and the continuation will amplify it: it's a little reward for people who actually check the source material, and preempts anyone who might otherwise be tempted to accuse me of taking the quote out of context :D
Apart from the obvious compatibility disaster, what kind of skeletons does Microsoft have in their printing system that the choice of C library creates those compatibility issues in the first place?
Print Spooler has had some bad security vulnerabilities. Example: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2021/06/30/printnigh...
I don’t know if this C library helps mitigate this but Print Spooler is not “it just works” either.
The UCRT is just the newer, Windows-component version of the MSVCRT, the one they’re worried about. It’s even available for XP.
> will intentionally fail to print to remote print servers
Why would a more secure local print driver refuse to talk to _remote_ print servers? What is so untrustable about what comes over the wire, and if it is, how can they trust the print server is or is not one is claims to be and can be talked to?
My guess is it’s riddled with vulnerabilities. I used to write some print management software and found it very easy to crash the spooler just from routine API calls.
Not only that but it seemed every time they fixed a vulnerability some piece of functionality broke.
What happened to "always maintain compatibility" ?
Typically there's always been an implicit "unless the security risk is wild".
Even though it's in-fashion to hate them, Microsoft has been pretty amazing at keeping compatibility. This one is pretty painful, but I really don't think they're doing it just to fuck with people or force you onto Windows 11 (as some people seem to think).
Windows 10 2004 itself has been out of support for 4 years. At some point, they have to drop code that's maintaining compatibility with obsoleted older version of Windows.
If this was Apple everybody would be praising their ability to cut ties with old cruft.
They really want you to update, huh?
For anyone that does not want to switch to linux LTSC is a good alternative to avoid issues like these:
https://github.com/massgravel/massgrave.dev/blob/main/docs/w...
I recommend IoT Enterprise LTSC and you can use https://get.activated.win to activate it.
If you are using it in a business setting it's $30/month per license (there are unfortunately no non subscription licenses for windows 11 IoT).
Alternatively you can install AtlasOS and disable automatic updates and rely on maintaining a strong firewall or/and switching every application to run sandboxed using sandboxie for security. Take note that for an average person you can run without updates as long as your computing device never leaves your home and your local network / networks you trust, use external tool for driver updates.
I feel like if you're going to use LTSC there is no point in using 11.
Windows 10 LTSC will still get updates for years, and uses less than half the resources that 11 does.
it's also using the exact same kernel, the only difference is explorer.exe and default apps funny enough. But I have to admit that the file explorer (not to be confused with explorer.exe the desktop), is nicer with the new tab functionality.
I know it's subjective, but I care less about the tabs and more about the missing right click options. I'm also annoyed that 11's explorer uses literally double the memory to perform the same function with less options.
I know you can add the missing right click options back. I just shouldn't have to.
Just to double check... I loaded the same folder in Windows 10 IOT LTSC and Windows 11 Pro retail. Explorer.exe used ~500Mb peak working memory. In Windows 10 it was less than 200Mb. In windows 10 it also loaded about 2x faster, despite the system I'm using being objectively worse hardware in every single measurable way.
With Windows 11 you get less, and pay more.
Oh no, its going to use 1.8% more of my system's memory, what a nightmare, totally unusable.
Why is 200MB acceptable but peaking to 500MB just totally unacceptable and problematic? The original Macintosh had a graphical desktop with 128KB of RAM, shouldn't anything more than 50KB be unacceptable?
EDIT: Just checked on a couple of my Windows 11 machines, all of them have Explorer using <200MB of memory. So no, explorer.exe isn't necessarily using 500MB of memory. Something else is going on with that system.
because the same thing applies to the new terminal, new settings app, new everything, it slowly adds up.
Keep in mind that explorer now uses 100% more resources than it did 5 years ago, but it still can not do basic things that Mac and open source competitors can do. It's almost 40 years old, and doesn't really do more than it did back then.
