Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.
Really needs to be studied.
It's like they started making structural decisions a decade ago that are now overwhelming their ability to deliver basic functionality.
I realize there were always problems like this, I live through Windows ME, but it does feel qualitatively different now with advertising being forced into the product, performance of no consideration at all, etc.
Under Satya Nadella's early leadership, Microsoft eliminated the test role on their engineering teams in 2014, transferring QA responsibilities to developers and detecting issues through telemetry. That's slightly over 10 years ago. Windows 10 was their last version of Windows built with a full test infrastructure in place.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together.
- They're beholden to Wall Street and stock price is the only relevant metric.
- They've been laying off staff even up to senior/principal engineering levels.
- Shifting towards vibe coding instead of engineering.
Gonna get a lot worse still and things will continue to deteriorate until Wall Street picks up on the issues and thinks it'll start hurting their next quarter results. (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)
> (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)
Azure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Their stock price has depended on it since Cloud and AI got restructured into a single department (it was Nadella's baby before he became CEO), and Azure was already pretty bad before vibe coding entered the picture.
Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.
Has it really, though? Or has it just shifted its corporate priorities away from its traditional stalwarts of Windows and Office, but in doing so caused disruption to users that had bet on the eternal stability of Microsoft’s product line? I don’t like the current direction of Windows any more than the next guy, and personally I’ve made other choices in recent years, but as a general principle, I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere.
IMHO, a deeper problem here is that we collectively allowed a near-monopoly culture to develop around desktop operating systems and basic business software. Instead of having a healthy degree of competition between providers and using standardisation to ensure interoperability and portability of our data, we’ve ended up in a “too big to fail” situation where many users have all their eggs in one basket and that basket has a rapidly growing hole in the bottom and looks like it’s going to fail anyway.
There are also reasonable arguments to be made about length of support for products already sold, forced obsolescence and ratcheting “upgrades”, where possibly the actions of some providers in the market are exploitative in ways we should not allow, and therefore regulating to prevent the undesirable behaviours might be in the public interest.
Ultimately, I think a combination of restricting customer-hostile practices while also encouraging a healthy degree of competition and interoperability in important markets would be best for the users and fair to the developers. Sadly, right now, we have neither of those things, and that’s how we get Windows 11, the mobile device duopoly, numerous examples of products or services being locked down against their users’ interests, online services that people increasingly rely on for fundamental aspects of their normal lives and yet that have little real obligation to those people in return, and assorted other ills of the 21st century tech landscape.
> I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere
Market forces aren't pushing it elsewhere. The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. If those would not exist nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.
By letting their guard down on those fronts and letting Windows and Office degrade more and more, they are exposing themselves to the risk that someone ends up building a competitive company filling those niches and people risk the switching cost in order to get away from ever increasing Office 365 subscription costs.
Agreed. Companies pick Azure because they have already invested in Windows and Office. I have never worked in one company that uses Azure but not Office. They usually buy azure because of the discount.
> nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.
There's a really interesting dynamic here in that Azure has a solid spoiler role for large organisations that don't want to be commercially dependent on only AWS, and they can probably get really solid discounts if they're aready on board elsewhere. It's something that doesn't play out with Microsoft's other products nearly so much: you get shouted down if you want to have desktop diversity, but having a multicloud strategy is (in my experience) looked on as essential.
The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office.
Again, is it really, though? I have no special insider knowledge so perhaps this is just a misunderstanding of the public information, but just going by the organisation structure, leadership comments and recent financials, it looks like Windows makes up a relatively small part of Microsoft’s revenues these days, while the traditional desktop Office applications seem to be almost lost in the noise. The emphasis seems to be firmly on cloud services, though admittedly with all the rebranding from Microsoft lately, I find it hard to understand even what basic products and services they offer any more.
My point is that Windows/Office are a essential part in their sales funnel.
Google also makes most of their money in "ads" but if they were to axe Search and Youtube (which in an reduced view are only sales funnels for ads), they wouldn't have much of a business left.
I expect you’re right about the sales funnel angle, though neither Windows nor Office seems to be the same kind of product that those brands have traditionally described any more, presumably for that same reason.
Windows appears to be positioned more as a platform to reach all the online services now, rather than its traditional role as a desktop OS. Can you even activate it without being online and having a Microsoft account any more? I’m out of the loop, so genuinely don’t know the answer to this one.
Office — or whatever it’s being called after the recent changes — also appears to have morphed into something quite different. I tried searching just now to see if you could still buy a permanent licence and install the classic applications like Word and Excel locally, and some sources implied you could, but I didn’t actually find any way to buy it in five minutes of looking around office.microsoft.com. As far as I saw, that site is now 100% about the online SaaS version and trying to get users to save their documents in the cloud. For businesses, the strategy seems to include promoting other online services like SharePoint and Teams as well.
So I think I stand by my original argument, though I don’t think it necessarily disagrees with yours. Windows and The Software Product/Service Formerly Known As Office might still be a significant part of Microsoft’s sales funnel, but they aren’t the products that Windows and Office used to be any more. The products they used to be have been repurposed to support an online-first corporate strategy, along with almost everything else in the Nadella era. Would Microsoft care if 100% of their customers stopped using Windows tomorrow and jumped to Apple or Linux systems, as long as they still used the other services that generate most of Microsoft’s revenues these days? I’m not entirely sure they would.
Not much? Google would still have cloud services (which unlike Azure adoption depending on Windows/Office, only basically depend on the Internet), Gemini and Google Drive paid subscriptions, their flagship Pixel line...
They kinda did the same with IE. Got into a virtual monopoly and then let what was already a mediocre browser crumble into a pile of manure. So yeah then Google came along and ate their lunch. They should know better at this point.
There's not really not much more room for Microsoft's consumer software to grow, but the next quarterly report must show black numbers, so the only way to stay profitable is to produce software in a way that is cheaper than the previous month.
Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.
Growth mindset can be such a cancer. Many mature businesses don't need to grow and are perfectly fine as they are. You could continue running them forever, making steady cash. Or you could enshittify them, make slightly more money for 3 years, and get overtaken by competitors, all the while pissing everyone off and wasting billions of dollars.
Intel was resting on their laurels throughout most of the 2010s, while AMD floundered and couldn't catch up. By the time AMD got their shit together with Ryzen, Intel had all but been defeated by their own complacency.
It seems like that decline will continue until it affects their stock prices. There's effectively a bunch of perverse incentives at the decision making level in all major companies right now that disconnects them from customer/end users. Until that fundamental issue is fixed the enshittification will continue.
According to their latest annual report, Windows earns them less than half as much as Office and less than a quarter of what they make by selling server products.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.
That is true in the short term but most of the rest of their business rests on the fact that windows is the default OS.
If windows ever gets so bad that people actually do defect to macos/linux en masse that absolutely will affect their stock price, but so far it hasn't happened
It's definitely on a very long fuse, but if they lose control of the windows codebase to the point where bugs are regularly getting shipped to production that cause issues for corporate IT departments, and an increasing number of employees use MacOS or Linux at home and need training at work to learn how to use windows, it could change.
Short term no but long term these rotations do happen, otherwise we'd all still be using IBM
Oh trust me, it's not like their server offerings are any better at being bug-free. I can't go into the specifics, but here's how Microsoft truly makes their money:
I'm currently stuck in some sort of an infinite loop where a bug in Microsoft's server offerings causes us to waste some money each month, my management is pushing me towards re-creating the same ticket with Microsoft's support in hopes of getting rid of those extra costs, and Microsoft's support partners waste my time by telling me to check the same 5 things I've already checked before they close the ticket due to "inactivity" once (heaven-forbid) some other task on my plate deserves my attention and I fail to re-check those same 5 things fast enough.
So they treat their corporate customers the same way they treat devs or consumers on their forums?
Lmao. Shifting responsibility is real.
"Actually it is YOUR problem that we broke something*
It's like Dell telling you that CPU voltage/RAID controller alert and server reboot is your fault that will get fixed if you just install EXACTLY the same firmware version you have, or this another firmware update to completely different component. Yes, it's market "optional", but you must have it installed before they actually consider it a hardware problem next time it happens.
I don't disagree with you and in fact I hope there were quicker ramifications. Any company that forgets their customers and assumes such arrogant self serving stance should get a proverbial slap in face rather sooner than later. Unfortunately our mechanism for serving that said slap in the face are rather limited and as a single consumer (or even as a single enterprise) serving that slap only serves to slap ourselves in the face in the process by inconveniencing ourselves given the lack of viable/drop in alternatives. This is why we need regulation to get the corporate greed in check.
You're also right that incentives are misaligned - Satya might well be fully aware that he's running the company into the ground but he doesn't care.
