People want a simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user. Windows 11 is a very, very long way from this.
Honestly Windows 95 is closer to ideal than Windows 11.
The amount of research that went into making Windows 95 a user friendly OS is actually quite impressive. They didn't have all the kinks ironed out, and they couldn't foresee everything, but it's was a pretty solid effort.
I wonder how much research went into Windows 11, or 10 or 8 for that matter, and to what ends that research was made.
There actually is a concrete reference for the Windows 95 era research. Microsoft published detailed results from their usability work in the mid-90s, including task based testing with real users, error analysis, and iterative design changes.
Article title: The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996)
Fortunately for Microsoft, macOS 26 (Tahoe) is an even bigger disaster. Even John Gruber won't upgrade. So Microsoft is under no pressure at the moment.
I use Linux for home and both Windows 11 and Tahoe for work. I personally find Windows 11 actively hostile while Tahoe is mostly just whatever. I'd much rather be using Tahoe.
I have been using Tahoe since it came out, and I really don't understand all the hate on it. Some of the aesthetics are a little off, but not burdensome. The only thing I really don't like is the large, rounded corners on windows.
Tahoe UI sucks and is a dumpster fire but for the most parts it's still just normal MacOS. Windows 11 on the other hand actively hinders my productivity.
Isn't Chrome OS "the Linux Desktop" for most non-developer people?
90% of the people I know don't need any software that isn't either delivered via the Web, or limited for purely business reasons to an 'APP™' for mobile phones only.
The remainder of the possible uses of a "computer" are mainly video editing and non-casual gaming.
So if Windows and macOS continue to drag their reputations through the mud, Chrome OS, the Linux Desktop, is the most likely beneficiary.
> The remainder of the possible uses of a "computer" are mainly video editing and non-casual gaming.
You're overlooking a whole universe of business users. With the proliferation of tablets, smart TVs and phones, I'll bet many of those users ONLY user a computer at work. The vast majority of (mature) small-to-medium sized businesses lack the technical agility, expertise, time, money and/or initiative to switch from their existing legacy system of Windows file shares, outlook calendars, etc. and likely don't see a need to try. I'll bet most of those companies haven't even had a serious technical strategy conversation about the new ai features/changes in windows beyond "Phyllis in accounting discovered if you change setting X, then the stupid copilot thing won't get in the way when you're trying to run the TPS report macro." Even if they can do whatever they need to do in a browser, getting everybody in the company on board with the change and then figuring out what parts of their business break by doing so isn't something they generally feel compelled to investigate.
I don't work in the software business anymore-- it's easy to forget that technical expertise isn't built-in to your workforce in the overwhelming majority of businesses, and most of them are way too ingrained in their procedures to jump ship to the latest SaaS solution that would do it 100x better once they figured it out.
::sigh:: Windows is an AI slop hellhole, and MacOS is way more interested in being flashy than being good. It should be Linux's time to shine as a general-audience desktop OS... but the usability just isn't there.
As everyone points out when talking about Linux usability, it's fine for your grampa who just uses the email client and browser, but those users are switching to tablets, en masse, anyway. It's obviously fine for technically savvy users who are willing to deal with the periodic breakage or other hassle.
Importantly, It's just a bad experience for users who require hardware, software or something else that tablets don't facilitate, but aren't interested in looking through stack overflow posts and reddit threads to see why the 6 year old tutorial for getting their video editing software to work doesn't apply to the distro they just installed because they couldn't figure out how to install their video card drivers on the other distro. And why does that program they used to use to control their firewall not change anything anymore (which to them just looks like the firewall doesn't work, so they can never research their way out of the problem?) And how do I [insert the bazillion other problems that are non-issues for people with the background knowledge, but for everyone else, frustrating, time-wasting brick walls that probably cost them more in lost billable time than multiple copies of Windows 11 Pro.]
I've been using Linux since the 90s but I still don't use it for a lot of my media work. It's just too much of a PITA when I just need to satisfy my use case, which has nothing to do with the OS.
Even the commercial distros like RHEL are just, comparatively... janky. I really wish it was easier to integrate more interface design expertise into FOSS development. The workflows are just super different. This is why commercial products have product managers that can objectively balance and coordinate the efforts between design and development. I think we've gotten to a point where more of the FOSS crowd sees the benefit of competent expert UI designers, but making that practically useful is a tough nut to crack.
At this point I think Linux's market share in desktop market will keep rising. But mostly due to Windows and MacOS users leaving desktop completely and becoming mobile-only in their private time.
I also believe that's the future both Microsoft and Apple bet on. Otherwise they wouldn't have let their (once) flagship products became what they are now.
macOS (not iOS) used to be this. POSIX underpinnings. Iconography and visual language designed for clarity and simplicity. Balances between customizability and system stability with deactivatable gatekeepers.
Now, the same way Windows serves Microsoft’s AI investments, Apple serves a nebulous corporate goal for inimitable (read: too unpredictable/unreliable for competitors to copy) Liquid [Gl]ass user interfaces at the expense of clarity, and launch speed at the expense of stability.
I’m not sure if Steve Jobs would have complained about the market capitalization - but he certainly would have executed product improvements more cleanly.
It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.
> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.
For me it is. I was already considering going back to Linux for a while, and MacOS Tahoe pushed me over the fence. Got a Thinkpad with Linux as a replacement for my MacBook some months ago and don’t regret it yet.
I always find some things that doesn't work with my PC on windows 11. Sometimes things as simple as moving files in explorer makes it hangs where I had to restart explorer.exe. This is embarrassing really that windows can't get this right. There are so many times where I was frustrated and wished that I can just use my macbook pro as my only workstation. I just wish that steam on linux has full support for most games that are it supports in windows then i'll make the switch
my pc is not even that old, its ryzen 9 5900x with rtx 3080 and 32gb ram. however it is sluggish compared to my m1 pro macbook pro
Steam on Linux is great. I'm playing Deadlock and Arc Raiders on my 3070 Ti without issue, highly recommend it if you're not playing FaceIts or Valorant.
Windows 95 has some legitimate problem but one thing that was nice is that Microsoft (and Apple) were doing Skeuomorph, so training users to use it was a joy. It was designed to be easy to learn. Today they don't really care how users are trained, and just assume they'll figure it out.
PS - Yes, Skeuomoric concepts age out, like Floppy Disk-Save Icons, but the concept still has merit. It can help "ground" the experience.
I have. Blame the drivers, not the OS. Vista wasn't great for the same reasons. Sure, Windows 11 mostly doesn't have driver problems, but that doesn't mean the OS is great. It's largely irrelevant to the point being made.
I remember those days. Thankfully Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 had a Windows 95/98-style desktop but used the rock-solid NT kernel. Unfortunately they were not marketed to home users.
I feel similarly about the classic Mac OS: excellent interface and UI guidelines hampered by its cooperative multitasking and its lack of protected memory.
Windows XP and Mac OS X were major blessings, bringing the NT kernel and Mach/BSD underpinnings, respectively, to home computing users.
I was doing tech support through the Windows 95/98/ME period and it was hell. Everything either crashed the OS or required a restart if you touched it.