I don't think MS cares to be competitive at all. Here is a small list of things other file managers can do that MS would never dream of (because it would require effort):
* Batch rename files
* File metadata/tag support
* Sessions/saved layouts (sort of exists in a half finished state)
* Fish/SSH Support
* Builtin hash/checksum support
* Native dual pane views
* Customizable keyboard shortcuts
* Built-in terminal
* Handle compressed files (outside limited zip compatibility)
* Search with advanced features (offers limited support)
* File versioning
* The ability to navigate entirely with the keyboard
* File transfer queue management (think Terracopy)
* Builtin Compare/Sync
* A Preview Pane
* User adjustable UI
* etc
This might be the most unserious post I've ever seen on this site.
I noticed you weren't specific, because you know you're wrong.
EDIT - To clarify, since we're many levels deep now. I'm specifically talking about file explorer. After 40 years of windows we have an explorer.exe that is still inferior to midnight commander in many ways and uses more memory than Windows XP used in total just to show us the files.
> just to show us the files.
This is incorrect. explorer.exe does more than just "show us the files", it is essentially the entire desktop environment. The taskbar, the start menu, file explorer windows, all the notification area, the quick settings area, etc. are all "explorer.exe".
But it was that ten years ago, too,
to bring us back to the original conversation.
A number of those features do exist in Explorer, a number can be trivially added with PowerToys, but I take it you're not actually interested in truth or reality.
Which ones? Name it and I'll show you how broken or weak it is compared to free alternatives.
Powertoys doesn't count anymore than just downloading a better file manager does. If I have to download something to replace or enhance it, you don't get credit.
And the goalposts just keep moving...
> Name it and I'll show you how broken or weak it is compared to free alternatives
We've now gone from "these features can't possibly ever exist because M$ so bad" to "they're not the absolute best possible implementation that could ever exist". I'm sure you'll continue to move the goalposts.
But sure, I'll name a few.
Only having limited ZIP support for archives. Its not true, it supports tar and 7z archives natively now as well, supporting a number of different compression formats including Zstandard and xz. Are there other compression utilities out there that support more? Sure. But saying it only has limited zip support and that's it is just a lie.
File versioning? File History has been a feature since Windows 8.
I just tested and was able to navigate to any part of the File Explorer window with nothing but a keyboard. I've used it a number of times with only a keyboard, but I wasn't sure that every thing was selectable. But yes, can confirm, you can use the whole thing with only a keyboard.
A Preview Pane? Really? Yes, File Explorer has a preview pane. Go to View > Preview Pane. This one really just gets me though. Are you truly this ignorant of extremely basic obvious features, or are you just making things up to complain about?
OTOH I reveived a password protected zip file at work on win11 today and I had to install 7zip because explorer couldn't present me the password dialog to extract it.
Also it is true there are features that exist but are half assed. Like virtual desktops. I use them all the time on Linux but on windows they are so inconvenient and unpractical especially if you have multiple monitors. One simole example is you can't move a window from one screen to another while also moving it from one virtual desktop to another, you have to do it in 2 pass.
> But saying it only has limited zip support and that's it is just a lie.
I wasn't aware of that. It wasn't a lie, I'm just old. Mea Culpa. The last time I checked it only did ZIP, and only did that poorly as it lacked support for encrypted archives (only supporting older easily crackable archives). I've been installing 7zip out of habit for so long I failed to notice it improved. I'll give the new features a try.
> File History has been a feature since Windows 8.
File history is an OS level feature that's disabled by default, and that I believe requires admin to enable. It doesn't really feel like it's fair, since the average user can't.. use it. Change control should just be something explorer does natively (at least optionally) when moving/copying/renaming/etc. Ctl-z just isn't enough in 2025. But that's fine, you can have credit for this one too.
That said, I do give MS credit for adding multiple undo steps sometime around Windows XP. Being able to ctl-z multiple times was a feature people actually wanted.
> I just tested and was able to navigate to any part of the File Explorer window with nothing but a keyboard.
AFAIK you still cannot group files, sort the view, create a zip file, create a new file, burn a disc, etc without clumsily navigating menus intended for mouse only usage with the keyboard. Yes, it's possible but it's incredibly painful, slow, and difficult to understand. All of those things should either have hotkeys or let you assign hotkeys of your own. In fact, every part of the UI should, but mostly does not. This is terrible for accessibility AND for productivity.