He'll be gone in a few years with all his bonuses and RSUs intact and there'll be absolutely no consequences for him if his actions cause MS to fall apart in 2035
I think that transition, from OS/Desktop company to a Cloud Services Provider, is where the rot comes from.
The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
By the time the decline affects the stock prices — it won't, since dollars will devalue faster than Microsoft shares — it will be too late as all institutional memory of how to make good products will have been lost.
Depends what you mean by Microsoft. Azure is its biggest division. OpenAI stake is its most important. I think xbox/gaming has more revenue than Windows now. Even LinkedIn is a huge part of the company.
All products seem to decline the moment the revenue model switches to monthly recurring. This is always contrary to the promise that they won't and that money will be invested in product improvements.
If you think it's bad now wait until they consolidate the rental PC market (Bezos and Nadella are all over that)
Because they are no longer competing with their own previous version. This means they only compete with the other crap, or don't care because they are a monopoly.
How do you patch something that was written by another colleague, using an LLM, that you also need an LLM to figure out?
How do you find the subtle bugs? Working with LLMs I noticed, they try to implement things from scratch. I asked it to output the md5 hash of some string in the api response, it went on to implement the md5 algo and then called it. I simply did not have the time to check correctness so asked it to import a library I know. Someone might just have gone with it, shipped to prod and then bugs.
It also introduced slight changes in the intended flow of your program, that if you aren’t fully aware, are unnoticeable until they compound and you’re too deep to go back because now 10 different weird behaviors are in prod, you’re not sure what the cause is or if they were actually intended. You just have no frame of reference because maybe you didn’t build all of it as part of a team. And those are the things you should have had tests for, but when you were writing the code yourself you were coding with intent, so you know when something was off.
Now you build at the speed of thought and no longer know all the intents, only that the end result satisfies loosely written requirements.
You know, I've speculated before that Facebook's video metrics fraud might have disrupted the entire industry, because people copy their "success". It's why autoplaying videos etc
I wonder if MFABT is a similar justification
Does MFABT work? It's possible. But people have complained about Facebook for years as a buggy product. And it doesn't fulfill what it's apparently meant to be used for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
The start menu search is turning blank and shows a white screen whenever I search anything. Similar to how react apps break. It's been like this for 6 momths, across two laptops, fresh install of 25h2.
It was never good when you compare to internet search.
On the internet I can search for "pictures of the eiffel tower". If I try the same on my own computer I expect to find photos from the time I took the family to paris... Yet I don't.
But that's not the point of the Start Menu. The purpose is to quickly start programs with a fixed name, not to do a natural language query. Yet it sucks with that simple task. If programs would add themselves to the PATH, then Win-R would be a worthy replacement. As they don't, it is not.
And yet Gnome and KDE have no troubles doing just that if you activate the corresponding plug-ins for the respective search engines (Tracker and Baloo). How you access them is a matter of taste, but both integrate into your runner dialog or launch menu, if you wish.
Does PowerToys still installs new updates once a work-day, and never delete it's old updates so you end up with GBs of useless .exe's? Remember discovering about 200GB of old updates back when I was still using Windows.
I would enjoy hooking up Claude to KDE with voice control and audio feedback, but am
100% on board with that it should be 100% the user deciding to go for that folly.
I mean, that would be a fun experiment on a VM, but I would not trust it directly on my work station, not the least because of privacy. It might might do a mass-mass-rm-rf
I was doing that until Adobe decided to start using an API which is not present in 2021 LTSC. So I moved to macOS. Tahoe has its problems but it and the hardware makes a mockery of Windows 11 and PCs generally.
It's still a bit bloaty. It still has telemetry, edge, even tries to sign you in with a Microsoft account. It's not as good as the old ltsb used to be.
You don't, you pirate it. If you paid perfectly working, non-vibecoded dollars for Windows 11 Pro which became utterly broken, pirating whatever you need from Microslop to actually having a working computer is morally right.
Look I have no idea if this is related, but I have noticed recently, talking to other developers, that the addiction / allure of the speed that coding with AI agents gives you is leading to a relaxation of their standard quality bar. This doesn't even feel like the evil overlords whipping them more, it is self-inflicted.
When you can get multiple different agents to all work on things and you are bouncing between them, careful review of their code becomes the bottleneck. So you start lowering your bar to "good enough", where "good enough" is not really good enough. It's a new good enough, which is like you squinting at the code and as long as the shape is vaguely ok, and the code works (where that means you click around a bit and it seems fine), it's ok.
Over time you lose your "theory"[1] of the software, and I would imagine that makes you effectively lower your bar even further, because you are less attached to what good should look like.
This is all anecdotal on my end, but it does feel like quality as a whole in the industry has tanked in the last maybe 12 months? It feels like there are more outages than normal. I couldn't find a good temporal outage graph, but if you trust this: https://www.catchpoint.com/internet-outages-timeline , the number of outages in 2025 is orders of magnitude up on 2024.
Maybe this is because there are way more, maybe this is because they are now tracking way more, I'm not sure. But it definitely _feels_ like we are in for a bumpy ride over the next few years.
Exactly, half of a system exists as code but the other half exists as a mental model in the minds of the devs. With AI the former will, now much more quickly, outrun or deviate from the latter and then the problems of long-term reliability, maintainability and confidence in validation and delivery are just beginning.
"The industry" is not that homogeneous. B2B Software firms keeping their products in maintenance for decades are very different from your B2C mobile gaming app creator.
I waited til the absolute last minute to upgrade from Win 10 to 11. I use the machine just for Steam games and in particular the graphics-heavy stuff that came out in the last year or two.
Out of the blue, for months now, there's something causing the Shift key to remain magically stuck, and there's no way to troubleshoot it that I can tell. Everything is off - sticky keys, accessibility settings, all that garbagey Settings-not-Control-Panel that seems to move around all the time. If I mash shift a couple of times it returns to normal - almost as it Sticky Keys WAS active (and again all that stuff is disabled).
What's annoying about Windows is that There's Nowhere to Go to fix problem - nothing is transparent. I can google away and I'll get people also experiencing this and there's no answer.
With Linux and to a limited extent, MacOS, you can use unix tools and logs and playing around, even if it's hard you're empowered. With Windows you're a slave to Google searches.
Just had a great experience with this on Linux. One time in 20, when my X1 Carbon (Pop OS 22) resumes from sleep, Bluetooth doesn’t work. This kinda sucks because my mouse is Bluetooth.
After 10 minutes with Gemini, we found the incantation to completely reset the USB+HID stack. I put the commands in a script, and I could make the script auto-run on wake if I wanted.
I was so happy. Even after 8 years on Linux I didn’t expect this to work.
After a couple of Nvidia driver update occasions (@Arch Linux) the resume brought back a broken resolution. I didn't need any assistance to think that an xrandr command executed after each resume whould solve the problem. Now it might be already fixed but I don't bother to remove the line.
I think there is even an internet meme showing a headline where Microsoft brags about how AI is doing more more coding and right below that headline another one where a decline in quality is mentioned.
Microsoft is an end stage software company that has exhausted natural growth in its desktop segment. When that happens to a company that is beholden to Wall Street the only ways are to start shitting on their "customers" and their employees. Cut costs and try engage in dark patterns and other shenanigans in order to keep getting the customer money and show growth. The relationship turns adverserial. I think this already happened way before but I speculate that the aggressive drive to slop and vibe coding while reducing head count is now coming around to start showing their effects in the software quality.
I further speculate that before they had some senior/principal engineers that were the backstop holding things together but they've been let go too now. So there's nothing to stop AI slop taking over.
That sounds like there’s something else amiss because that definitely should not happen. For example, I was working on a family member’s Win 11 laptop (a budget 2018 HP laptop upgraded from Win10) that was absurdly slow. It would take 5 minutes to power on and open a web browser and even that was extremely sluggish. The specs were decent except for one thing—the local storage was a crappy 1TB 5200 RPM HDD. The drive was functionally ok, but I couldn’t find a way to get it out of 100% disk I/O. I ended up just cloning the drive to an old spare SATA SSD that was laying around and that immediately solved the issue. Windows was zippy and very usable again. I couldn’t believe they put up with this nonsense for years. Not sure if the HDD was just a lemon or something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.
This actually started With Windows 10 2019 if I remember correctly. They started using the storage for more things. Hard disk drives were no longer recommend. I say it's a good thing.
It didn't used to be so bad. It was really not that long ago that Windows really ramped up spending most of the users' resources on things which work against the user. While still getting not much new accomplished that most users were asking for.
>something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.
This is exactly it.
More than one thing changed in "unison", and not for the better.