When Windows 2000 rolled around and I saw how stable it was, I went out and bought it to put on my gaming PC. Another friend from work laughed at me and told me how terrible "Windows NT" was for running games until he saw how smooth Starcraft ran on it.
It was unstable but it was nice to use. It introduced a lot of UI elements that are now taken for granted. I remember starting to build a window manager that replicated the win95 look.
people tend to complain more than comment on being content. A fraction of a percent of windows user base is a lot of people. ( given around 500 billion.... 1 percent is 5 billion people ish, it would seem to me much much less than 5 billion people are generally complaining)
HN users are the global thought leaders and (hate the term) influencers in technology and what they think has massively outsized impact on the way the tech world works.
If that were the case, every single project would be hosted on Hetzner with a Postgres database and everyone would be running Linux desktops everywhere. It's not happening.
>"HN users are the global thought leaders and (hate the term) influencers"
I've no idea about leaders as those do not write here much. As for "influencers" - my golden rule is to research subject I am having doubts about and pay zero attention to what so called "influencers" say.
what evidence do you have that people hate it? keeping in mind that a fraction of a percent of their user base is going to be a LOT of people so at any given time you can find a lot of people complaining.
> Around 500 million PCs are holding off upgrading to Windows 11, says Dell.
> “We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines.
And that's ignoring the 500 million that can't upgrade due to TPM requirements or whatever.
what's that evidence of? it's also an estimate of all PCs that can upgrade, of 1.5 billion, 500 million still haven't upgraded. Certainly not evidence that people hate it. Many reasons why IT departments may not have upgraded things or why people haven't. In fact, the ones who haven't upgraded kind of are the people who are least likely to know about what windows 11 is like.
Steam's Hardware survey still showed a 2/3 to 1/3 share of Windows 11 to Windows 10 two weeks before the support ended.[1] So about 1/3 of people who use Steam still weren't upgrading even though support was ending.
It took about two and a half years for Windows 10 to overtake Windows 10 in usage (release in July 2015, overtook 7 in January 2018). It's taken more than 3 for Windows 11 (released October 2021, overtook 10 in June 2025), and it only did that with four and a bit months left until support for 10 ended (compared to 3 years for 7). And the number isn't consistently trending downwards for 10 anymore. It's a mess.[2]
> Many reasons why IT departments may not have upgraded things
Running an outdated OS which isn't getting security updates is against regulations in a lot of places. I'd imagine all the major corps were already done doing that by the time support actually ended.
> In fact, the ones who haven't upgraded kind of are the people who are least likely to know about what windows 11 is like.
And thus the most likely to be pushed to upgrade by Microslops lack of understanding of what consent is. They're just going to push the button that says 'Next' and have Windows 11 pushed onto them.
again, it's really not evidence of people hating it, you are just talking about adoption numbers. Trying to infer peoples reasons is basically just guesswork.
I'm a people and I hate it. Loathe it, even. Ergo, people hate it.
Together with what I hear from people who use Windows 11, it sure looks like a lot of people are unhappy with what's on offer. I doubt Microslop are willing to publish the relevant numbers or make surveys to figure it out, since that's not going to tell them what they want.
Macworld published some estimates regarding Liquid Ass, and they look very red indeed.[1] I doubt Apple are in a hurry to publish anything about that either.
The key to having a nice time with Windows is 1) to give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely) and 2) to run a debloater script the moment you pick up a new system e.g. https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
All the rubbish from the last 20 years - ads, OneDrive, Copilot, Office upsells, Candy Crush in the start menu - it can just disappear, leaving a pretty stable system that hasn't actually changed much.
Apart from the awful control panels, anything else you don't like is probably replaceable. I really love startallback.com which brings back the regular start menu and lots of other little fixes.
Obviously everyone deserves a computer that doesn't try to sell to them CONSTANTLY, and I wish Windows were better out of the box. But it doesn't take much adjustment to get there.
Personally I don't think I've ever re-run it. I think I've clicked a few buttons as I've seen alerts about new options appearing. But ultimately it's just a bunch of powershell commands to remove packages and set options. So I'd assume it's safe to run regularly.
Thanks. I was asking because I was hoping to run it for a relative's computer that I am reinstalling Win11 on now, and they would not be capable of re-running it after the fact.
Linux is not getting better in those respects, either. DE's are crazy bloated. For everyone bitching about control panels, tell me how is it done in Linux? In the WM control panel or the DE control panel? Or some obscure .conf file you must edit by hand? Your guess is as good as mine and it's beyond disorganized. If I want to change a font it's a game of three card monte.
Linux desktop environments remind me what TempleOS would look like if it was designed by committee.
I was at Microsoft for a few years. I think some amount of blame has to go to hiring quality declining over the years.
I wrote a bit about this in an old comment:
> They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.
Also, a little bit after I left, they eliminated the SDET role. I have memories of encountering many SDETs who didn't know what they were doing. But the good ones kept the developers honest. Getting rid of a parallel org structure dedicated to testing for regressions etc. would certainly seem like a good explanation for a quality dip.
Two years ago I did some cleaning up and finally sorted out the gaming PC from my youth. I believe I bought it around 2007. Ran some old AMD dual core (may have been an Athlon 64 4400), still had an HDD. Installed on it was Windows Vista, which wasn't exactly a crowd favorite. So as I went to backup the final remnants of those gaming days I was flabbergasted by the snappiness of the explorer. Folders just opened instantly! So snappy, it was actually fun just navigating through all the folders. I had been expecting this PC to run at snail's pace, yet the windows experience was much better than on my desktop PC built in 2021 running Windows 10 on an NVMe drive. I have no idea how that is possible, but since then with every interaction with modern Windows there's just this tiny tinge of sadness...
HDD performance on Windows just died after some Windows 10 update. Sure, it took two minutes to boot 7 of an HDD, but once it was going, Explorer ran fine, and Firefox would run fine after that (probably cached after boot).
Same goes for day one Windows 10 (they probably didn't touch the relevant parts). I remember having to deal with a Windows 10 machine on an HDD, and it was mostly fine after it booted, but even clean installs on more recent version are just horrible. There's probably been some optimisation done which works fine on SSDs but just thrash HDDs, and HDDs as boot drives just aren't a thing anymore (within margin of error), so it didn't matter.
The fact that they've managed to throw so much bloat on top that even SSDs start struggling though, that really is something.
I work with seniors, who use W11. Aspects of change from W10 confused them, but their primary requests are two quite different things
1) please stop making dark patterns preference onedrive backup and let us run a local file backup cleanly without needing to de-install software
2) please make the charming folded complex flower-like shape an alpha channel overlay so we can make it lie over a background colour of our own choosing, not the one(s) you pre-package
one of them is "stop innovating" and the other is "innovate more" -I think the union over them both is "be nicer"
There is a third one: work better with Apple so that outlook handles photos and icloud mail oauth sync better, but there is a blame game with two parties in that one. An amazingly high number of seniors seem to want apple devices (iphone, ipad) to work with Windows home compute, and no amount of me suggesting they get a mac makes them want to get a mac "office doesn't work properly" mainly the issue. (thats nonsense, but they believe what they believe)
I guess as a senior sysadmin before I got absorbed into cloud "devops" and management, I'll say they're right! Legacy backup is found, I just discovered yesterday, in control panel I believe and it's called Windows 7 "File History and Restore".
