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)
Windows 95 Plug and Play (now called Legacy Plug and Play, which brings a tear to my eye) was a marvelous engineering feat. If operating systems had kept improving at that pace, who knows what they'd be capable of today?
These days Operating Systems (desktop and mobile) have mostly stagnated; even open source Unix derivatives are strongly committed to backwards compatibility, and have reached an island of mostly stability.
I hope to see in the future something like Plan 9, who was an effort to reimagine what an OS could be. BeOS brought innovations, but those have become commonplace while Haiku still has growing pains.
I yearn for weird again, but I don't have the skill set and resources to design/build a weird OS. Then again, standardization is good for progress, and I much prefer that the de facto standard is something free like Linux, and not proprietary Windows or MacOS. Standards should be public.
I've heard that MS took a different path (than previously) for the Windows 8 Metro design and wonder if a big source of the initial UI issues was a result of shoehorning the new design into the existing Windows UI.
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.
The complaints about Apple are from decades of excellent design and about a pixel being off or other small items that people with well trained eyes spot. The problems with Windows are forcing you to run Onedrive and then deleting your files
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.
Completely incomparable! It is not a bigger disaster. John Grubber is being an aesthetic stickler -— “comically sad icons”, “indiscriminate transparency” leading to things that are ugly, hard to grab-to-resize rounded window corners, icons in menus “ruining Mac’s signature menu system.”
If you think that adding icons all over the place to menu items RUINS it, I think you’re either in a MacOS “purist stickler” category (which John Gruber is in), or you’re hyping things up for clicks. Because no sane person would call this ruining the menu system.
And new icons “comically sad”? Someone call the whambulance. I saw the new icons, and they are fine. Sure, they are different. But I am not laughing and/or crying about them, and I bet most people don’t find them comically sad either.
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.
Not for me. Coincidentally, I spent half a day yesterday with Gemini trying to install Linux Mint so that it dual boots with my Windows 10. Unfortunately - no matter what I did (and I tried a lot of things), the installer "couldn't locate an existing system installation" and warned me of losing access to my data should I continue.
Now, I am using computers since 1980s, and I said "Nope, I don't have time for this". Now imagine a casual user trying to fight with GRUB.
I swapped from Windows 11 to Linux in 2024 (Arch for a bit, NixOS for the last 1.5 years) and can never go back. Linux isn't perfect yet, but my experience is so much better now, and it will only improve. Windows seems to be regressing in many ways.
Yeah, the regressions in Mac OS are particularly ill-timed and infuriating because there is no real competition now. I consider Windows unusable. It's not even worth talking about anymore; and I was a big Windows fan (and developer) into the 2000s. Now I don't have a single instance of Windows running in my house.
If Apple's slide continues, computing will recede back to its hobbyist/academic roots, I guess.
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.
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 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 have. Also windows 98, Me (I loved it), NT 4.0, 2000, 2003 (as a workstation), XP, 7, (loved 7; skipped Vista, skipped 8), windows 10 is my last one.
I really really liked windows 95. It rarely crashed on me even though I used and abused it extensively. It lived running smoothly, tolerated tinkering and uni files shenanigans.
The i loved 7. To me it was a pinnacle. All comfort, no crap. Win 10 was less convenient (even if safer), and it was a constant struggle with the subversive, hostile vendor.
Windows 95 is closer to the ideal, I agree with GP, although to me the closest is Windows 7 tbh.
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.
This was back when you'd hook up a new printer or other device to a Windows computer, and it would detect it and prompt you for a driver disk. During that same era (and well past it, into the 2000s) if you plugged something into a Mac... nothing would happen. You had to go hunt down a driver for it and initiate the installation process yourself.
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.
I mostly agree, but Windows XP was probably peak windows (Win 2k is my personal favorite)
Windows 95 was a terrible operating system in the classic sense ( phony multi-tasking, no memory protection, no security protections whatsoever -- any process could ready any file or any piece of memory it wanted).
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.
Can you provide a source for your claims about what users want?
I think that hackers want a
> simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user
...and those are things that I think are good and I want - but my interactions with normal people (which constitute the vast majority of Windows' userbase) consistently indicate that they have different priorities, such as cost, ease of use, familiarity, software compatibility, and a "modern" appearance (which often directly goes against actually good UX principles).