Just fixed one of the 2019 HP's for my family which came with W10 1809 version on the same (actually decent) HDD. This was a pretty nice laptop and not the budget model.
It was not too bad when he got it but he had gotten some useless performance-hogging downloads and it was W10 Home to be taken off the internet anyway.
While waiting for the NVMe and some more memory, his partitions were then backed up to external media before experimenting with the built-in HP factory recovery method. Which wiped the HDD and started Windows 10 Home fresh like it was 2019, including of course the HP-specific software. If it was my PC I would have curtailed or uninstalled a selected good bit of the HP stuff, along with things like OneDrive from Windows, and limited the Windows settings to only those I particularly need. So that's what I did. It takes a little time but then it feels about as satisfyingly like a new PC has been doing for decades. Boots fast and everything is pretty responsive, especially without going on the internet. And that's with the HDD set up like it was originally.
When W11 first came out I had already shrunken his main partition by some decent space and installed W11 there for a regular plain Microsoft dual-boot system (but he never liked w11), so did that again too using the newest W11 Pro 25H2. This was a clean install without any HP bloatware, but I did properly manually download then install all the device drivers to current versions which some of them need to come from HP. Without going on the internet, and with equivalent Windows settings it's a real dog by comparison.
It naturally takes twice as much effort to set up one PC to dual-boot as if it was two different PC's, but after that the A/B testing back-to-back on identical hardware is as easy as it gets.
When you look into it Windows 11 is just hammering the C: volume like it's never done before, almost constantly, needing simultaneous reads & writes so much it would have been way more widespread ridicule if most people had not already been on SSD's before W11 "accelerated" the march of sluggishness.
W11 is a huge difference in what you see from older W10, back when loads of these laptops for a few years had W10 on 5400rpm HDDs and very few users could intuitively point to that one factor being worse than any other Windows performance degradation that came along in years before.
Now anybody could tell the difference if they tested on a more level playing field like this.
Once the NVMe was in he's now got the W11 Pro 25H2 and the W10 LTSC 2021 which does look like peak Windows. Neither one is nearly as frustrating as on HDD, but you can tell there is something very unfortunately wrong with W11 by direct comparison still.
Once you get on the internet it does get worse and stays worse. In addition to the very frequent simultaneous read/writes of the storage drive, then you've got all kinds of simultaneous send/receive actions to your network on top of that. And W11 is now up to 4GB of Windows Update per month, where W10 only took about 1GB to update all the way from the 2021 ISO.
Dwarfing W10 with a bunch of things that weren't needed at all for Windows 10 to do fine, so why can't it get better instead of worse?
As someone who back in the day worked on plenty of Dell ultralights running 4200 RPM drives and 5400 RPM drives at best, yes, yes it was "so bad". [And these devices were on the REDMOND domain!]
Anything else is rose-colored glasses, the same glasses people wear when they reminisce about the glory days of Windows 2000 or XP, absolutely forgetting what a security nightmare they were, or the boot times of Windows 2000 (when we used to regularly shutdown rather than suspend), or the not-so-uncommon BSODs, either from native Windows components or 3rd party drivers, etc.
Last Thursday windows 11 forced an update on my Acer machine.It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device. It took me a reformat to solve the issue.
I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse.
I was hit by this. Could RDP into machines using the regular client, but could not access Dev Boxes via Windows App. Getting real sick of the low quality AI slop.
Microsoft management should be held accountable for this sh.. and laid off. It is obvious these people do not understand software development on such scale.
As someone mentioned upthread, that's fine until some software you rely upon starts using something not present on older versions. It's one of the points that I keep in mind with most "what OS?" discussions, the OS by itself isn't really that useful but what it lets you do is. When win7 +3 year extended support ended that was the time chromium framework dropped support, and when projects using it updated then they would also need to drop win7 support (or "your mileage may vary" territory). I expect 2028 onwards may see another gradual win10 migration wave.
The support you're paying for is security updates against 0-day attacks. Once you stop receiving those then your machine becomes open season for botnets
By definition no support protects you from a zero day attack, A one day attack? sure if the supporting org is on their toes. Most of the time it will be weeks to months. if it is patched at all.
>A one day attack? sure if the supporting org is on their toes. Most of the time it will be weeks to months. if it is patched at all.
You should look at the CVE list that's fixed every month. Surely you agree it's important to have those exploits patched, especially since baddies can reverse engineer the patches to find the original exploits?
Yes, but they can only be analyzed, patched and distributed "After" the attack is known.
A zero day attack is where there have been zero days since the attack mechanism is discovered(by the victim, not the attacker obviously), there is no after. There is no time for a fix to be developed. When you get hit one day after the attack vector is known that would be a one day attack. if you get a fix one day after the attack that would be a one day patch. If the vulnerability gets discovered and patched before the attack occurs, then there is no zero day attack. only multi day ones on people who did not get or apply the patch.
I’m not so sure if you are using a web browser. Even the best enterprise firewall with SSL decryption and the best whizz bang features probably wouldn’t stop some novel zero day RCE. WannaCry was so bad that even WinXP and Server 2000/2003 got updates.
Microsoft security patches doesn’t protect you from doing that. Unsupported Win 10 behind firewall is perfectly fine, as long as you use an updated browser
Even that won't last forever. Notably, Edge is only guaranteeing updates until October 2028 [1], coinciding with the end of Windows 10's 3-year ESU period. Previously, Chromium ended support for Windows 7 at the end of its ESU period (which was also the end of support for Windows 8.1) [2]. However, Firefox continues to support Windows 7/8.1 by providing security updates for an older ESR version of Firefox 115; they appear to be re-evaluating whether to continue support every 6 months, currently set to end in March 2026.
People are blaming vibe coding but the real culprit was hiring leetcoders in the first place. I genuinely believe the stark decrease in quality of most products across the industry has been driven by that.
A developer said to me once, outside of work hours: "Why are you serious about [fundamentals]? [Framework] is where all the money is at." Work cultures that embrace those with his philosophy will have trouble. And here we are.
They exist but are rare and don't hire often. I know a guy (self taught programmer) who got his first major a job at a company doing native ui (not even using OS frameworks, straight GPU stuff).
The company does highly complex simulation software used by movie studios for explosions and other effects.
He got hired by word of mouth recommendation from someone at the company that had met him.
It takes as much luck as it takes skill to get these sorts of jobs, sadly.
If you mean his conference talk by that title, what was batshit unhinged in it? I remember thinking he was spot on. (Then again, if you called me “batshit unhinged”, you wouldn’t be the first to do it, and you may well be right.)
Using React in core parts of the Windows Shell, Microsof's inability to design and release an application using non-web technologies, and the sluggishness and lagginess and bloat of Windows in general has finally pushed me to dual boot Fedora on a separate drive.
It is very nice having an Operating system that respects the Hardware I own and makes efficient use of it. My experience has been very good so far. Every device in my custom built desktop PC worked immediately. The only driver I had to build and install was for my XBOX Wireless dongle.
Gaming has been really damn good. I installed Steam and my games just worked. No fiddling around with configs or anything. Even installing a custom Proton version to try it out is very simple.
I've been on Fedora now for nearly a month and only boot into Windows for work. Eventually, I might get rid of Windows entirely. It'll take a massive U-turn from Microsoft on the philosophy for Windows for me to change my opinion now.
This is the result of letting “devs” that only use JavaScript, that think JavaScript is an good language, and now only use AI to code, to do anything at all.
Microsoft is a joke; all of the formerly glorious tech companies are.
My experience has been somewhat different. I've had a linux server for a long time so I'm not new to the OS but my main computer which I use for development and gaming and everything else has always been Windows. I recently added a dual-boot Ubuntu for some performance-heavy development where the better docker integration made sense for me to use.
I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.
The window manager crashed multiple times when I tried to unlock it.
Whenever I woke up my screen the whole system froze, apparently because of the USB hub in the monitor which registered. So far the only solution has been to disconnect the USB hub.
Fan control doesn't work properly because the chipset isn't supported.
I see rendering issues with window decorations all the time.
That's just after two weeks. I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors. Whenever I'm in the console or do IO heavy stuff I feel right at home but as a desktop OS it's still inferior to me. I don't have fewer problems on Linux, just different ones.
I stopped recommending Ubuntu years ago. I've daily driven fedora, pop_os! and a few arch derivatives with few or zero issues for years, switching it up when I get new hardware just out of curiosity.
> I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors.
This is my new daily life with Windows 11. I've got a client that requires some software that can't run under Linux (even with wine) and picked up a fairly spendy new laptop with windows on it. Not a day has gone by in the last three months I haven't regretted being forced to use it. Hangs and glitches every day for a minute or two, occasionally to the point that I give up and force restart it.