MS has to be aware that it's essentially unusable with a keyboard, they obviously just decided not to care for the last 20+ years.
> Are you truly this ignorant of extremely basic obvious features, or are you just making things up to complain about?
Yeah, I should have been more specific. I was specifically think of Mac's finder and "Quick Look" or whatever it's called. You press space and you get an instant preview, for however many files you have selected.
In windows you have to turn on this clunky sidebar that takes up screen real-estate all day every day until you need it (or never need it). Worse it doesn't really work for a lot of file types so you just end up opening the full application, and mayeb worst of all it stinks out loud from a security perspective. I don't want to preview every piece of malware from the internet. I want to preview the one thing that needs previewed.
It's a terrible, clunky 90's UI for something that is, as you describe it, extremely basic and obvious. Hell, windows can't even preview markdown properly. Sometimes it feels like a time warp to the 90's.
So yes. Ignorance, goal post moving, acknowledging these features did exist just not to your standards so you claimed they didn't exist, and then pointing out a completely different application as a feature missing from a file browser. Finder doesn't have that "Preview" or "Quick Look" applications in MacOS, they're separate apps. And they're definitely not a "Preview pane" as you listed in your requirements.
More ignorance about the preview pane as well in this comment. You can quickly open and close the preview pane with Win+P. Files marked as downloaded from the internet or from file shares are blocked by default these days, one needs to unblock them for them to be opened by the Preview pane.
FWIW, beta builds have Notepad with markdown support. Sure, that's still not File Explorer having markdown support, but neither does Finder. But its whatever, you're shifting the goalposts to features for File Explorer compared to Finder + any other arbitrary application on the system.
What's the single keyboard shortcut on Finder to burn a new CD? If Finder doesn't have it, I guess MacOS is a trash OS with no redeemable value, since that's an obviously critical feature for people to have productive use of their operating systems in 2025.
I'm done here man. You just want to rant and complain features don't exist rather than spending two seconds to see if the feature is there or not.
I appreciate the conversation either way. I did learn a few things.
Ultimately I complain because I like windows and want it to improve. I'm just incredibly frustrated that after 20 years of explorer.exe this is the best a trillion dollar company can manage.
You might start with actually looking at the features being implemented and the other tools the company publishes instead of ignoring them and brushing them off. You wrote off the idea of installing PowerToys, but they're literally published and fully endorsed by Microsoft. They'd cover a lot of those gaps you're complaining about and have existed for a long while.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
Instead of being so combative and proclaiming these things can't possibly exist, maybe you should look at what is actually there. And I admit, maybe I shouldn't be so rough, I'm sorry for how negative I've been in this exchange. I get frustrated when people say obviously false things. I'll try and work on that. I hope you work on growing as well.
> Why is 200MB acceptable but peaking to 500MB just totally unacceptable and problematic?
Because only 200MB are reserved for this application. /s
That 300MB may be taken from another app (CAD) which needs it badly.
Shouldn't you then also complain that explorer.exe is consuming 200MB when previous graphical desktops managed it in handfuls of kilobytes? Once again, why is 200MB OK, but 500MB, oh boy, that's just far too much. Couldn't that CAD software also make use of that other 200MB? Why not demand 20MB? Or 2MB? Or 20KB?
How much of that extra 300MB is paged out and not actually in active memory? On both systems, how much of the total is actually paged out and not in current system memory?
Are you trying to run a modern CAD system on a device with only 512MB of RAM or something?
What do I get out of it using double the memory? It has zero new features that a normal human would want. There's supposed to be a benefit in a cost/benefit comparison or you just get a divide by zero error.
See my other comment in this thread for a list of the many, many, many ways Microsoft continues to chose not to improve.
There's a number of new features to the Windows desktop experience, I'm not really interested in reenumerating all of Microsoft's marketing here.
Personally I find the Windows 11 desktop experience far better than 10, despite it possibly using 1% more of my system memory at peak times.