Implying you're one thousand years old and using a legacy system if you don't use Onedrive.
Yes. Senior Citizens. Home users. Legacy backup is there, but MS both de-preference it, and use dark pattern labels on boxes to make it hard to stop one drive from nagging you about what MS want you to do.
And, if you did do a network attached install, your actual Document paths now lie UNDER the one drive anchor mount and so you have to un-do things, in order to be cleanly able to delete one drive: If you don't do this, your files can disappear because they are on local disk, under a one drive protected directory which will be wiped.
Oh, and it does registry edits to wire One drive into office, so there's all kinds of sneaky paths which make this visible. And these are >75yo, declining faculties people. It's hugely unfair.
(I volunteer for a local not-for-profit assisting seniors, older people, with their ICT burdens)
I really don't mind Windows 11, and don't recognise many of the problems other people here claim to have. For example, I simply don't see all (or any) of the ads that many complain about.
Much of the outrage over Recall seemed excessive to me as well. People spun it as 'Microsoft is spying on you with AI!' even though it was never that in any way.
Yeah, I haven't seen these either. WSL is great, it's pretty nice looking, there's a lot of good stuff in Windows 11. My main gripe is inconsistency and falling behind the competition in speed (largely due to the chips and x86/x64).
The worst thing is, there is no real alternative to Windows that is backed by somewhat of a corporate guarantee besides macOS.
But many people who use Windows wouldn't want to move to a considerably new platform like macOS, which works quite differently. There is Linux, but then there are compatibility issues and driver issues and other things that are not great for the casual average user.
It feels like Windows could have been better off without being free, but being something like a buy once, keep forever solution, like the good old days.
Today it has just turned into a complete toxic pit of mess that tracks you in every little thing you do and works against you to make sure that it maximizes profits for Microsoft and its partners. The usability is completely destroyed, alas.
This really isn't the case any longer. Linux Mint and similar are gaining traction in the gaming community because of how simple they are to use. It's entirely possible to use Linux nowadays without ever opening a terminal, and the UX is no more difficult than Windows XP was.
It ain’t that confusing. Click on the icon of the app you want to launch and that’s it.
The app is similar to what’s going in on windows.
Where that becomes frustrating is when you have a computer that isn’t well supported by Linux, things don’t work, battery is bad, you have to look up for ways to fix them and so on.
But if the « driver » support was as good as on windows, people could switch in 2 seconds.
My university computers ran Ubuntu, we were not computer nerd but civil engineering yet everyone adapted very quick.
Well okay, tell me why a single user would end up buying enterprise support?
And I would still argue that linux is confusing for casual users. Everything from file system paths to system settings, things are not understood readily for casual users. Lack of available apps like photoshop, etc can also frustrate users.
I must have miss written it. I meant that single user would have to buy computer that are well supported by Linux.
You don’t need canonical enterprise support.
If nothing is already broken, Ubuntu isn’t that different from windows. You got your 10 app icons, and a button to shut down the computer.
And the file path ? Everyone used the standard file picker and had no issue. I guess it defaulted to the home directory or desktop, whatever the case we just put all the garbage there in folder like we used to do in windows.
One thing not mentioned here is the Photos app. Out of the box, it is the default way to view images on Windows. That app is so bloated and slow to start that Microsoft announced they were going to preload it as well so it "starts" faster.
Coming from a Gsuite + Atlassian + AWS world to an all-inclusive Microsoft world was an experience. It should be in the bucket list for every developer to try once in their life.
WSL is a far better developer environment in Windows even for dotnet based development. I use it at work. It is fine.
Windows OS on the other hand is a mess. There are dedicated keyboard shortcut (win + c), keyboard buttons, buttons on desktop for copilot. Copilot is almost on every Microsoft software. I'm not getting the appeal of copilot at all.
Also, I have a personal gripe with a non-standard way of placing the Fn key - first of all, why keep it close to Ctrl, why? and on top of that, Lenovo & Microsoft and every other manufacturer have them in different positions on the keyboard.
FWIW; Every Lenovo I've used in recent history had a setting in the BIOS to remap Fn/Ctrl.
On my assigned machine, I have it swapped so Ctrl is in the lower left spot because otherwise I'd lose my mind trying to figure it out between all the machines I swap through. (Emacs users will have to use something else to put Ctrl where they want ....)
It's not an emergency at Microsoft for two reasons:
1. Microsoft doesn't make their money from Windows anymore. They make their money from services, like Azure and whatever they are calling their web-based Office this week. Windows is now mostly a telemetry-collection system for them, not a product.
2. People who hate Windows don't have a choice. Regular people are issued a PC and its OS from their employer, and can't change it. Consumers who buy low-end laptops for school or hobbies aren't going to pay twice as much for a Mac. And outside of HN, a vanishingly small number of people are even aware of Linux or other FOSS alternatives, much less have the ability to install and use it.
And PC gaming. Despite the massive amounts of improvement to Linux gaming thanks to Wine & Valve, if you play games that rely on kernel anticheat, you have no choice but Windows.
I'm hoping now that Microsoft seems like they might get serious about kicking people out of the kernel after the cloudstrike incident, kernel level anticheat may go away which will pave the way for Linux to completely take over.
To force the tech giants to actually compete with each other for customers, we have to be willing to switch platforms. If you think of yourselfs as Mac or PC (or iOS/Android) person, then these companies can treat you like a reliable asset they can extract value from, rather than a customer they have to please in order to keep.
Personally, I've worked pretty hard over the last few years to make sure that I can easily switch to a different OS. This means avoiding relying on Mac and Windows apps as much as possible, and most importantly having all of my data in portable formats that do not tie me to any specific software.
A mate just gave me a laptop; it is the first Windows device I have touched in 20 years. It runs Windows 11. I am assuming it's all as bad as it was 20 years ago, but going from all the Windows 11 talk I am guessing it will be far worse?
I am trying it out today first and then reinstalling it with Linux. It seems its fully supported out of the box except the cam and fingerprint scanner: cam I never use, fingerprint scanner would be nice but I hear it is basically impossible to get working if not supported (and it is not).
I disagree with this in the article: "Last, but not least, the technical debt of Windows has become almost unbearable. 30+ years of Windows NT certainly adds up."
The actual design of the Windows internals has mostly remained unchanged and continues to be improved. This is not much different than Linux being a design from the 70s. The critical bugs in Windows are due to newer additions to that base -- not the base itself.
But what everyone really hates is the "modern" technology has been piled on top of that Windows NT legacy not the legacy itself.
My favorite is whenever you need to do anything remotely complicated in settings. It's like travelling through layers of archeological digs. For me, it's the network settings and audio settings that are the best example.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their approach to updating the settings up but I think they did that exactly right. There was no way that were going to be able to re-implement every setting available in one go and have it be good. So they took the iterative approach and moved over the most important settings first and each version of Windows 10/11 more and more options are available in settings.
I find myself having to use the old control panel dialogs less and less -- but I'm also happy that they are still there.
Or like how there are two layers of right-click menu in windows explorer - the new simplified menu, and then 'Show more options' for the old menu just in case.