> I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.
Does your Gnome install use Xorg? If yes, than it supports this. Xrandr settings are per screen. That is independent from the Window manager.
I picked Linux Mint way back when, before snap was a thing, so I can't lay claim to foresight. But I was really glad when they announced that they were disabling snap by default (though of course allowing you to install it if you choose to). There days, Mint is what Ubuntu should be — and nearly all Ubuntu-based packages will run unmodified on Mint too, so if you want to run an Ubuntu version that's sane, then Mint is what I would recommend.
> I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
That is a disingenuous statement.
Gnome is just as open source as KDE is and there are several forks for those who don't like the direction on Gnome. At no point does Gnome force ads on you, changes default apps under your butt, or takes a nap before opening a menu.
Sure, Gnome is not for everybody and you may dislike the direction it is taking, but saying it is like MS Windows, or the community project is like Microsoft is dishonest and insulting. I expect better behaviour from a fellow FOSS enthusiast.
I was just helping my dad with a brand new Lenovo laptop with Windows 11. It felt unbelievable slow and sluggish. Just opening file manager to create a new folder lagged so much it felt like this would have been a 15 years old computer.
While I personally use Ubuntu on my laptop for several years now, when I helped my relative with a brand new laptop (huawei) with Windows 11 I was suprised how fast it was despite being very cheap, I don't remember any version of Windows that had such a performance, at least visually.
Out of curiosity, what model does your father have?
To me it's generally pretty quick outside of File Explorer. The reskinned File Explorer is an absolute car crash - it's like they've taken everything that made 2005 KDE awkward and bolted it on top of Windows.
I’d also recommend people try Arch. The install process has been made waaaay easier in the latest versions. Mostly select what you want et voila you’re good to go. I installed it on a mini pc I took with me over the holidays to game on and it was great. The only thing I’d seriously suggest against is installing a bunch of packages from the installer itself.
Doing so caused me headaches because it installed Gnome (again my fault for selecting a bunch of packages) alongside KDE and I didn’t realize it. Causing me a bunch of “issues” until I selected KDE as the desktop environment on login.
I’ll probably move to Arch on my primary workstation sometime in the next few weeks (from PopOS which has treated me well for the last five years but Cosmic has been frustrating). My biggest reason is Arch has much more up to date packages than what I’ve had access to via Pop and it’s what SteamOS is based on so imagine it’ll be easier to keep up to date (along with little tweaks that Valve incorporates). Not to mention the Arch docs are great, I’ve had them help me even on PopOS for years now.
Addendum: Gnome + Wayland has more or less jumped the shark for me, with its highly opinionated design. KDE has thus far been plenty acceptable. For folks wanting to try both it’s easy enough to just install, pretty much all login managers (screens) let you choose which one you want. My only regret about KDE is losing Kinto.sh for MacOS style keybindings but I lost those with the move to Wayland anyway (still trying alternatives but they’ve been slow or quirky by comparison).
Non-technical home users in my circles are fed up with Windows 11's changes from Windows 10 without a suitable transition that eases them into the changes. They are nowhere near good candidates to migrate to any flavor of Linux, though. There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
More interesting to me however, are the macOS technical friends in my circles. A trickle of them are switching to various Linux desktop distributions. This was inconceivable to me a mere 10 years ago. But I have to admit the quality of the Apple ecosystem has slid an astounding amount, which is driving the more advanced technical users into the arms of Linux. There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS, system-wide kinetic/momentum scrolling, iCloud sync, system-comprehensive battery management that includes working sleep and suspend, advanced trackpad gestures, uneven Unicode support, uneven human interface guideline adherence, limited laptop LLM inference, etc. So I'm not expecting this trickle to turn into a flood soon, but the solid lock Apple used to have on developer mindshare is not as solid any longer.
> There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
I wouldn't be so assertive about that. No OS is perfect, and as we see here, windows is no exception. It's mostly a matter of being used to living with those imperfections. At least on Linux, nobody is making those worse for you for "fun" (actually for their own profit at the detriment of yours), and many more nontechnical users sense that just fine (just the way copilot was forced is baffling).
> There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS
KDE Connect solved that, and much more, many many years ago. I don't know the situation in the Apple walled garden, only that any hurdle there is the result of Apple abusive, user-hostile and anticompetitive practices that should (and will eventually) be illegal outside of the US.
Please don’t blame react for this, and not because I like react. The real problem is bad development caused by processes, procedures and most likely pressures to cut corners.
Microsoft code is bad. This is not a react issue, and is probably not caused by lead developers. But the problem is now that things have regressed to 98 era technology, it’s going to take a long time for the problem to get better.
Web tech encompasses a wide berth of performance requirements depending on the stack used. React requires more overhead than Windows 95-2000 era HTML and javascript.
Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.
Really needs to be studied.
It's like they started making structural decisions a decade ago that are now overwhelming their ability to deliver basic functionality.
I realize there were always problems like this, I live through Windows ME, but it does feel qualitatively different now with advertising being forced into the product, performance of no consideration at all, etc.
Under Satya Nadella's early leadership, Microsoft eliminated the test role on their engineering teams in 2014, transferring QA responsibilities to developers and detecting issues through telemetry. That's slightly over 10 years ago. Windows 10 was their last version of Windows built with a full test infrastructure in place.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together.
In summary because:
Gonna get a lot worse still and things will continue to deteriorate until Wall Street picks up on the issues and thinks it'll start hurting their next quarter results. (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)> (And it's not going to happen since Windows is nothing but a quarterly result side note at this point)
Azure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Their stock price has depended on it since Cloud and AI got restructured into a single department (it was Nadella's baby before he became CEO), and Azure was already pretty bad before vibe coding entered the picture.
Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years now.
Has it really, though? Or has it just shifted its corporate priorities away from its traditional stalwarts of Windows and Office, but in doing so caused disruption to users that had bet on the eternal stability of Microsoft’s product line? I don’t like the current direction of Windows any more than the next guy, and personally I’ve made other choices in recent years, but as a general principle, I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere.
IMHO, a deeper problem here is that we collectively allowed a near-monopoly culture to develop around desktop operating systems and basic business software. Instead of having a healthy degree of competition between providers and using standardisation to ensure interoperability and portability of our data, we’ve ended up in a “too big to fail” situation where many users have all their eggs in one basket and that basket has a rapidly growing hole in the bottom and looks like it’s going to fail anyway.
There are also reasonable arguments to be made about length of support for products already sold, forced obsolescence and ratcheting “upgrades”, where possibly the actions of some providers in the market are exploitative in ways we should not allow, and therefore regulating to prevent the undesirable behaviours might be in the public interest.
Ultimately, I think a combination of restricting customer-hostile practices while also encouraging a healthy degree of competition and interoperability in important markets would be best for the users and fair to the developers. Sadly, right now, we have neither of those things, and that’s how we get Windows 11, the mobile device duopoly, numerous examples of products or services being locked down against their users’ interests, online services that people increasingly rely on for fundamental aspects of their normal lives and yet that have little real obligation to those people in return, and assorted other ills of the 21st century tech landscape.
> I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere
Market forces aren't pushing it elsewhere. The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. If those would not exist nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.
By letting their guard down on those fronts and letting Windows and Office degrade more and more, they are exposing themselves to the risk that someone ends up building a competitive company filling those niches and people risk the switching cost in order to get away from ever increasing Office 365 subscription costs.
Agreed. Companies pick Azure because they have already invested in Windows and Office. I have never worked in one company that uses Azure but not Office. They usually buy azure because of the discount.
> nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.
There's a really interesting dynamic here in that Azure has a solid spoiler role for large organisations that don't want to be commercially dependent on only AWS, and they can probably get really solid discounts if they're aready on board elsewhere. It's something that doesn't play out with Microsoft's other products nearly so much: you get shouted down if you want to have desktop diversity, but having a multicloud strategy is (in my experience) looked on as essential.
> The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office.
You mean Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot App?
The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office.
Again, is it really, though? I have no special insider knowledge so perhaps this is just a misunderstanding of the public information, but just going by the organisation structure, leadership comments and recent financials, it looks like Windows makes up a relatively small part of Microsoft’s revenues these days, while the traditional desktop Office applications seem to be almost lost in the noise. The emphasis seems to be firmly on cloud services, though admittedly with all the rebranding from Microsoft lately, I find it hard to understand even what basic products and services they offer any more.
My point is that Windows/Office are a essential part in their sales funnel.
Google also makes most of their money in "ads" but if they were to axe Search and Youtube (which in an reduced view are only sales funnels for ads), they wouldn't have much of a business left.