And FWIW, on my Windows 11 desktop explorer.exe is using 110MB, not even 200MB.
> There's a number of new features to the Windows desktop experience, I'm not really interested in reenumerating all of Microsoft's marketing here.
I was speaking specifically about the file explorer in this context, though you'd have to go back to the grandparent post at least to see that.
You were speaking of explorer.exe's memory usage. That includes practically all the desktop experience. The right click menu, the desktop, the taskbar, the start menu, and more. Kill the process and see what all disappears. So no, you weren't speaking specifically about the file explorer, though it would take having some knowledge to understand that.
> So no, you weren't speaking specifically about the file explorer, though it would take having some knowledge to understand that.
Don't blame me if the architecture stinks.
The fact is it's unnecessarily large, complex, and wasteful of resources isn't the consumers fault. Deciding to use a single monolithic block of whack code that uses all my memory instead of separating those functions wasn't my choice and I'm not gonna change my expectations to suit that weird decision.
You don't have any idea of what it actually is or what its actually doing but you're 100% certain its overly large, complex, and wasteful.
Incredible.
And as mentioned, on my other Win11 machines I couldn't get explorer.exe to use more than ~200MB, with most of its usage around 110-130MB. I think you've got something else going on there, potentially lots of other 3rd party applications hooked into it causing excessive memory usage. Win11 doesn't inherently use 500MB of memory compared to Win10 only using a bit under 200MB. That's something with your machines.
the stupid right click menu is a single registry key (and i think it's also in settings now), but yah dumb new defaults.
There are two issues to consider: security updates and software compatibility.
The LTSC version is good for security updates, but I worry that software could stop supporting Windows 10 despite the LTSC version existing.
Coincidentally I am about to install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC! I was experimenting (and struggling) with PXE boot with iSCSI. An update broke iscsi boot in Windows 11 25H2 (26200.6901 works, 26200.7019 fails) as well as LTSC (26100.6905 works, 26100.7178 fails). There were other issues with iscsi boot on the LTSC version - the network hardware needs to be enumerated before the first boot, but can't boot because it needs network (a chicken-and-egg style problem).
To expand upon the second issue: I believe Nvidia stopped releasing driver updates for the version of Windows 10 a still supported version of LTSB was based upon at one point leaving users with no further driver updates for a Microsoft supported system. I don't know how common of a problem this is but it did seem to happen once. I also use LTSC but this is a potential pitfall.
I use W10 LTSC (which is pretty old at this point) and have no problem installing the latest NV drivers
The password icon being invisible is just funny. Some of the other issues are actually problematic, as they may interfere with some workflows.
However if you go to the December 1. (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/december-1-2025-kb...) the icon is still missing. How hard is that to fix? Aren't they using CoPilot? Just ask it to fix the invisible icon.
Probably not a priority.
> How hard is that to fix? Aren't they using CoPilot? Just ask it to fix the invisible icon.
They would, but no-one in the development team are able to log into their PCs due to no longer being able to locate the password icon ...
> How hard is that to fix? Aren't they using CoPilot? Just ask it to fix the invisible icon.
Maybe that's the problem? Imagine a Microsoft employee allowed to program only by using a CoPilot prompt, screaming and begging to just apply a patch he already written without touching anything else :D
This might not be too far from what's happening. In the dotnet repos you can see MS employees constantly fighting it across hundreds of PRs: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/120637
https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/120637#discussion_r24...
lmao. They had an AI create a PR, then a human to review it, but then the human ended up using another AI to review the original AI.
Looking that that PR and the interaction with CoPilot I struggle to see how it wouldn't have been easier to simply sidestep the AI.
After all that noise, the clanker just says it can't do it and the PR is abandoned. I'd say it would have been easier to literally do nothing and have the same result.
If a human wrote it, at least there would have been a possibility for learning or growth. This just looks like a waste of time for everyone.
Noise, credits.
Maybe if we burn through the budget, the AI mandates will back off a bit?
Oh man that gave me a good laugh!