I am still on Win10 on my pc, the day my pc is forced to update to Win11 is the day I finally switch OS. I don’t even care if I loose things that are windows only. What OS should I switch to? Is it Linux Mint that is the closest alternative?
You should switch to something else immediately. Windows 10 is no longer receiving security updates and will become increasingly unsafe to leave connected to the internet.
I would almost agree XP with SP2 was decent for its time. SP3 introduced more bugs I'm guessing because that was the end of the line for XP. Stability as of XP made sense as well given Microsoft split the developers into common code, desktop and server. Both desktop and server became more stable around that time, relatively speaking. Both borrowed heavily from the VMS code base.
Windows 7 later on in its patch cycle was more stable in my opinion. Each time a version gets stable they make a new version full of new bloat, bugs, stability issues, crap most people did not want or need. Near the end of that versions life cycle it gets more stable and debloat scripts work better, then the cycle repeats and new junk comes out. Stability seems to leap-frog. Win 7 decent, 8 crap, 10 decent, 11 crap. This was a thing long ago with Unix kernel versions. I probably just jinxed it. 12 will probably summon the anti-christ and four horsemen of the apocalypse.
I think XP to a degree was indeed peak Microsoft...in that while yes, XP felt bloated at first, then they streamlined it, and it got better....plus its look and feel felt like such a departure from previous Windows....or maybe because it was so vibrantly colored that i was hypnotized. But, i did enjoy XP....but then my favorite Windows version was version 7....because it felt to me like a grown up, optimized version of XP...Running Win7 made me feel like XP was the fisher price/toy version of a windows operating system, and Win7 was the adult version...of course, "thanks" to Windows Vista, by the time Win7 came out, i had already started using linux distros as my daily drivers...and never looked back since then. So, i guess i have Windows vista to thank for going all in on linux....and maybe Win11 will be that for others? :-)
My software logic mind asks: I question why if Copilot is so great then why cannot Microsoft turn themselves around by dogfooding their own solution that they have forced on all of their users which then proves to the world that Copilot is great?
I am led to believe from marketing that A.I. has all the answers and with Microsoft having the greatest A.I. don't they have all the answers?
Microsoft really needs to retire the Control Panel and other old-school elements of the OS. Windows 11's design system is very pretty and user-friendly, please finish the transition to it ASAP!
The monkey's paw curls, and the old control panels disappear. However, more than 70% of what you needed to do when you did dig down into the old control panel is still not available in the new settings menu.
They've been 'transitioning' away from the old control panel since Windows 8, and they're still nowhere near done. On the contrary, when I do find myself on a Windows machine, I just jump straight to the old settings rather than jump through the hoops of the new settings, since I don't have any confidence in the new settings to do anything when I need them to (honourable mention to Windows update. That's worked mostly fine for me, other than the two times it broke and just refused to update anything until I did some manual fix. All it needs now is an 'Never update automatically. Only update manually' button, but I don't expect Microslop to understand what consent is quite yet).
Exactly there's so much stuff you simply cannot configure otherwise. For example disallowing applications to take sole ownership of a mic, in-detail power plans, etc. If they remove the old control panel, your machine basically becomes unconfigurable.
Literally every time I interact with the modern settings UI I give up 15 seconds in and switch back to the old control panel.
For instance, how do you change the key repeat delay in the modern UI? I have looked and I actually can't find a way to change it. I have to use control panel.
Just looking at the modern UI is an eyesore, there is so much empty space, a menu that should be a 600x400 rectangle takes up the entire screen. The information density is comically low. I have to scroll up and down this giant monitor sized list to find the one thing I am looking for. It's horrendous.
Because many settings still aren't available in the "Settings" app, you often have to dig into the Control Panel (most notably for power options). Microsoft support forums and ChatGPT, which I think would be used by non-technical users when they encounter an issue, seem to both default to recommending going straight to the Control Panel to change settings.
No, Control Panel works as well as it did 30 years ago.
Settings is a slow, bloated mess, as you stated elsewhere missing many settings, and was in general designed by schizophrenics.
A primary reason for the sorry state of software today is the absolutely delusional priority that software should be "pretty" vs it being functional.
Send all the UI/UX wizards packing, give them a Starbucks apron where IMO they belong, and watch software usability and customer satisfaction improve over the next 5 years.
State of Windows?
It's so out of touch, people hate it.
People want a simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user. Windows 11 is a very, very long way from this.
Honestly Windows 95 is closer to ideal than Windows 11.
The state of Windows is: disaster.
The amount of research that went into making Windows 95 a user friendly OS is actually quite impressive. They didn't have all the kinks ironed out, and they couldn't foresee everything, but it's was a pretty solid effort.
I wonder how much research went into Windows 11, or 10 or 8 for that matter, and to what ends that research was made.
There actually is a concrete reference for the Windows 95 era research. Microsoft published detailed results from their usability work in the mid-90s, including task based testing with real users, error analysis, and iterative design changes.
Article title: The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996)
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611
Fortunately for Microsoft, macOS 26 (Tahoe) is an even bigger disaster. Even John Gruber won't upgrade. So Microsoft is under no pressure at the moment.
I use Linux for home and both Windows 11 and Tahoe for work. I personally find Windows 11 actively hostile while Tahoe is mostly just whatever. I'd much rather be using Tahoe.
I have been using Tahoe since it came out, and I really don't understand all the hate on it. Some of the aesthetics are a little off, but not burdensome. The only thing I really don't like is the large, rounded corners on windows.
Tahoe UI sucks and is a dumpster fire but for the most parts it's still just normal MacOS. Windows 11 on the other hand actively hinders my productivity.
You said that as if Linux desktop weren't a thing.
...and you're mostly right.
Isn't Chrome OS "the Linux Desktop" for most non-developer people?
90% of the people I know don't need any software that isn't either delivered via the Web, or limited for purely business reasons to an 'APP™' for mobile phones only.
The remainder of the possible uses of a "computer" are mainly video editing and non-casual gaming.
So if Windows and macOS continue to drag their reputations through the mud, Chrome OS, the Linux Desktop, is the most likely beneficiary.
> The remainder of the possible uses of a "computer" are mainly video editing and non-casual gaming.
You're overlooking a whole universe of business users. With the proliferation of tablets, smart TVs and phones, I'll bet many of those users ONLY user a computer at work. The vast majority of (mature) small-to-medium sized businesses lack the technical agility, expertise, time, money and/or initiative to switch from their existing legacy system of Windows file shares, outlook calendars, etc. and likely don't see a need to try. I'll bet most of those companies haven't even had a serious technical strategy conversation about the new ai features/changes in windows beyond "Phyllis in accounting discovered if you change setting X, then the stupid copilot thing won't get in the way when you're trying to run the TPS report macro." Even if they can do whatever they need to do in a browser, getting everybody in the company on board with the change and then figuring out what parts of their business break by doing so isn't something they generally feel compelled to investigate.
I don't work in the software business anymore-- it's easy to forget that technical expertise isn't built-in to your workforce in the overwhelming majority of businesses, and most of them are way too ingrained in their procedures to jump ship to the latest SaaS solution that would do it 100x better once they figured it out.