I expect you’re right about the sales funnel angle, though neither Windows nor Office seems to be the same kind of product that those brands have traditionally described any more, presumably for that same reason.
Windows appears to be positioned more as a platform to reach all the online services now, rather than its traditional role as a desktop OS. Can you even activate it without being online and having a Microsoft account any more? I’m out of the loop, so genuinely don’t know the answer to this one.
Office — or whatever it’s being called after the recent changes — also appears to have morphed into something quite different. I tried searching just now to see if you could still buy a permanent licence and install the classic applications like Word and Excel locally, and some sources implied you could, but I didn’t actually find any way to buy it in five minutes of looking around office.microsoft.com. As far as I saw, that site is now 100% about the online SaaS version and trying to get users to save their documents in the cloud. For businesses, the strategy seems to include promoting other online services like SharePoint and Teams as well.
So I think I stand by my original argument, though I don’t think it necessarily disagrees with yours. Windows and The Software Product/Service Formerly Known As Office might still be a significant part of Microsoft’s sales funnel, but they aren’t the products that Windows and Office used to be any more. The products they used to be have been repurposed to support an online-first corporate strategy, along with almost everything else in the Nadella era. Would Microsoft care if 100% of their customers stopped using Windows tomorrow and jumped to Apple or Linux systems, as long as they still used the other services that generate most of Microsoft’s revenues these days? I’m not entirely sure they would.
Not much? Google would still have cloud services (which unlike Azure adoption depending on Windows/Office, only basically depend on the Internet), Gemini and Google Drive paid subscriptions, their flagship Pixel line...
Google Ads still make up a 75% share of their revenue, and likely an even bigger share if looking at profit.
They kinda did the same with IE. Got into a virtual monopoly and then let what was already a mediocre browser crumble into a pile of manure. So yeah then Google came along and ate their lunch. They should know better at this point.
There's not really not much more room for Microsoft's consumer software to grow, but the next quarterly report must show black numbers, so the only way to stay profitable is to produce software in a way that is cheaper than the previous month.
Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.
Growth mindset can be such a cancer. Many mature businesses don't need to grow and are perfectly fine as they are. You could continue running them forever, making steady cash. Or you could enshittify them, make slightly more money for 3 years, and get overtaken by competitors, all the while pissing everyone off and wasting billions of dollars.
Short term greed. Maximize immediate profits at the the cost of future profits.
Or you could invest some of the business's profits into growth attempts without letting them stifle the reliable existing business.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon ...
> Microsoft has seemingly been in a slow but steady decline for 10 years
Sort of matching the decline of Intel too.
Intel was resting on their laurels throughout most of the 2010s, while AMD floundered and couldn't catch up. By the time AMD got their shit together with Ryzen, Intel had all but been defeated by their own complacency.
It seems like that decline will continue until it affects their stock prices. There's effectively a bunch of perverse incentives at the decision making level in all major companies right now that disconnects them from customer/end users. Until that fundamental issue is fixed the enshittification will continue.
According to their latest annual report, Windows earns them less than half as much as Office and less than a quarter of what they make by selling server products.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.
That is true in the short term but most of the rest of their business rests on the fact that windows is the default OS.
If windows ever gets so bad that people actually do defect to macos/linux en masse that absolutely will affect their stock price, but so far it hasn't happened
Corporate users are the only users they even pretend they care about and they know they have pretty good lock in with Windows and office.
Also obviously this is someone else's problem some other quarter.. so.. like who cares?
It's definitely on a very long fuse, but if they lose control of the windows codebase to the point where bugs are regularly getting shipped to production that cause issues for corporate IT departments, and an increasing number of employees use MacOS or Linux at home and need training at work to learn how to use windows, it could change.
Short term no but long term these rotations do happen, otherwise we'd all still be using IBM
Oh trust me, it's not like their server offerings are any better at being bug-free. I can't go into the specifics, but here's how Microsoft truly makes their money:
I'm currently stuck in some sort of an infinite loop where a bug in Microsoft's server offerings causes us to waste some money each month, my management is pushing me towards re-creating the same ticket with Microsoft's support in hopes of getting rid of those extra costs, and Microsoft's support partners waste my time by telling me to check the same 5 things I've already checked before they close the ticket due to "inactivity" once (heaven-forbid) some other task on my plate deserves my attention and I fail to re-check those same 5 things fast enough.
So they treat their corporate customers the same way they treat devs or consumers on their forums? Lmao. Shifting responsibility is real. "Actually it is YOUR problem that we broke something*
Of course.
It's like Dell telling you that CPU voltage/RAID controller alert and server reboot is your fault that will get fixed if you just install EXACTLY the same firmware version you have, or this another firmware update to completely different component. Yes, it's market "optional", but you must have it installed before they actually consider it a hardware problem next time it happens.
I don't disagree with you and in fact I hope there were quicker ramifications. Any company that forgets their customers and assumes such arrogant self serving stance should get a proverbial slap in face rather sooner than later. Unfortunately our mechanism for serving that said slap in the face are rather limited and as a single consumer (or even as a single enterprise) serving that slap only serves to slap ourselves in the face in the process by inconveniencing ourselves given the lack of viable/drop in alternatives. This is why we need regulation to get the corporate greed in check.
You're also right that incentives are misaligned - Satya might well be fully aware that he's running the company into the ground but he doesn't care.
He'll be gone in a few years with all his bonuses and RSUs intact and there'll be absolutely no consequences for him if his actions cause MS to fall apart in 2035
I think that transition, from OS/Desktop company to a Cloud Services Provider, is where the rot comes from.
The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
By the time the decline affects the stock prices — it won't, since dollars will devalue faster than Microsoft shares — it will be too late as all institutional memory of how to make good products will have been lost.
Depends what you mean by Microsoft. Azure is its biggest division. OpenAI stake is its most important. I think xbox/gaming has more revenue than Windows now. Even LinkedIn is a huge part of the company.
All products seem to decline the moment the revenue model switches to monthly recurring. This is always contrary to the promise that they won't and that money will be invested in product improvements.
If you think it's bad now wait until they consolidate the rental PC market (Bezos and Nadella are all over that)
Because they are no longer competing with their own previous version. This means they only compete with the other crap, or don't care because they are a monopoly.
That does seem strange now that you mention it.
The Xbox name committee moved to Windows. Maybe they are shuffling the names their internal tools and documentation as well.
How do you patch something that was written by another colleague, using an LLM, that you also need an LLM to figure out?
How do you find the subtle bugs? Working with LLMs I noticed, they try to implement things from scratch. I asked it to output the md5 hash of some string in the api response, it went on to implement the md5 algo and then called it. I simply did not have the time to check correctness so asked it to import a library I know. Someone might just have gone with it, shipped to prod and then bugs.
It also introduced slight changes in the intended flow of your program, that if you aren’t fully aware, are unnoticeable until they compound and you’re too deep to go back because now 10 different weird behaviors are in prod, you’re not sure what the cause is or if they were actually intended. You just have no frame of reference because maybe you didn’t build all of it as part of a team. And those are the things you should have had tests for, but when you were writing the code yourself you were coding with intent, so you know when something was off.
Now you build at the speed of thought and no longer know all the intents, only that the end result satisfies loosely written requirements.
The bigger question is how the breakage made it through QA in the first place. Oh right, Microsoft fired all their QA a while back.
They're quite a bit late to the 'move fast and break things' party.
Maybe another virtual sticker or trophy or something will help motivate the unpaid Windows Insiders to find the bugs.
You know, I've speculated before that Facebook's video metrics fraud might have disrupted the entire industry, because people copy their "success". It's why autoplaying videos etc
I wonder if MFABT is a similar justification
Does MFABT work? It's possible. But people have complained about Facebook for years as a buggy product. And it doesn't fulfill what it's apparently meant to be used for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
MFABT is great advice for early stage startups. Keep changing things until customers like it.
I guess but developers were pretty pissed off with "startup" FB. Constantly breaking functionality
Facebook has been built on a lot of fraud. Don't just copy them as the example to follow
The start menu search is turning blank and shows a white screen whenever I search anything. Similar to how react apps break. It's been like this for 6 momths, across two laptops, fresh install of 25h2.
Search on Windows is completely pointless, it’s been broken for years at this point. I’ve installed PowerToys and use Command Palette now
It was never good when you compare to internet search.
On the internet I can search for "pictures of the eiffel tower". If I try the same on my own computer I expect to find photos from the time I took the family to paris... Yet I don't.
But that's not the point of the Start Menu. The purpose is to quickly start programs with a fixed name, not to do a natural language query. Yet it sucks with that simple task. If programs would add themselves to the PATH, then Win-R would be a worthy replacement. As they don't, it is not.