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.
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.
I wonder what exactly Microsoft did with “New Teams” that was supposedly written in Rust and uses the system browser engine or whatever instead of Electron. On release it seemed better, but now it seems as bloated, slow and annoying as the Electron one. MS Teams seems to have some incurable infection.
If I could, MS Teams would be the second tool I’d eject out (after Outlook and Exchange). But the company I work in is tied to MS 365 and will not give up on Teams and its useless cousin SharePoint.
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.
Gnome for example has been working hard to simplify things (maybe a bit too hard?). The gnome settings panel is significantly simpler than win11 and osx dito.
If you want to dive deeper there is a separate tweak app (not as simple), no reason fiddling with .conf files.
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.
A major culprit is background processes that scan the drive in the background, like CompatTelRunner.exe. Works fine if you're on an SSD, but grinds an HDD to a halt. They also forgot about their own I/O prioritization API from Vista, so it also spammed I/O at Normal instead of Background priority in the early versions. Not to mention the periodic Defender scans, the Malware Removal Tool scan that runs before each major update, etc.
Similarly, Windows Update used to consume ungodly amounts of CPU time because the update system would write a multi-hundred megabyte text log and then spend forever compressing it for upload. Then they remembered their own ETL system and switched to much more efficient binary logs.
Firefox also has problems on HDD, I remember it locking up for minutes at a time doing cache maintenance until I switched permanently to SSDs.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 ....)
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.
Nearly all of the complaints about AI , Ads and Search in Windows are easily bypassed with a few settings (look up Debloat or run the settings manually).
There are quality issues, some severe, but no worse than iOS or MacOS. Honestly Windows 11 performance on my $300 mini PC exceeds latest iOS on my $1400 iPhone 17 pro.
Instead of shaming Microsoft, we should all be a bit more introspective about performance, latency , quality control and the overall decline in software.
1gb memory for a browser tab is more shameful than a Copilot button on the taskbar
I prefer shaming all guilty parties. Microslop for their declining OS, software quality and pushing AI, Apple for their Ass design, Google for their declining search and closing of the Android ecosystem, and lots of web developers for using way too much JS.
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.
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 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 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)
> 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)
Do they use Office-Office (or Microslop Copilot 365 xXxQuickScoperz42069xXx or whatever it's called today)? Is there any reason they can't use Libreoffice and the like, or does that fail instantly when they try it for whatever reason? Or is the idea of using not-Office-Office rejected instantly and you can't even get them to the point of trying it?
My grandma's been on Libreoffice for 10+ years, since she doesn't use any of the fancy features of actual Word and Excel. In reality, she'd probably be fine on Wordpad (although she would need an actual spreadsheet program, but even Calc is overkill for her, and it works fine anyway), so I fail to see why seniors would complain about not being able to use an office program, assuming you can get them in front of a Mac running one.
From experience, I can assure you LibreOffice is no real equivalent to Office.
I can guarantee you that you will have people asking you about stuff that Office does just fine but isn't really possible in LibreOffice or is a major hassle.
I have been the one touting alternatives since I was very young and foolish (in particular advocating for the free Apple suite), but I have run into enough problems I couldn't solve that I don't bother anymore.
Microsoft is winning with Office because everyone else is more incompetent than them; it's simple as that.
If someone could come up with a true, cheaper competitor, everybody would switch, regardless of the file format arguments.
In fact, the generalized use of Google Suite for the simple stuff shows that it is the case. When people insist on Office, they generally have a good reason, and you should trust them.
They use Office (YYYY) locally. They repudiate 365 on the quite reasonable take that its rental not ownership, but forget if they found the right bundle, the rental would give them decent cloud (this is when onedrive as a backup can be sensible)
Mostly, they are addicted to menu position and one specific thing word does in showing you content, but different for each person.
I am doing the "how do I make libreoffice look like Word" tunings for font and menu, and so far, I think its close enough I could re-visit this with them but getting them to even agree to look at my own MBP is a struggle.
Older people feel they are losing agency, control. I try not to just tell them what to do. It's better if they decide, than if they give up and ask me to decide for them. The organisation I work with emphasises that older people have a right to dignity even when they're wrong.