Well, with the help of Microsoft and Apple, who knows? This might just be the years of the Linux desktop!
Valve has made Linux gaming a thing. So, even normies are trying it…
I support your notion but my take is it will be a "slowly and then suddenly" thing.
Do you declare "Year of the Linux Desktop" when market share is more than 50% or when the rate of conversion is 2%/month due to some market mechanism?
::sigh:: Windows is an AI slop hellhole, and MacOS is way more interested in being flashy than being good. It should be Linux's time to shine as a general-audience desktop OS... but the usability just isn't there.
As everyone points out when talking about Linux usability, it's fine for your grampa who just uses the email client and browser, but those users are switching to tablets, en masse, anyway. It's obviously fine for technically savvy users who are willing to deal with the periodic breakage or other hassle.
Importantly, It's just a bad experience for users who require hardware, software or something else that tablets don't facilitate, but aren't interested in looking through stack overflow posts and reddit threads to see why the 6 year old tutorial for getting their video editing software to work doesn't apply to the distro they just installed because they couldn't figure out how to install their video card drivers on the other distro. And why does that program they used to use to control their firewall not change anything anymore (which to them just looks like the firewall doesn't work, so they can never research their way out of the problem?) And how do I [insert the bazillion other problems that are non-issues for people with the background knowledge, but for everyone else, frustrating, time-wasting brick walls that probably cost them more in lost billable time than multiple copies of Windows 11 Pro.]
I've been using Linux since the 90s but I still don't use it for a lot of my media work. It's just too much of a PITA when I just need to satisfy my use case, which has nothing to do with the OS.
Even the commercial distros like RHEL are just, comparatively... janky. I really wish it was easier to integrate more interface design expertise into FOSS development. The workflows are just super different. This is why commercial products have product managers that can objectively balance and coordinate the efforts between design and development. I think we've gotten to a point where more of the FOSS crowd sees the benefit of competent expert UI designers, but making that practically useful is a tough nut to crack.
At this point I think Linux's market share in desktop market will keep rising. But mostly due to Windows and MacOS users leaving desktop completely and becoming mobile-only in their private time.
I also believe that's the future both Microsoft and Apple bet on. Otherwise they wouldn't have let their (once) flagship products became what they are now.
Hey wait...there are...er...dozens of us!
macOS (not iOS) used to be this. POSIX underpinnings. Iconography and visual language designed for clarity and simplicity. Balances between customizability and system stability with deactivatable gatekeepers.
Now, the same way Windows serves Microsoft’s AI investments, Apple serves a nebulous corporate goal for inimitable (read: too unpredictable/unreliable for competitors to copy) Liquid [Gl]ass user interfaces at the expense of clarity, and launch speed at the expense of stability.
I’m not sure if Steve Jobs would have complained about the market capitalization - but he certainly would have executed product improvements more cleanly.
It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.
> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.
It is if you want it to be. For me it was 1996 - been doing great on Linux since then.
> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.
For me it is. I was already considering going back to Linux for a while, and MacOS Tahoe pushed me over the fence. Got a Thinkpad with Linux as a replacement for my MacBook some months ago and don’t regret it yet.
Windows 2000 was peak. All improvements from XP onwards were negligible.
It was all downhill from 3.11
That was the best. With sound drivers
I always find some things that doesn't work with my PC on windows 11. Sometimes things as simple as moving files in explorer makes it hangs where I had to restart explorer.exe. This is embarrassing really that windows can't get this right. There are so many times where I was frustrated and wished that I can just use my macbook pro as my only workstation. I just wish that steam on linux has full support for most games that are it supports in windows then i'll make the switch
my pc is not even that old, its ryzen 9 5900x with rtx 3080 and 32gb ram. however it is sluggish compared to my m1 pro macbook pro
> I just wish that steam on linux has full support for most games that are it supports in windows then i'll make the switch
That day is today (assuming you don't play games with kernel anti-cheat).
Steam on Linux is great. I'm playing Deadlock and Arc Raiders on my 3070 Ti without issue, highly recommend it if you're not playing FaceIts or Valorant.
Have you actually used Windows 95? It was awful. Crashed every four hours, driver hell, etc
Windows 95 has some legitimate problem but one thing that was nice is that Microsoft (and Apple) were doing Skeuomorph, so training users to use it was a joy. It was designed to be easy to learn. Today they don't really care how users are trained, and just assume they'll figure it out.
PS - Yes, Skeuomoric concepts age out, like Floppy Disk-Save Icons, but the concept still has merit. It can help "ground" the experience.
I have. Blame the drivers, not the OS. Vista wasn't great for the same reasons. Sure, Windows 11 mostly doesn't have driver problems, but that doesn't mean the OS is great. It's largely irrelevant to the point being made.
I remember those days. Thankfully Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 had a Windows 95/98-style desktop but used the rock-solid NT kernel. Unfortunately they were not marketed to home users.
I feel similarly about the classic Mac OS: excellent interface and UI guidelines hampered by its cooperative multitasking and its lack of protected memory.
Windows XP and Mac OS X were major blessings, bringing the NT kernel and Mach/BSD underpinnings, respectively, to home computing users.
I was doing tech support through the Windows 95/98/ME period and it was hell. Everything either crashed the OS or required a restart if you touched it.
When Windows 2000 rolled around and I saw how stable it was, I went out and bought it to put on my gaming PC. Another friend from work laughed at me and told me how terrible "Windows NT" was for running games until he saw how smooth Starcraft ran on it.
Yeah, Windows 95/98/ME were terrible.
It was unstable but it was nice to use. It introduced a lot of UI elements that are now taken for granted. I remember starting to build a window manager that replicated the win95 look.
I wouldn't be so certain of this. People on HN hate it for sure, but this is a bit of an echo chamber.
Non-technical users aren't fans of random UI changes either. On the contrary, they hate having to re-learn shit every whatever-the-fuck years.
No,lots of people hate it. The biggest haters I know in real life are non technical users.
However, they will continue to use it so MS does not need to worry about them.
At least in the comment sections on tech/PC gaming YouTube people are frustrated with it there too.
On the other hand YouTube tries to serve me content I want so maybe thats just the algo talking.
people tend to complain more than comment on being content. A fraction of a percent of windows user base is a lot of people. ( given around 500 billion.... 1 percent is 5 billion people ish, it would seem to me much much less than 5 billion people are generally complaining)
I don't have an issue with it and I started with 98. There are somethings I'd change, but I do feel like I read a lot of hyperbole.
Provided I only largely use my PC for gaming.
HN users are the global thought leaders and (hate the term) influencers in technology and what they think has massively outsized impact on the way the tech world works.
and other hilarious jokes we can tell ourselves :P
There's a fast-follow "You're absolutely right!" from Claude pending here. :)
If this is a joke, it was a very good one.
If that were the case, every single project would be hosted on Hetzner with a Postgres database and everyone would be running Linux desktops everywhere. It's not happening.
>"HN users are the global thought leaders and (hate the term) influencers"
I've no idea about leaders as those do not write here much. As for "influencers" - my golden rule is to research subject I am having doubts about and pay zero attention to what so called "influencers" say.