At one point it basically just keeps responding with
>This requires a comprehensive rewrite
I never laughed so hard from watching a PR's comments.
Seeing Copilot says this over and over again was hilarious: "The current implementation requires a complete rewrite..."
Came for programming, became a shepherd, awesome career.
> The password icon being invisible is just funny
Sometimes the icons in the dock are also invisible. I thought that it was my RDP client playing bad with the server on Windows but eventually I found bug reports about that. This is exactly what I see 50% of the times https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1bdgym6/windows_...
> How hard is that to fix?
My experience with Microsoft fixing bugs in Win 10: at least 6 months. At first they deny it, then, after a fix is issued, they acknoledge it.
Expanding the "Gradual rollout" section is … interesting. I could hardly read it, let alone understand it straight away. For me a clear indicator that I am trying to ingest AI generated content. It's so embarrasing - is quality in documentation now a foreign concept in the age of AI, or does nobody simply care?
No one cares? I am confident someone got a promotion out of AI automating that. It is the metric being tracked in performance reviews. What is not tracked is how the readers experience it, so no point in putting effort into that.
Bottom line is employees do what they're incentivised to do.
Can't wait for my new SSD to arrive, then it's finally Goodbye Windows, Hello again, Linux.
Moved to Arch 6+ months ago after 25+ years in Windows, it's been SO nice. My computer belongs to me again, lightning fast, no ads and BS every update, no 500 background processes.
Definitely took some setup work - I have a lot of scripts and custom tools. But so worth it! Happy trails.
I did this just recently; Windows is now adware and no longer in your best interests.
A computer without Windows is like a fish without a bicycle.
Windows 10 has some really weird UI quirks.
I have my taskbar set up to be the small view on the bottom but I have the double stacked time + date so I can always see what time it is and today's date. It does this without making the taskbar taller.
50% of the time when I reboot, the date disappears and re-appears on its own after some time (sometimes hours, sometimes days, even without another reboot).
I'm taking 2 weeks off around Christmas and I'm absolutely dedicating some of those days to finally switch to native Linux to be control of my machine. I was trying for almost 10 years but was always road blocked on something not working. I think things are good enough now. I'll be making serious compromises on my video editing workflow but everything else is much better minus games with kernel level anti-cheat and I'm willing to take that hit.
> Windows 10 has some really weird UI quirks.
Oh boy, wait till you see Windows 11's UI quriks.. They butchered the taskbar and replaced it with some cheap (presumably AI coded) imitation.
Firstly, you can't move it to the top or sides. Okay, bottom taskbar I can live with.. but if you enable small icons and show all names - like how it used to be back in the day - it doesn't shrink the taskbar's height, so it ends up looking weirdly out-of-proportion. Even more weirder is this inexplicable blank space to the far-right (between the tray and where the taskbar buttons end), this space refuses to be used up even if my taskbar is full - sometime this space just expands for no reason, reducing the space available for the taskbar buttons by almost 50%! So 50% of the taskbar is blank, and the remaining buttons shrink and get shoved into the tiny tray overflow space, thereby almost killing the whole point of the taskbar. It's like, they don't want you to use the old title view any more and want to force you to use the icon-only, centered-taskbar...
Roblox was the last thing keeping my Windows 11 partition alive. Today, I found Sober that runs the Android Version on Linux. Took no effort to install and feels just like the desktop windows version using KBM. Goodbye forever MS!
Thats and minecraft are also holding me back. Well, technically my kids back. I was worried about it being janky, but you think its just as good?
Minecraft was what originally triggered me to dual boot Linux. I couldn't run either version in Windows 11 without also signing into the MS store, so I decided Java version was better than nothing. My kid doesn't play much MC anymore, but if we do, we'll start a Java world next time.
I use MCPelauncher to play android bedrock minecraft on linux and use a controller. Jankiest part was having to resurrect a very old, deeply unused google account to buy the game, but as goes without saying, YMMV.
is there anything that prevents them from using the java-version?
Yeah, they play bedrock
[dead]
Microsoft: if you're eating your own dog food and use Copilot etc. to develop Windows, please stop.