There is a cohort happy on linux. I just chose not to work with them because I saw the cohort with a mixture of iPad and Windows as more interesting. (I am a BSD and Mac person mostly)
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.
Not a day goes by that I regret blocking MS from upgrading my personal PC from Win 10 to Win 11. I decided going without ongoing support is a small price to pay for the joy of not stepping into a bottomless pit of wtf every time I log on and work on stuff.
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 only startup the PC to play games from Epic / Steam. Maybe watch Youtube sometimes. Nothing else, I use my mac for actual work. Realistically speaking, how dangerous is it for me to stay on Win10 until I am forced to switch?
Fedora and Linux Mint is my considerations at the moment.
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? :-)
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.
Windows 11 couldn't be more aggravating. User hostile is the term. Windows Explorer, move a file and the navigation pane jumps up and down at random. Excell, cannot locate anything on Find and Select. I wish I would have never bought this new computer. HP makes great laptops, but it won't last long if I throw it against the wall. I've been taking classes and using computers on jobs since the late 70s. My dad taught me to do key punch in 1972. My son has been working on computers his entire life to the point he makes me look like a novice. He yelled the same phrase at his computer that I do "STOP TRYING TO HELP ME! IT'S NOT MY FIRST DAY!!!"
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.
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
Windows 95 Plug and Play (now called Legacy Plug and Play, which brings a tear to my eye) was a marvelous engineering feat. If operating systems had kept improving at that pace, who knows what they'd be capable of today?
These days Operating Systems (desktop and mobile) have mostly stagnated; even open source Unix derivatives are strongly committed to backwards compatibility, and have reached an island of mostly stability.
I hope to see in the future something like Plan 9, who was an effort to reimagine what an OS could be. BeOS brought innovations, but those have become commonplace while Haiku still has growing pains.
I yearn for weird again, but I don't have the skill set and resources to design/build a weird OS. Then again, standardization is good for progress, and I much prefer that the de facto standard is something free like Linux, and not proprietary Windows or MacOS. Standards should be public.
I've heard that MS took a different path (than previously) for the Windows 8 Metro design and wonder if a big source of the initial UI issues was a result of shoehorning the new design into the existing Windows UI.
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.
The complaints about Apple are from decades of excellent design and about a pixel being off or other small items that people with well trained eyes spot. The problems with Windows are forcing you to run Onedrive and then deleting your files
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.
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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.
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Completely incomparable! It is not a bigger disaster. John Grubber is being an aesthetic stickler -— “comically sad icons”, “indiscriminate transparency” leading to things that are ugly, hard to grab-to-resize rounded window corners, icons in menus “ruining Mac’s signature menu system.”
If you think that adding icons all over the place to menu items RUINS it, I think you’re either in a MacOS “purist stickler” category (which John Gruber is in), or you’re hyping things up for clicks. Because no sane person would call this ruining the menu system.
And new icons “comically sad”? Someone call the whambulance. I saw the new icons, and they are fine. Sure, they are different. But I am not laughing and/or crying about them, and I bet most people don’t find them comically sad either.
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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.
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> 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.
> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop
Not for me. Coincidentally, I spent half a day yesterday with Gemini trying to install Linux Mint so that it dual boots with my Windows 10. Unfortunately - no matter what I did (and I tried a lot of things), the installer "couldn't locate an existing system installation" and warned me of losing access to my data should I continue.
Now, I am using computers since 1980s, and I said "Nope, I don't have time for this". Now imagine a casual user trying to fight with GRUB.
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I swapped from Windows 11 to Linux in 2024 (Arch for a bit, NixOS for the last 1.5 years) and can never go back. Linux isn't perfect yet, but my experience is so much better now, and it will only improve. Windows seems to be regressing in many ways.
Yeah, the regressions in Mac OS are particularly ill-timed and infuriating because there is no real competition now. I consider Windows unusable. It's not even worth talking about anymore; and I was a big Windows fan (and developer) into the 2000s. Now I don't have a single instance of Windows running in my house.
If Apple's slide continues, computing will recede back to its hobbyist/academic roots, I guess.
Windows 2000 was peak. All improvements from XP onwards were negligible.
Improvements? Windows has suffered an ever-accelerating slide into the toilet, starting with Vista.
