Comment by rich_sasha
1 day ago
They weren't great before LLMs either.
Also, it seems from the outside like a dysfunctional organisation, or at least with incentives heavily misaligned with their users. Replace LLMs with a bunch of 10x engineers and it will still be bad in an environment like this.
So not sure how much to blame the LLMs - or in fact how much MS is really using them. Poor souls have to use MS AI tools, I almost feel sorry for them.
They hit peak with Windows 7 and will never have an operating system that good again.
Some flavors of Linux are approaching the Windows 7 peak as well as far as ease of use for newbies, software "just working", and for familiarity for users of other OS's.
Their days as the default OS for most people are numbered unless they pull an incredible heel turn.
On a whim I gave my 14 year old an old System76 laptop with ElementaryOS on it then sent her back to her Mom's house on the other end of the world. Then she switched schools and ended up requiring a laptop instead of an iPad to do her work. I about crapped my pants but she's been using that laptop almost problem-free for two months now (two glitches with Firefox that she got around). She even figured out how to install Sober so she can play Roblox. While that probably says as much about my parenting as Linux's progress I have to say, I'm pretty impressed.
They still need to land on consumer PC shops for regular users to take notice, until the trend of online only, and zero OEM support, rather reverse engineering even when there are systems out there like Dell XPS, Windows and macOS will keep being what most regular users buy.
Either that or a mix of tablets with detachable keyboards or Chromebooks, none of them GNU/Linux powered.
Have you tried Windows 11? The WSL2 integration works really well. And the work that is being done in regards to safe vms so games can move away from kernel anticheat is also exciting.
As someone that was really into WinRT, pity that the whole UWP stack went bust, it was so mismanaged that outside Windows team themselves no one else cares any longer.