If you're not using it (why not?), please start.
Do they have any employees left capable of writing code without it?
Does this happen every time after the update or only sometimes? if it happens every time, how does that slip through? It would literally be noticed on the first test boot, no?
also: "To remove the LCU after installing the combined SSU and LCU package, use the DISM/Remove-Package command line option with the LCU package name as the argument. You can find the package name by using this command: DISM /online /get-packages.
Running Windows Update Standalone Installer (wusa.exe) with the /uninstall switch on the combined package will not work because the combined package contains the SSU. You cannot remove the SSU from the system after installation."
Always these linux users wanting to fix everything in the terminal, luckily i dont need it to use (or install without internet/MS account) Windows at all :)
Somebody should be fired for that. There's no excuses. A nearly trillion dollar company can afford to pay to QA before release.
Copilot is on the job to fix it already!
Fixing an invisible icon is a four month CoPilot job? It's been broken since August.
Yes, we just have to wait until the random word generator hits the right combination of words to fix this. Can't be long now! It's being motivated with billions of dollars, after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
LLMs can't see icons.
Did Microsoft just completely give up on QA in the name of accelerated slop delivery? They are in the news once a month for a serious windows bug. My disdain for windows id getting immense, at this point I'd rather have a linux computer, if I can't have a macbook. (But don't get me started on OSX & iOS, which are also total messes)
Microsoft is just relying on the feedback they collect from Windows Insider Program (a.k.a. program for volunteers beta testers) to fix bugs before a new version is released widely.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsinsider/
Once upon a time, you were able to get a free Windows 8 license if you join that program. And yes, when I was young and naive and couldn't care less about random things breaking, I joined the program, just like when I used to root Android phones and flash ROMs every other week.
(On the other hand, corporate IT almost certainly only roll out updates half or one year after they become available, when these bugs are likely already fixed.)
Anyone who would opt-in to use a buggier version of an already buggy and unreliable OS without being paid should be psychologically evaluated but instead they're trusted to be QA testers for the most widespread desktop OS in the world which is also a critically important tool in businesses and government organizations that keep most countries running.
I wouldn't worry about it. It isn't clear anyone is even reading any of their reports anyway.
I imagine it sends a fax to a printer that's had its tray removed and is mounted above a waste bin
So you can get rooted by the security issues disclosed.
Isn't it a wonderful catch 22?
Didn't MS fire most of the QA people together with the translation people a few years ago?
Or is that just a rumor that many of us fall for because it seems like a great explanation of what we see?
They laid off SDETs circa 2014 (I was one). I don’t think Windows ever had QA people, but it did have automated testing and dedicated people to write and monitor those tests, then file bugs if something broke. But not anymore since 2014.
These days, the only testing any release of Windows gets is from Microsoft employees (Dev/PM) and Windows Insiders.
They have rules of how many hours of self-hosting are required before they can release, but that’s the only requirement. That there exists telemetry of it running.
You might see a gap with that testing methodology, but it might also explain how things like this happen. If it’s a bug that doesn’t prevent boot, it’s easy to ignore.
(I knew a few devs who would just put builds of windows on one of their computers and play a 72 hour long video of a black screen on repeat to get self hosting hours. Then they would proceed with their feature release. And nobody saw any problem with that.)
MS needs a 'windows xp sp2' moment. Where they stop jamming new things in and just fix as much junk as possible. They still have a mixed control panel situation. Things just randomly work/break for no real reason. Camera here one day gone the next oh look its back again. Hey my sound is broken again. Linux/MacOS in many benchmarks is faster. Hundreds of old programs now just flake out for random reasons. But then will work again sometimes. Backwards compat is a reason to stick with them. But if it doesnt work, why am I here? SteamOS is going to remove one of the large reasons people keep windows.
MS is losing the people who cared about using them. Those people are migrating to linux/macos. I dont blame em.
They still had Software Test Engineers (a different role from SDET) in 2001, when I was an STE intern in MacBU (Macintosh Business Unit), which at that point, was basically a compliance department in the wake of the US DoJ's massive anti-trust ruling against MSFT a few years before. Every month, the MacBU STE team lead would award "Scariest Tester" for whoever had found the best (scariest) bug.