And yet Gnome and KDE have no troubles doing just that if you activate the corresponding plug-ins for the respective search engines (Tracker and Baloo). How you access them is a matter of taste, but both integrate into your runner dialog or launch menu, if you wish.
> I’ve installed PowerToys and
Does PowerToys still installs new updates once a work-day, and never delete it's old updates so you end up with GBs of useless .exe's? Remember discovering about 200GB of old updates back when I was still using Windows.
The start menu is a React app!
Start menu uses XAML Islands, not React.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5072911-explorer...
Simply ridiculous, a vital part of the OS is being drawn by a web framework, so that they can mingle it with ads more efficiently.
I still have my Windows 11 machine, but I haven't booted into it in a couple months now.
The "Windows is going to be an agentic OS" announcement was the last straw.
Linux and Mac it is.
I would enjoy hooking up Claude to KDE with voice control and audio feedback, but am 100% on board with that it should be 100% the user deciding to go for that folly.
I mean, that would be a fun experiment on a VM, but I would not trust it directly on my work station, not the least because of privacy. It might might do a mass-mass-rm-rf
https://x.com/tskulbru/status/2015148189897101622
alias mass=sudo
And this is why I'm still running Win10 LTSC. No bloat, super fast, still gets security updates.
I was doing that until Adobe decided to start using an API which is not present in 2021 LTSC. So I moved to macOS. Tahoe has its problems but it and the hardware makes a mockery of Windows 11 and PCs generally.
Use the opportunity to remove adobe from your life so that you can kill two birds with one stone.
I have no plans to. I like Lightroom and Photoshop and am willing to keep paying for it.
I will note that I have used Darktable extensively. But there isn't a good Photoshop alternative.
isn't affinity free these days when you don't pay for their AI?
There's free and there's free.
Affinity is a risk. Undocumented file formats (unlike PSD + LR database), no XMP support and vendor relying on AI to keep it free.
Nope!
It's still a bit bloaty. It still has telemetry, edge, even tries to sign you in with a Microsoft account. It's not as good as the old ltsb used to be.
windows 10 pro (and other editions) also have an option for 3 year of updates via https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol
In theory, this was a security patch, so you're still at risk of MS pushing a problematic patch to Win10
How do you get a valid license?
This is the current method of choice
https://massgrave.dev/
You don't, you pirate it. If you paid perfectly working, non-vibecoded dollars for Windows 11 Pro which became utterly broken, pirating whatever you need from Microslop to actually having a working computer is morally right.
> If you paid perfectly working, non-vibecoded dollars for Windows 11 Pro
then you already have a license.
Not for the 'working' version of windows which is LTSC or enterprise not pro.
Unfortunately they don't sell single LTSC licenses to individuals
My Win 11 Pro install is not "utterly broken" and is actually quite responsive.
What did I do wrong on my 5800X3D w/ 4090?
Look I have no idea if this is related, but I have noticed recently, talking to other developers, that the addiction / allure of the speed that coding with AI agents gives you is leading to a relaxation of their standard quality bar. This doesn't even feel like the evil overlords whipping them more, it is self-inflicted.
When you can get multiple different agents to all work on things and you are bouncing between them, careful review of their code becomes the bottleneck. So you start lowering your bar to "good enough", where "good enough" is not really good enough. It's a new good enough, which is like you squinting at the code and as long as the shape is vaguely ok, and the code works (where that means you click around a bit and it seems fine), it's ok.
Over time you lose your "theory"[1] of the software, and I would imagine that makes you effectively lower your bar even further, because you are less attached to what good should look like.
This is all anecdotal on my end, but it does feel like quality as a whole in the industry has tanked in the last maybe 12 months? It feels like there are more outages than normal. I couldn't find a good temporal outage graph, but if you trust this: https://www.catchpoint.com/internet-outages-timeline , the number of outages in 2025 is orders of magnitude up on 2024.
Maybe this is because there are way more, maybe this is because they are now tracking way more, I'm not sure. But it definitely _feels_ like we are in for a bumpy ride over the next few years.
[1] in the Programming as Theory Building sense: https://gareth.nz/ai-programming-as-theory-building.html
Exactly, half of a system exists as code but the other half exists as a mental model in the minds of the devs. With AI the former will, now much more quickly, outrun or deviate from the latter and then the problems of long-term reliability, maintainability and confidence in validation and delivery are just beginning.
Exactly right and by the time you get that theory back could you have just it all yourself?
Do you get the impression the industry is caring about quality vs ‘good enough’ + cutting costs?
"The industry" is not that homogeneous. B2B Software firms keeping their products in maintenance for decades are very different from your B2C mobile gaming app creator.
Agreed. Combine with job rewards for "impact" over anything else and move fast break things its hardly a surprise.
I waited til the absolute last minute to upgrade from Win 10 to 11. I use the machine just for Steam games and in particular the graphics-heavy stuff that came out in the last year or two.
Out of the blue, for months now, there's something causing the Shift key to remain magically stuck, and there's no way to troubleshoot it that I can tell. Everything is off - sticky keys, accessibility settings, all that garbagey Settings-not-Control-Panel that seems to move around all the time. If I mash shift a couple of times it returns to normal - almost as it Sticky Keys WAS active (and again all that stuff is disabled).
What's annoying about Windows is that There's Nowhere to Go to fix problem - nothing is transparent. I can google away and I'll get people also experiencing this and there's no answer.
With Linux and to a limited extent, MacOS, you can use unix tools and logs and playing around, even if it's hard you're empowered. With Windows you're a slave to Google searches.
Just had a great experience with this on Linux. One time in 20, when my X1 Carbon (Pop OS 22) resumes from sleep, Bluetooth doesn’t work. This kinda sucks because my mouse is Bluetooth.
After 10 minutes with Gemini, we found the incantation to completely reset the USB+HID stack. I put the commands in a script, and I could make the script auto-run on wake if I wanted.
I was so happy. Even after 8 years on Linux I didn’t expect this to work.
After a couple of Nvidia driver update occasions (@Arch Linux) the resume brought back a broken resolution. I didn't need any assistance to think that an xrandr command executed after each resume whould solve the problem. Now it might be already fixed but I don't bother to remove the line.
How's that AI tools doing for you Microslop ?
They are doing fine. It affects users, not customers.
I’m genuinely wondering if they’re using llms to code windows. Is that likely?
I think there is even an internet meme showing a headline where Microsoft brags about how AI is doing more more coding and right below that headline another one where a decline in quality is mentioned.
It's mandatory.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-internal-memo-usin...
I mean, unless Windows is a special exception, almost certainly:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
10,000%.
Vibe patching
Microsoft is an end stage software company that has exhausted natural growth in its desktop segment. When that happens to a company that is beholden to Wall Street the only ways are to start shitting on their "customers" and their employees. Cut costs and try engage in dark patterns and other shenanigans in order to keep getting the customer money and show growth. The relationship turns adverserial. I think this already happened way before but I speculate that the aggressive drive to slop and vibe coding while reducing head count is now coming around to start showing their effects in the software quality.
I further speculate that before they had some senior/principal engineers that were the backstop holding things together but they've been let go too now. So there's nothing to stop AI slop taking over.
I wish David Cutler were still the head of Windows NT.
Is it only cloud storage files? I've noticed that in 2026 my windows 11 machine is slower than ever before, by a lot- barely able to render web pages.
That sounds like there’s something else amiss because that definitely should not happen. For example, I was working on a family member’s Win 11 laptop (a budget 2018 HP laptop upgraded from Win10) that was absurdly slow. It would take 5 minutes to power on and open a web browser and even that was extremely sluggish. The specs were decent except for one thing—the local storage was a crappy 1TB 5200 RPM HDD. The drive was functionally ok, but I couldn’t find a way to get it out of 100% disk I/O. I ended up just cloning the drive to an old spare SATA SSD that was laying around and that immediately solved the issue. Windows was zippy and very usable again. I couldn’t believe they put up with this nonsense for years. Not sure if the HDD was just a lemon or something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.
This actually started With Windows 10 2019 if I remember correctly. They started using the storage for more things. Hard disk drives were no longer recommend. I say it's a good thing.
>they put up with this nonsense for years.
It didn't used to be so bad. It was really not that long ago that Windows really ramped up spending most of the users' resources on things which work against the user. While still getting not much new accomplished that most users were asking for.
>something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.
This is exactly it.
More than one thing changed in "unison", and not for the better.
Just fixed one of the 2019 HP's for my family which came with W10 1809 version on the same (actually decent) HDD. This was a pretty nice laptop and not the budget model.