You'll never know if the person you abuse on HN is Sam or Cook, since they use alts to plant ideas or assess damage their misdeeds are causing.
I was talking about getting "influenced". I do not base my research on what's on HN. Prefer to find and read articles on specific subjects.
I think that I struggled much less with Window 95 as a child than I struggle with Windows 11 today, as I near 40.
what evidence do you have that people hate it? keeping in mind that a fraction of a percent of their user base is going to be a LOT of people so at any given time you can find a lot of people complaining.
> Around 500 million PCs are holding off upgrading to Windows 11, says Dell.
> “We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines.
And that's ignoring the 500 million that can't upgrade due to TPM requirements or whatever.
https://www.theverge.com/news/831364/dell-windows-11-upgrade...
what's that evidence of? it's also an estimate of all PCs that can upgrade, of 1.5 billion, 500 million still haven't upgraded. Certainly not evidence that people hate it. Many reasons why IT departments may not have upgraded things or why people haven't. In fact, the ones who haven't upgraded kind of are the people who are least likely to know about what windows 11 is like.
Steam's Hardware survey still showed a 2/3 to 1/3 share of Windows 11 to Windows 10 two weeks before the support ended.[1] So about 1/3 of people who use Steam still weren't upgrading even though support was ending.
It took about two and a half years for Windows 10 to overtake Windows 10 in usage (release in July 2015, overtook 7 in January 2018). It's taken more than 3 for Windows 11 (released October 2021, overtook 10 in June 2025), and it only did that with four and a bit months left until support for 10 ended (compared to 3 years for 7). And the number isn't consistently trending downwards for 10 anymore. It's a mess.[2]
> Many reasons why IT departments may not have upgraded things
Running an outdated OS which isn't getting security updates is against regulations in a lot of places. I'd imagine all the major corps were already done doing that by the time support actually ended.
> In fact, the ones who haven't upgraded kind of are the people who are least likely to know about what windows 11 is like.
And thus the most likely to be pushed to upgrade by Microslops lack of understanding of what consent is. They're just going to push the button that says 'Next' and have Windows 11 pushed onto them.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/a-bunch-of-steam-pl...
[2] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
again, it's really not evidence of people hating it, you are just talking about adoption numbers. Trying to infer peoples reasons is basically just guesswork.
I'm a people and I hate it. Loathe it, even. Ergo, people hate it.
Together with what I hear from people who use Windows 11, it sure looks like a lot of people are unhappy with what's on offer. I doubt Microslop are willing to publish the relevant numbers or make surveys to figure it out, since that's not going to tell them what they want.
Macworld published some estimates regarding Liquid Ass, and they look very red indeed.[1] I doubt Apple are in a hurry to publish anything about that either.
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/3028428/ios-26-is-a-massive...
OP is certainly a metaphorical as well as a technical question
The key to having a nice time with Windows is 1) to give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely) and 2) to run a debloater script the moment you pick up a new system e.g. https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
All the rubbish from the last 20 years - ads, OneDrive, Copilot, Office upsells, Candy Crush in the start menu - it can just disappear, leaving a pretty stable system that hasn't actually changed much.
Apart from the awful control panels, anything else you don't like is probably replaceable. I really love startallback.com which brings back the regular start menu and lots of other little fixes.
Obviously everyone deserves a computer that doesn't try to sell to them CONSTANTLY, and I wish Windows were better out of the box. But it doesn't take much adjustment to get there.
If only our technology were advanced enough that we could have an OS that didn't constantly undermine the user's intentions.
This looks great. In your experience, do you run it once and that's it? Or do you need to re-run as updates add or re-introduce "bloat"?
Personally I don't think I've ever re-run it. I think I've clicked a few buttons as I've seen alerts about new options appearing. But ultimately it's just a bunch of powershell commands to remove packages and set options. So I'd assume it's safe to run regularly.
Thanks. I was asking because I was hoping to run it for a relative's computer that I am reinstalling Win11 on now, and they would not be capable of re-running it after the fact.
You definitely should run it after updates.
Or buy an IOT LTSC license to have an officially debloated version.
How? It's only available to companies.
https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
There are sites that will happily sell you keys, though I don’t feel qualified to comment on their legitimacy.
You could also sail the seven seas and run an AutoKMS script, though that might (and probably will) include some malware.
If your options include paying for piracy or pirating for free, always pirate for free.
Or don't buy a licence and use it anyway.
Linux is not getting better in those respects, either. DE's are crazy bloated. For everyone bitching about control panels, tell me how is it done in Linux? In the WM control panel or the DE control panel? Or some obscure .conf file you must edit by hand? Your guess is as good as mine and it's beyond disorganized. If I want to change a font it's a game of three card monte.
Linux desktop environments remind me what TempleOS would look like if it was designed by committee.
Try a distro like Fedora. I mostly use Arch, but I’ve found Fedora to be an excellent out of the box experience.
Bloat is what you call any feature you're not actively using.
Only difference is on Windows nobody wants those "features".
There's a difference between features you don't use and pre-installed Minecraft and ads.
I was at Microsoft for a few years. I think some amount of blame has to go to hiring quality declining over the years.
I wrote a bit about this in an old comment:
> They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472300
Also, a little bit after I left, they eliminated the SDET role. I have memories of encountering many SDETs who didn't know what they were doing. But the good ones kept the developers honest. Getting rid of a parallel org structure dedicated to testing for regressions etc. would certainly seem like a good explanation for a quality dip.
Two years ago I did some cleaning up and finally sorted out the gaming PC from my youth. I believe I bought it around 2007. Ran some old AMD dual core (may have been an Athlon 64 4400), still had an HDD. Installed on it was Windows Vista, which wasn't exactly a crowd favorite. So as I went to backup the final remnants of those gaming days I was flabbergasted by the snappiness of the explorer. Folders just opened instantly! So snappy, it was actually fun just navigating through all the folders. I had been expecting this PC to run at snail's pace, yet the windows experience was much better than on my desktop PC built in 2021 running Windows 10 on an NVMe drive. I have no idea how that is possible, but since then with every interaction with modern Windows there's just this tiny tinge of sadness...
HDD performance on Windows just died after some Windows 10 update. Sure, it took two minutes to boot 7 of an HDD, but once it was going, Explorer ran fine, and Firefox would run fine after that (probably cached after boot).
Same goes for day one Windows 10 (they probably didn't touch the relevant parts). I remember having to deal with a Windows 10 machine on an HDD, and it was mostly fine after it booted, but even clean installs on more recent version are just horrible. There's probably been some optimisation done which works fine on SSDs but just thrash HDDs, and HDDs as boot drives just aren't a thing anymore (within margin of error), so it didn't matter.
The fact that they've managed to throw so much bloat on top that even SSDs start struggling though, that really is something.
I work with seniors, who use W11. Aspects of change from W10 confused them, but their primary requests are two quite different things
1) please stop making dark patterns preference onedrive backup and let us run a local file backup cleanly without needing to de-install software
2) please make the charming folded complex flower-like shape an alpha channel overlay so we can make it lie over a background colour of our own choosing, not the one(s) you pre-package
one of them is "stop innovating" and the other is "innovate more" -I think the union over them both is "be nicer"
There is a third one: work better with Apple so that outlook handles photos and icloud mail oauth sync better, but there is a blame game with two parties in that one. An amazingly high number of seniors seem to want apple devices (iphone, ipad) to work with Windows home compute, and no amount of me suggesting they get a mac makes them want to get a mac "office doesn't work properly" mainly the issue. (thats nonsense, but they believe what they believe)
You called them seniors? Like senior citizens?