We were also, essentially, Apple's Mac OS X post-release testing team (10.0 Cheetah was released while I was there, but I missed the party because my grandmother had died and I was back home for her funeral) - we ran into all sorts of exciting problems with basic OS functions.
One of the things MacBU prided themselves on was having fewer people putting out the whole Office suite PLUS Internet Explorer for Mac than there were working on Word for Windows alone, yet still managing.
Really impressive since Internet Explorer 5 for Mac was the best browser anywhere at the time. First to support HTML4 & CSS1.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20557488
looks like it
> Did Microsoft just completely give up on QA in the name of accelerated slop delivery?
They never had QA. It was common knowledge to wait until SP2 for a "stable" version. These days, Windows is a rolling release, so all bets are off.
But hey! At least these four AI components made it in, so the important stuff is okay...
Man. I’d pay actual money to be able to just install security updates and nothing else indefinitely for this pile of shit. Really does suck that 90% of my workflow on my Windows PC remains Windows-only.
You don't have to pay anything.
Select security updates using this app:
https://github.com/DavidXanatos/wumgr
If you care about security, you're shouldn't be downloading some random dudes update manager with the last release being in 2019.
First, not a random dude.
Second, it's open source. You and your AI army can inspect the code if you wish. The same is true for literary every other software, so I don't see a point you are making.
>"First, not a random dude."
Oh, are they famous? Who are they and where would I know them from?
>"You and your AI army can inspect the code if you wish."
Nah. Though, if you want to pay a consulting fee, sure!
>"The same is true for literary every other software, so I don't see a point you are making."
The point I'm making is that if you care about security, you shouldn't install an update manager from some random dude, especially when it hasn't been touched in 6 years.
And if you don't recognize why software that manages your updates is riskier than most software, you really shouldn't install an update manager from some random dude.
Famous people get pwned.
That’s a shit heuristic.
Not the guy you're replying to, but... I think that's the joke.
I'm not using it as a heuristic.
Your first question about their credentials was “where would I know them from?”.
Unfortunately, as I have a 12700 I’m forced to use windows 11 and downgrading to W10 is not an option.
At this point I’ve literally just disabled updates completely. Firefox + uBlock origin + noscript is gonna have to get me by on that machine for now.
It works on W11.
What? 12700 CPUs work just fine on Windows 10.
In other news, 500 million PCs declined to 'upgrade' to 11.
Like a dog shaking fleas, Microsoft seeks to concentrate on paying customers, leaving granny to fend for herself in a world full of scams and misinformation.
Steam should start packaging small productivity software.
More seriously, the granny might actually be better served by a Chromebook.
Google is killing ChromeOS.
For Android Desktop.
Really? They nagged and nagged and nagged and nagged me until I finally upgraded.
setup.exe /product server
why the downvote haha, must be someone from microsoft
Perhaps someone with good with reverse engineering skills could figure out what went wrong here - it might be amusing...
Does it matter? It's designed to be used only by by AI agents anyway.
I mean this is a Preview release right? Essentially a beta? Are we surprised there are bugs in a beta release?
I mean, shouldn't we all be encouraging people to hit Enter or Return? No need to click blindly if we just use keyboard input properly. Unless the form doesn't correctly respond to those keys… dunno if that's the case or not.
Maybe the should spend time less time and money on clanker slop and more on delivering for their paying customers?
Their paying customers aren't end users, they're companies paying for in-OS advertising and telemetry/spyware data
And? Writing software at scale is incredibly hard. Where is the empathy for MS devs who are sprinting every day to give us an awesome product
Still waiting for the awesome product. Last time they shipped one was in 2009.
was that year where they added \n support to notepad ?
> Where is the empathy for MS devs
It's right there, next to the empathy they have for their paying customers.
/s
This makes sense.
The Windows Insiders are so glazed over they probably don’t even use passwords to log in — they’re too lost in the “free QA for Microsoft” sauce.