It was not too bad when he got it but he had gotten some useless performance-hogging downloads and it was W10 Home to be taken off the internet anyway.
While waiting for the NVMe and some more memory, his partitions were then backed up to external media before experimenting with the built-in HP factory recovery method. Which wiped the HDD and started Windows 10 Home fresh like it was 2019, including of course the HP-specific software. If it was my PC I would have curtailed or uninstalled a selected good bit of the HP stuff, along with things like OneDrive from Windows, and limited the Windows settings to only those I particularly need. So that's what I did. It takes a little time but then it feels about as satisfyingly like a new PC has been doing for decades. Boots fast and everything is pretty responsive, especially without going on the internet. And that's with the HDD set up like it was originally.
When W11 first came out I had already shrunken his main partition by some decent space and installed W11 there for a regular plain Microsoft dual-boot system (but he never liked w11), so did that again too using the newest W11 Pro 25H2. This was a clean install without any HP bloatware, but I did properly manually download then install all the device drivers to current versions which some of them need to come from HP. Without going on the internet, and with equivalent Windows settings it's a real dog by comparison.
It naturally takes twice as much effort to set up one PC to dual-boot as if it was two different PC's, but after that the A/B testing back-to-back on identical hardware is as easy as it gets.
When you look into it Windows 11 is just hammering the C: volume like it's never done before, almost constantly, needing simultaneous reads & writes so much it would have been way more widespread ridicule if most people had not already been on SSD's before W11 "accelerated" the march of sluggishness.
W11 is a huge difference in what you see from older W10, back when loads of these laptops for a few years had W10 on 5400rpm HDDs and very few users could intuitively point to that one factor being worse than any other Windows performance degradation that came along in years before.
Now anybody could tell the difference if they tested on a more level playing field like this.
Once the NVMe was in he's now got the W11 Pro 25H2 and the W10 LTSC 2021 which does look like peak Windows. Neither one is nearly as frustrating as on HDD, but you can tell there is something very unfortunately wrong with W11 by direct comparison still.
Once you get on the internet it does get worse and stays worse. In addition to the very frequent simultaneous read/writes of the storage drive, then you've got all kinds of simultaneous send/receive actions to your network on top of that. And W11 is now up to 4GB of Windows Update per month, where W10 only took about 1GB to update all the way from the 2021 ISO.
Dwarfing W10 with a bunch of things that weren't needed at all for Windows 10 to do fine, so why can't it get better instead of worse?
> It didn't used to be so bad.
As someone who back in the day worked on plenty of Dell ultralights running 4200 RPM drives and 5400 RPM drives at best, yes, yes it was "so bad". [And these devices were on the REDMOND domain!]
Anything else is rose-colored glasses, the same glasses people wear when they reminisce about the glory days of Windows 2000 or XP, absolutely forgetting what a security nightmare they were, or the boot times of Windows 2000 (when we used to regularly shutdown rather than suspend), or the not-so-uncommon BSODs, either from native Windows components or 3rd party drivers, etc.
Last Thursday windows 11 forced an update on my Acer machine.It caused me BSOD: inaccessible boot device. It took me a reformat to solve the issue.
I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse.
I was hit by this. Could RDP into machines using the regular client, but could not access Dev Boxes via Windows App. Getting real sick of the low quality AI slop.
Microsoft management should be held accountable for this sh.. and laid off. It is obvious these people do not understand software development on such scale.
You know, I am not a big fan of AI, but it really highlights who knows what they are doing, and who doesn't.
I for one am enjoying my last few months of Windows 10, stable, responsive, no surprise updates at last.
Windows 10 is still supported until 2032 if you use LTSC
Even without MS' support it'll still work fine.
In fact, it's arguably better that way.
The old saying about known unknowns vs. unknown unknowns comes to mind.
As someone mentioned upthread, that's fine until some software you rely upon starts using something not present on older versions. It's one of the points that I keep in mind with most "what OS?" discussions, the OS by itself isn't really that useful but what it lets you do is. When win7 +3 year extended support ended that was the time chromium framework dropped support, and when projects using it updated then they would also need to drop win7 support (or "your mileage may vary" territory). I expect 2028 onwards may see another gradual win10 migration wave.
The support you're paying for is security updates against 0-day attacks. Once you stop receiving those then your machine becomes open season for botnets
By definition no support protects you from a zero day attack, A one day attack? sure if the supporting org is on their toes. Most of the time it will be weeks to months. if it is patched at all.
>A one day attack? sure if the supporting org is on their toes. Most of the time it will be weeks to months. if it is patched at all.
You should look at the CVE list that's fixed every month. Surely you agree it's important to have those exploits patched, especially since baddies can reverse engineer the patches to find the original exploits?
Yes, but they can only be analyzed, patched and distributed "After" the attack is known.
A zero day attack is where there have been zero days since the attack mechanism is discovered(by the victim, not the attacker obviously), there is no after. There is no time for a fix to be developed. When you get hit one day after the attack vector is known that would be a one day attack. if you get a fix one day after the attack that would be a one day patch. If the vulnerability gets discovered and patched before the attack occurs, then there is no zero day attack. only multi day ones on people who did not get or apply the patch.
That is pure FUD. Machines behind a firewall are not going to be affected at all.
I’m not so sure if you are using a web browser. Even the best enterprise firewall with SSL decryption and the best whizz bang features probably wouldn’t stop some novel zero day RCE. WannaCry was so bad that even WinXP and Server 2000/2003 got updates.
As long as you don’t run that one file.
Microsoft security patches doesn’t protect you from doing that. Unsupported Win 10 behind firewall is perfectly fine, as long as you use an updated browser
Even that won't last forever. Notably, Edge is only guaranteeing updates until October 2028 [1], coinciding with the end of Windows 10's 3-year ESU period. Previously, Chromium ended support for Windows 7 at the end of its ESU period (which was also the end of support for Windows 8.1) [2]. However, Firefox continues to support Windows 7/8.1 by providing security updates for an older ESR version of Firefox 115; they appear to be re-evaluating whether to continue support every 6 months, currently set to end in March 2026.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-...
[2]: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/185534985/sunsettin...
[3]: https://whattrainisitnow.com/release/?version=esr
I have patched Firefox 115 to run on XP, so no doubt it would be much easier to continue doing it for something as new as Win10.
If you want stable, responsive, and old, use Debian, possibly with XFCE. Then, you have patches for security issues too.
I for one been enjoying Linux for years. No surprise updates or AI slop forced down my throat.
are they vibe coding?
Vibe coding with Github copilot, no less
They do as the slop king Satya guides (yes).
He wants more “diffusion”. Slopya says “diffusion” so you better “diffusion”. They need AI…
DIFFUSION
Wait... Outlook and OneDrive were usable??
If it compiles - ship it.
windows 10 ltsc is really the last good windows
People are blaming vibe coding but the real culprit was hiring leetcoders in the first place. I genuinely believe the stark decrease in quality of most products across the industry has been driven by that.
A developer said to me once, outside of work hours: "Why are you serious about [fundamentals]? [Framework] is where all the money is at." Work cultures that embrace those with his philosophy will have trouble. And here we are.
Where can I find places that value fundamentals AND is willing to hire someone relatively junior, but has the proof of self-teaching fundamentals?
They exist but are rare and don't hire often. I know a guy (self taught programmer) who got his first major a job at a company doing native ui (not even using OS frameworks, straight GPU stuff).
The company does highly complex simulation software used by movie studios for explosions and other effects.
He got hired by word of mouth recommendation from someone at the company that had met him.
It takes as much luck as it takes skill to get these sorts of jobs, sadly.
it is so annoying when Jonathan Blow says batshit unhinged shit about "the collapse of civilization" and he is kind of right.
I can't judge the severity but his basic point is absolutely correct
If you mean his conference talk by that title, what was batshit unhinged in it? I remember thinking he was spot on. (Then again, if you called me “batshit unhinged”, you wouldn’t be the first to do it, and you may well be right.)
You know better than jblow to call him crazy? I definitely don’t.
Using React in core parts of the Windows Shell, Microsof's inability to design and release an application using non-web technologies, and the sluggishness and lagginess and bloat of Windows in general has finally pushed me to dual boot Fedora on a separate drive.
It is very nice having an Operating system that respects the Hardware I own and makes efficient use of it. My experience has been very good so far. Every device in my custom built desktop PC worked immediately. The only driver I had to build and install was for my XBOX Wireless dongle.
Gaming has been really damn good. I installed Steam and my games just worked. No fiddling around with configs or anything. Even installing a custom Proton version to try it out is very simple.