I guess as a senior sysadmin before I got absorbed into cloud "devops" and management, I'll say they're right! Legacy backup is found, I just discovered yesterday, in control panel I believe and it's called Windows 7 "File History and Restore".
Implying you're one thousand years old and using a legacy system if you don't use Onedrive.
Yes. Senior Citizens. Home users. Legacy backup is there, but MS both de-preference it, and use dark pattern labels on boxes to make it hard to stop one drive from nagging you about what MS want you to do.
And, if you did do a network attached install, your actual Document paths now lie UNDER the one drive anchor mount and so you have to un-do things, in order to be cleanly able to delete one drive: If you don't do this, your files can disappear because they are on local disk, under a one drive protected directory which will be wiped.
Oh, and it does registry edits to wire One drive into office, so there's all kinds of sneaky paths which make this visible. And these are >75yo, declining faculties people. It's hugely unfair.
(I volunteer for a local not-for-profit assisting seniors, older people, with their ICT burdens)
I really don't mind Windows 11, and don't recognise many of the problems other people here claim to have. For example, I simply don't see all (or any) of the ads that many complain about.
Much of the outrage over Recall seemed excessive to me as well. People spun it as 'Microsoft is spying on you with AI!' even though it was never that in any way.
Yeah, I haven't seen these either. WSL is great, it's pretty nice looking, there's a lot of good stuff in Windows 11. My main gripe is inconsistency and falling behind the competition in speed (largely due to the chips and x86/x64).
The worst thing is, there is no real alternative to Windows that is backed by somewhat of a corporate guarantee besides macOS.
But many people who use Windows wouldn't want to move to a considerably new platform like macOS, which works quite differently. There is Linux, but then there are compatibility issues and driver issues and other things that are not great for the casual average user.
It feels like Windows could have been better off without being free, but being something like a buy once, keep forever solution, like the good old days. Today it has just turned into a complete toxic pit of mess that tracks you in every little thing you do and works against you to make sure that it maximizes profits for Microsoft and its partners. The usability is completely destroyed, alas.
RedHat and Ubuntu both provide enterprise support.
Well, they are still Linux, and they are confusing for casual, average users.
This really isn't the case any longer. Linux Mint and similar are gaining traction in the gaming community because of how simple they are to use. It's entirely possible to use Linux nowadays without ever opening a terminal, and the UX is no more difficult than Windows XP was.
It ain’t that confusing. Click on the icon of the app you want to launch and that’s it.
The app is similar to what’s going in on windows.
Where that becomes frustrating is when you have a computer that isn’t well supported by Linux, things don’t work, battery is bad, you have to look up for ways to fix them and so on.
But if the « driver » support was as good as on windows, people could switch in 2 seconds.
My university computers ran Ubuntu, we were not computer nerd but civil engineering yet everyone adapted very quick.
Well okay, tell me why a single user would end up buying enterprise support? And I would still argue that linux is confusing for casual users. Everything from file system paths to system settings, things are not understood readily for casual users. Lack of available apps like photoshop, etc can also frustrate users.
I must have miss written it. I meant that single user would have to buy computer that are well supported by Linux.
You don’t need canonical enterprise support.
If nothing is already broken, Ubuntu isn’t that different from windows. You got your 10 app icons, and a button to shut down the computer.
And the file path ? Everyone used the standard file picker and had no issue. I guess it defaulted to the home directory or desktop, whatever the case we just put all the garbage there in folder like we used to do in windows.
These days less so. LLMs have greatly lowered the barrier to entry.
I'll be honest, I just want something that I can develop on (linux is the easiest by far) and that's not annoying (Nixos is the best at that).
I don't even use any advanced config, just bare-minimum config for the system, enough (project-specific things handled by nix).
One thing not mentioned here is the Photos app. Out of the box, it is the default way to view images on Windows. That app is so bloated and slow to start that Microsoft announced they were going to preload it as well so it "starts" faster.
Coming from a Gsuite + Atlassian + AWS world to an all-inclusive Microsoft world was an experience. It should be in the bucket list for every developer to try once in their life.
WSL is a far better developer environment in Windows even for dotnet based development. I use it at work. It is fine.
Windows OS on the other hand is a mess. There are dedicated keyboard shortcut (win + c), keyboard buttons, buttons on desktop for copilot. Copilot is almost on every Microsoft software. I'm not getting the appeal of copilot at all.
Also, I have a personal gripe with a non-standard way of placing the Fn key - first of all, why keep it close to Ctrl, why? and on top of that, Lenovo & Microsoft and every other manufacturer have them in different positions on the keyboard.
FWIW; Every Lenovo I've used in recent history had a setting in the BIOS to remap Fn/Ctrl.
On my assigned machine, I have it swapped so Ctrl is in the lower left spot because otherwise I'd lose my mind trying to figure it out between all the machines I swap through. (Emacs users will have to use something else to put Ctrl where they want ....)
how is it not yet a code red inside Microsoft, for the astonishing decline of user experience of Windows 11?
It's not an emergency at Microsoft for two reasons:
1. Microsoft doesn't make their money from Windows anymore. They make their money from services, like Azure and whatever they are calling their web-based Office this week. Windows is now mostly a telemetry-collection system for them, not a product.
2. People who hate Windows don't have a choice. Regular people are issued a PC and its OS from their employer, and can't change it. Consumers who buy low-end laptops for school or hobbies aren't going to pay twice as much for a Mac. And outside of HN, a vanishingly small number of people are even aware of Linux or other FOSS alternatives, much less have the ability to install and use it.
Don't schools typically use Chromebooks these days? My daughter was issued one each year from grade 7 to 12.
And PC gaming. Despite the massive amounts of improvement to Linux gaming thanks to Wine & Valve, if you play games that rely on kernel anticheat, you have no choice but Windows.
I'm hoping now that Microsoft seems like they might get serious about kicking people out of the kernel after the cloudstrike incident, kernel level anticheat may go away which will pave the way for Linux to completely take over.
it's probably been thrown out the window compared to office and chatgpt
Because their profits are all time high??
To force the tech giants to actually compete with each other for customers, we have to be willing to switch platforms. If you think of yourselfs as Mac or PC (or iOS/Android) person, then these companies can treat you like a reliable asset they can extract value from, rather than a customer they have to please in order to keep.
Personally, I've worked pretty hard over the last few years to make sure that I can easily switch to a different OS. This means avoiding relying on Mac and Windows apps as much as possible, and most importantly having all of my data in portable formats that do not tie me to any specific software.
A mate just gave me a laptop; it is the first Windows device I have touched in 20 years. It runs Windows 11. I am assuming it's all as bad as it was 20 years ago, but going from all the Windows 11 talk I am guessing it will be far worse?