It was all downhill from 3.11
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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).
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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.
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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.
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 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 have. Also windows 98, Me (I loved it), NT 4.0, 2000, 2003 (as a workstation), XP, 7, (loved 7; skipped Vista, skipped 8), windows 10 is my last one.
I really really liked windows 95. It rarely crashed on me even though I used and abused it extensively. It lived running smoothly, tolerated tinkering and uni files shenanigans.
The i loved 7. To me it was a pinnacle. All comfort, no crap. Win 10 was less convenient (even if safer), and it was a constant struggle with the subversive, hostile vendor.
Windows 95 is closer to the ideal, I agree with GP, although to me the closest is Windows 7 tbh.
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.
Nonsense. And 98 was even better.
This was back when you'd hook up a new printer or other device to a Windows computer, and it would detect it and prompt you for a driver disk. During that same era (and well past it, into the 2000s) if you plugged something into a Mac... nothing would happen. You had to go hunt down a driver for it and initiate the installation process yourself.
How times have changed.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I mostly agree, but Windows XP was probably peak windows (Win 2k is my personal favorite)
Windows 95 was a terrible operating system in the classic sense ( phony multi-tasking, no memory protection, no security protections whatsoever -- any process could ready any file or any piece of memory it wanted).
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...
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OP is certainly a metaphorical as well as a technical question
Can you provide a source for your claims about what users want?
I think that hackers want a
> simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user
...and those are things that I think are good and I want - but my interactions with normal people (which constitute the vast majority of Windows' userbase) consistently indicate that they have different priorities, such as cost, ease of use, familiarity, software compatibility, and a "modern" appearance (which often directly goes against actually good UX principles).
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.
What is SDET? Software Developer and Tester? QA?
Software Development Engineer in Test.
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"?
You definitely should run it after updates.
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.
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> give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely)
Make that 64 if you’re obliged to run Teams. I wonder how many power plants the US could retire if we all stopped using it.
I wonder what exactly Microsoft did with “New Teams” that was supposedly written in Rust and uses the system browser engine or whatever instead of Electron. On release it seemed better, but now it seems as bloated, slow and annoying as the Electron one. MS Teams seems to have some incurable infection.
If I could, MS Teams would be the second tool I’d eject out (after Outlook and Exchange). But the company I work in is tied to MS 365 and will not give up on Teams and its useless cousin SharePoint.
Or buy an IOT LTSC license to have an officially debloated version.
Or don't buy a licence and use it anyway.
How? It's only available to companies.
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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.
Have to disagree.
Gnome for example has been working hard to simplify things (maybe a bit too hard?). The gnome settings panel is significantly simpler than win11 and osx dito.
If you want to dive deeper there is a separate tweak app (not as simple), no reason fiddling with .conf files.
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.
Try a distro like Fedora. I mostly use Arch, but I’ve found Fedora to be an excellent out of the box experience.
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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.
A major culprit is background processes that scan the drive in the background, like CompatTelRunner.exe. Works fine if you're on an SSD, but grinds an HDD to a halt. They also forgot about their own I/O prioritization API from Vista, so it also spammed I/O at Normal instead of Background priority in the early versions. Not to mention the periodic Defender scans, the Malware Removal Tool scan that runs before each major update, etc.
Similarly, Windows Update used to consume ungodly amounts of CPU time because the update system would write a multi-hundred megabyte text log and then spend forever compressing it for upload. Then they remembered their own ETL system and switched to much more efficient binary logs.
Firefox also has problems on HDD, I remember it locking up for minutes at a time doing cache maintenance until I switched permanently to SSDs.
With write-amplification, SSDs are being thrashed even more than HDDs would be, the SSDs just accomplish it quicker :\
Much worse than it was only a year ago.
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.
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What corporate guarantee? The system doesn't work properly.
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.
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).
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.
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 ....)
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).
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.
Nearly all of the complaints about AI , Ads and Search in Windows are easily bypassed with a few settings (look up Debloat or run the settings manually).
There are quality issues, some severe, but no worse than iOS or MacOS. Honestly Windows 11 performance on my $300 mini PC exceeds latest iOS on my $1400 iPhone 17 pro.