I've been on Fedora now for nearly a month and only boot into Windows for work. Eventually, I might get rid of Windows entirely. It'll take a massive U-turn from Microsoft on the philosophy for Windows for me to change my opinion now.
This is the result of letting “devs” that only use JavaScript, that think JavaScript is an good language, and now only use AI to code, to do anything at all.
Microsoft is a joke; all of the formerly glorious tech companies are.
Remember the times when Windows still had assembly language in its components?
My experience has been somewhat different. I've had a linux server for a long time so I'm not new to the OS but my main computer which I use for development and gaming and everything else has always been Windows. I recently added a dual-boot Ubuntu for some performance-heavy development where the better docker integration made sense for me to use.
I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.
The window manager crashed multiple times when I tried to unlock it.
Whenever I woke up my screen the whole system froze, apparently because of the USB hub in the monitor which registered. So far the only solution has been to disconnect the USB hub.
Fan control doesn't work properly because the chipset isn't supported.
I see rendering issues with window decorations all the time.
That's just after two weeks. I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors. Whenever I'm in the console or do IO heavy stuff I feel right at home but as a desktop OS it's still inferior to me. I don't have fewer problems on Linux, just different ones.
I stopped recommending Ubuntu years ago. I've daily driven fedora, pop_os! and a few arch derivatives with few or zero issues for years, switching it up when I get new hardware just out of curiosity.
> I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors.
This is my new daily life with Windows 11. I've got a client that requires some software that can't run under Linux (even with wine) and picked up a fairly spendy new laptop with windows on it. Not a day has gone by in the last three months I haven't regretted being forced to use it. Hangs and glitches every day for a minute or two, occasionally to the point that I give up and force restart it.
> I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.
Does your Gnome install use Xorg? If yes, than it supports this. Xrandr settings are per screen. That is independent from the Window manager.
> I've been on Fedora now
I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
If you are not on KDE, I strongly recommend it.
Source: daily driving Linux for 25+ years.
KDE is useable now that I can use AI to deal with the thousand cuts.
TBH I was rather shocked at how bad Kubuntu is out of the box:
* Hibernate is flaky
* The OS freezes from time to time requiring a hard reset
* Snaps completely bork the system - better to just uninstall snap
* Keyring is flaky. Often you get stuck into an "enter your password" endless loop.
The list goes on - and this is on a desktop PC! But fortunately an AI can sift through the arcane workaround lore in the various forums.
The bugs are annoying, but a helluva lot better than using Gnome!
Kubuntu has always been mostly a one-man effort, and that one man very publicly burnt out after getting somewhat shafted by his work colleagues.
I believe one should use "KDE Linux" as the reference implementation, nowadays.
Do not underestimate the importance of the distribution. Debian 13 is great, fedora too. Ubuntu snaps are a plague.
> Ubuntu snaps are a plague.
I picked Linux Mint way back when, before snap was a thing, so I can't lay claim to foresight. But I was really glad when they announced that they were disabling snap by default (though of course allowing you to install it if you choose to). There days, Mint is what Ubuntu should be — and nearly all Ubuntu-based packages will run unmodified on Mint too, so if you want to run an Ubuntu version that's sane, then Mint is what I would recommend.
I agree. KDE is pretty good these days.
> I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
That is a disingenuous statement.
Gnome is just as open source as KDE is and there are several forks for those who don't like the direction on Gnome. At no point does Gnome force ads on you, changes default apps under your butt, or takes a nap before opening a menu.
Sure, Gnome is not for everybody and you may dislike the direction it is taking, but saying it is like MS Windows, or the community project is like Microsoft is dishonest and insulting. I expect better behaviour from a fellow FOSS enthusiast.
I was just helping my dad with a brand new Lenovo laptop with Windows 11. It felt unbelievable slow and sluggish. Just opening file manager to create a new folder lagged so much it felt like this would have been a 15 years old computer.
While I personally use Ubuntu on my laptop for several years now, when I helped my relative with a brand new laptop (huawei) with Windows 11 I was suprised how fast it was despite being very cheap, I don't remember any version of Windows that had such a performance, at least visually. Out of curiosity, what model does your father have?
To me it's generally pretty quick outside of File Explorer. The reskinned File Explorer is an absolute car crash - it's like they've taken everything that made 2005 KDE awkward and bolted it on top of Windows.
It's a Lenovo Yoga 9i with an Intel EVO i5 CPU. Not sure how much memory it has.
> Just opening file manager to create a new folder lagged so much it felt like this would have been a 15 years old computer.
I use a 15 year old computer and I assure you creating a folder has no lag at all.
There’s no way they’re using react in windows shell. Tell me they’re not.
Start menu and the new calendar widget.
React Native though.
I’d also recommend people try Arch. The install process has been made waaaay easier in the latest versions. Mostly select what you want et voila you’re good to go. I installed it on a mini pc I took with me over the holidays to game on and it was great. The only thing I’d seriously suggest against is installing a bunch of packages from the installer itself.
Doing so caused me headaches because it installed Gnome (again my fault for selecting a bunch of packages) alongside KDE and I didn’t realize it. Causing me a bunch of “issues” until I selected KDE as the desktop environment on login.
I’ll probably move to Arch on my primary workstation sometime in the next few weeks (from PopOS which has treated me well for the last five years but Cosmic has been frustrating). My biggest reason is Arch has much more up to date packages than what I’ve had access to via Pop and it’s what SteamOS is based on so imagine it’ll be easier to keep up to date (along with little tweaks that Valve incorporates). Not to mention the Arch docs are great, I’ve had them help me even on PopOS for years now.
Addendum: Gnome + Wayland has more or less jumped the shark for me, with its highly opinionated design. KDE has thus far been plenty acceptable. For folks wanting to try both it’s easy enough to just install, pretty much all login managers (screens) let you choose which one you want. My only regret about KDE is losing Kinto.sh for MacOS style keybindings but I lost those with the move to Wayland anyway (still trying alternatives but they’ve been slow or quirky by comparison).
Non-technical home users in my circles are fed up with Windows 11's changes from Windows 10 without a suitable transition that eases them into the changes. They are nowhere near good candidates to migrate to any flavor of Linux, though. There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
More interesting to me however, are the macOS technical friends in my circles. A trickle of them are switching to various Linux desktop distributions. This was inconceivable to me a mere 10 years ago. But I have to admit the quality of the Apple ecosystem has slid an astounding amount, which is driving the more advanced technical users into the arms of Linux. There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS, system-wide kinetic/momentum scrolling, iCloud sync, system-comprehensive battery management that includes working sleep and suspend, advanced trackpad gestures, uneven Unicode support, uneven human interface guideline adherence, limited laptop LLM inference, etc. So I'm not expecting this trickle to turn into a flood soon, but the solid lock Apple used to have on developer mindshare is not as solid any longer.
> There are still plenty of sharp edges. So lots of cursing and griping at Windows 11 continues.
I wouldn't be so assertive about that. No OS is perfect, and as we see here, windows is no exception. It's mostly a matter of being used to living with those imperfections. At least on Linux, nobody is making those worse for you for "fun" (actually for their own profit at the detriment of yours), and many more nontechnical users sense that just fine (just the way copilot was forced is baffling).
> There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS
KDE Connect solved that, and much more, many many years ago. I don't know the situation in the Apple walled garden, only that any hurdle there is the result of Apple abusive, user-hostile and anticompetitive practices that should (and will eventually) be illegal outside of the US.
CachyOS has been smooth sailing for me! It is an arch derivative and it is blazing fast and stable.
Please don’t blame react for this, and not because I like react. The real problem is bad development caused by processes, procedures and most likely pressures to cut corners.
Microsoft code is bad. This is not a react issue, and is probably not caused by lead developers. But the problem is now that things have regressed to 98 era technology, it’s going to take a long time for the problem to get better.
If only people knew how much of Microsoft Windows has been secretly powered by HTML pages for 20 years…
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
Windows XP/2000 still had Internet Explorer as a core component. Web tech was involved every time you opened a folder.
Windows Shell using web tech is as on-brand Microsoft as it gets.
There's a HUGE difference between "you can use HTML" and "JS all the things, because we can".
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
"Active desktop"? Most people turned that off, and the explorer was pure native code otherwise.
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98. Windows 95 would let you do this if you installed Internet Explorer 4.0 but there was no HTML anywhere in the OS in vanilla Win95.
Web tech encompasses a wide berth of performance requirements depending on the stack used. React requires more overhead than Windows 95-2000 era HTML and javascript.
Hyphens please.
Slop Tuesday
Maybe it'll come full circle and we'll have Patch Fridays.
Microslop producing slop by using github slopilot, now supported by claude slopus 4.5
Copilot Tuesday
#winning