← Back to context

Comment by xvxvx

3 hours ago

Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.

it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.

You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.

(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)

  • that rotting lack of QA is now spreading through their Xbox subsidiaries too. WoW is much buggier than ~4 years ago.

    • To be fair, WoW is a 20+ year old game that to my knowledge never really got the ground up rewrite it has needed.... so I feel issues keep compounding faster and faster. Also - and not trying to defend MS here - I am pretty sure MS has been fairly hands-off about how blizz is run - so far. Just the general enshitification going on in parallel everywhere.

Haven't you heard? QAs are unnecessary ballast now, devs and managers can test product just as well in their spare time ;) . Also, people are buying bug ridden products anyway, so why bother.

Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff. Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works. Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571.... don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that

(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...

  • I agree with your sentiment, but I dont see linux as windows with some compromises. I simply see windows as unusable (only wsl is imo), so anything will be an improvement.

> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.

Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.

  • It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that.

    Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.

    The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.

    Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.

  • For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software.

    Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.

    WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.

    Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.

    • Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).

      2 replies →

  • I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase.

    The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.

    At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.

    • What kind of research did you do?

      I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.

      Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.

      I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.

      It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.

  • I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.

  • Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion.

    </meta>

> ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.

They were. QA is paying Customers now.

Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.

> remote access and pasting issues

And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...

> issues should have been discovered in QA

Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!

  • That’s my bigger fear in this scenario: that they did limited testing with the internal agreement that any small issues that arise can be carried by the customers. As long as it didn’t fully break, it can be released.