Instead of shaming Microsoft, we should all be a bit more introspective about performance, latency , quality control and the overall decline in software.
1gb memory for a browser tab is more shameful than a Copilot button on the taskbar
I prefer shaming all guilty parties. Microslop for their declining OS, software quality and pushing AI, Apple for their Ass design, Google for their declining search and closing of the Android ecosystem, and lots of web developers for using way too much JS.
You read my mind
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.
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.
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Don't schools typically use Chromebooks these days? My daughter was issued one each year from grade 7 to 12.
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it's probably been thrown out the window compared to office and chatgpt
Because their profits are all time high??
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).
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.
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 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)
> 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)
Do they use Office-Office (or Microslop Copilot 365 xXxQuickScoperz42069xXx or whatever it's called today)? Is there any reason they can't use Libreoffice and the like, or does that fail instantly when they try it for whatever reason? Or is the idea of using not-Office-Office rejected instantly and you can't even get them to the point of trying it?
My grandma's been on Libreoffice for 10+ years, since she doesn't use any of the fancy features of actual Word and Excel. In reality, she'd probably be fine on Wordpad (although she would need an actual spreadsheet program, but even Calc is overkill for her, and it works fine anyway), so I fail to see why seniors would complain about not being able to use an office program, assuming you can get them in front of a Mac running one.
From experience, I can assure you LibreOffice is no real equivalent to Office. I can guarantee you that you will have people asking you about stuff that Office does just fine but isn't really possible in LibreOffice or is a major hassle.
I have been the one touting alternatives since I was very young and foolish (in particular advocating for the free Apple suite), but I have run into enough problems I couldn't solve that I don't bother anymore.
Microsoft is winning with Office because everyone else is more incompetent than them; it's simple as that. If someone could come up with a true, cheaper competitor, everybody would switch, regardless of the file format arguments. In fact, the generalized use of Google Suite for the simple stuff shows that it is the case. When people insist on Office, they generally have a good reason, and you should trust them.
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They use Office (YYYY) locally. They repudiate 365 on the quite reasonable take that its rental not ownership, but forget if they found the right bundle, the rental would give them decent cloud (this is when onedrive as a backup can be sensible)
Mostly, they are addicted to menu position and one specific thing word does in showing you content, but different for each person.
I am doing the "how do I make libreoffice look like Word" tunings for font and menu, and so far, I think its close enough I could re-visit this with them but getting them to even agree to look at my own MBP is a struggle.
Older people feel they are losing agency, control. I try not to just tell them what to do. It's better if they decide, than if they give up and ask me to decide for them. The organisation I work with emphasises that older people have a right to dignity even when they're wrong.
There is a cohort happy on linux. I just chose not to work with them because I saw the cohort with a mixture of iPad and Windows as more interesting. (I am a BSD and Mac person mostly)
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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.
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In wonder whether in a few years, we'll have a post complaining about windows 12 and that 11 was much better.
Not a day goes by that I regret blocking MS from upgrading my personal PC from Win 10 to Win 11. I decided going without ongoing support is a small price to pay for the joy of not stepping into a bottomless pit of wtf every time I log on and work on stuff.
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.
I only startup the PC to play games from Epic / Steam. Maybe watch Youtube sometimes. Nothing else, I use my mac for actual work. Realistically speaking, how dangerous is it for me to stay on Win10 until I am forced to switch?
Fedora and Linux Mint is my considerations at the moment.
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.
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=46011569
etc
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.
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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.
Windows 11 couldn't be more aggravating. User hostile is the term. Windows Explorer, move a file and the navigation pane jumps up and down at random. Excell, cannot locate anything on Find and Select. I wish I would have never bought this new computer. HP makes great laptops, but it won't last long if I throw it against the wall. I've been taking classes and using computers on jobs since the late 70s. My dad taught me to do key punch in 1972. My son has been working on computers his entire life to the point he makes me look like a novice. He yelled the same phrase at his computer that I do "STOP TRYING TO HELP ME! IT'S NOT MY FIRST DAY!!!"
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
Vibe coded updates for sure.
Probably also vibe tested.
It‘s not a priority for Microsoft, it‘s intrusive and above all it‘s shit.
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.
try windhawk. it is awesome tweak for mac-os-wannabe windows 11.
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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.
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