I am trying it out today first and then reinstalling it with Linux. It seems its fully supported out of the box except the cam and fingerprint scanner: cam I never use, fingerprint scanner would be nice but I hear it is basically impossible to get working if not supported (and it is not).
I disagree with this in the article: "Last, but not least, the technical debt of Windows has become almost unbearable. 30+ years of Windows NT certainly adds up."
The actual design of the Windows internals has mostly remained unchanged and continues to be improved. This is not much different than Linux being a design from the 70s. The critical bugs in Windows are due to newer additions to that base -- not the base itself.
But what everyone really hates is the "modern" technology has been piled on top of that Windows NT legacy not the legacy itself.
My favorite is whenever you need to do anything remotely complicated in settings. It's like travelling through layers of archeological digs. For me, it's the network settings and audio settings that are the best example.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for their approach to updating the settings up but I think they did that exactly right. There was no way that were going to be able to re-implement every setting available in one go and have it be good. So they took the iterative approach and moved over the most important settings first and each version of Windows 10/11 more and more options are available in settings.
I find myself having to use the old control panel dialogs less and less -- but I'm also happy that they are still there.
Or like how there are two layers of right-click menu in windows explorer - the new simplified menu, and then 'Show more options' for the old menu just in case.
The services control panel just as badly designed as it was 30 years ago.
Exactly technicaly linux is even older than NT. Some Microsoft guys had to implement async io in linux because they where incapable of doing it.
I am still on Win10 on my pc, the day my pc is forced to update to Win11 is the day I finally switch OS. I don’t even care if I loose things that are windows only. What OS should I switch to? Is it Linux Mint that is the closest alternative?
You should switch to something else immediately. Windows 10 is no longer receiving security updates and will become increasingly unsafe to leave connected to the internet.
I like Ubuntu.
Linux Mint would be a very decent distribution to start with. I've also heard good things about Fedora, but never used it myself.
Yeah.
In wonder whether in a few years, we'll have a post complaining about windows 12 and that 11 was much better.
Who would have thought forcing one developer to write a million lines of code each month would have negative consequences
I never experienced any of this problems on any of my computers inclusing the ARM one. Same for everybody i know
XP was peak Windows.
I would almost agree XP with SP2 was decent for its time. SP3 introduced more bugs I'm guessing because that was the end of the line for XP. Stability as of XP made sense as well given Microsoft split the developers into common code, desktop and server. Both desktop and server became more stable around that time, relatively speaking. Both borrowed heavily from the VMS code base.
Windows 7 later on in its patch cycle was more stable in my opinion. Each time a version gets stable they make a new version full of new bloat, bugs, stability issues, crap most people did not want or need. Near the end of that versions life cycle it gets more stable and debloat scripts work better, then the cycle repeats and new junk comes out. Stability seems to leap-frog. Win 7 decent, 8 crap, 10 decent, 11 crap. This was a thing long ago with Unix kernel versions. I probably just jinxed it. 12 will probably summon the anti-christ and four horsemen of the apocalypse.
I think XP to a degree was indeed peak Microsoft...in that while yes, XP felt bloated at first, then they streamlined it, and it got better....plus its look and feel felt like such a departure from previous Windows....or maybe because it was so vibrantly colored that i was hypnotized. But, i did enjoy XP....but then my favorite Windows version was version 7....because it felt to me like a grown up, optimized version of XP...Running Win7 made me feel like XP was the fisher price/toy version of a windows operating system, and Win7 was the adult version...of course, "thanks" to Windows Vista, by the time Win7 came out, i had already started using linux distros as my daily drivers...and never looked back since then. So, i guess i have Windows vista to thank for going all in on linux....and maybe Win11 will be that for others? :-)
No. It was frustrating to use and had to be reinstalled every year. Windows 8.1 was good and so was Windows 10 to a degree.
They never solved that problem in Windows. Every Windows older than a year, even the modern ones, get slower.
It will get more annoying with Satya at the helm and as long as there is a cash cow that is not enduser facing there is not even hope for change.
try windhawk. it is awesome tweak for mac-os-wannabe windows 11.
Vibe coded updates for sure.
Probably also vibe tested.
My software logic mind asks: I question why if Copilot is so great then why cannot Microsoft turn themselves around by dogfooding their own solution that they have forced on all of their users which then proves to the world that Copilot is great?
I am led to believe from marketing that A.I. has all the answers and with Microsoft having the greatest A.I. don't they have all the answers?
I apologize in advance for my dumb.
It‘s not a priority for Microsoft, it‘s intrusive and above all it‘s shit.
Just repeating all of the threads from the last 6 months; (including two big ones in the last week);
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46656998
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011569
etc
Microsoft really needs to retire the Control Panel and other old-school elements of the OS. Windows 11's design system is very pretty and user-friendly, please finish the transition to it ASAP!
The monkey's paw curls, and the old control panels disappear. However, more than 70% of what you needed to do when you did dig down into the old control panel is still not available in the new settings menu.
They've been 'transitioning' away from the old control panel since Windows 8, and they're still nowhere near done. On the contrary, when I do find myself on a Windows machine, I just jump straight to the old settings rather than jump through the hoops of the new settings, since I don't have any confidence in the new settings to do anything when I need them to (honourable mention to Windows update. That's worked mostly fine for me, other than the two times it broke and just refused to update anything until I did some manual fix. All it needs now is an 'Never update automatically. Only update manually' button, but I don't expect Microslop to understand what consent is quite yet).
I giggle every time I stumble upon a Windows 3.1 file-selector dialog still in Windows 11.
The old stuff still being accessible is the only way I find the stuff I'm looking for
Exactly there's so much stuff you simply cannot configure otherwise. For example disallowing applications to take sole ownership of a mic, in-detail power plans, etc. If they remove the old control panel, your machine basically becomes unconfigurable.
I can at least find stuff in control panel
This is sarcasm, right?
Absolutely not sarcasm. Control Panel is a mess and keeping it is only confusing for most users.
Literally every time I interact with the modern settings UI I give up 15 seconds in and switch back to the old control panel.
For instance, how do you change the key repeat delay in the modern UI? I have looked and I actually can't find a way to change it. I have to use control panel.
Just looking at the modern UI is an eyesore, there is so much empty space, a menu that should be a 600x400 rectangle takes up the entire screen. The information density is comically low. I have to scroll up and down this giant monitor sized list to find the one thing I am looking for. It's horrendous.
90% of the time when you do find what you're looking for in Settings it's a hyperlink to Control Panel anyway.
I am confused by what you mean by this. An average user would interact with the new "Settings" and never really touch or see Control Panel...
Because many settings still aren't available in the "Settings" app, you often have to dig into the Control Panel (most notably for power options). Microsoft support forums and ChatGPT, which I think would be used by non-technical users when they encounter an issue, seem to both default to recommending going straight to the Control Panel to change settings.
No, Control Panel works as well as it did 30 years ago.
Settings is a slow, bloated mess, as you stated elsewhere missing many settings, and was in general designed by schizophrenics.
A primary reason for the sorry state of software today is the absolutely delusional priority that software should be "pretty" vs it being functional.
Send all the UI/UX wizards packing, give them a Starbucks apron where IMO they belong, and watch software usability and customer satisfaction improve over the next 5 years.