Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely uninstall it, which didn't really help, because they still kept bringing it back after every update. I assume that they're going to do this with Teams now.
For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.
Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.
It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship.
From my POV it has come to a time where the tradeoffs you make switching to Linux (xubuntu in my case) are worth it.
A few days ago I had to do some helpdesk for a friend with windows 10. We suspected that one of his three drives failed, and windows just refused to start up, so I wanted to jump into recovery/safe mode and take a look.
But for doing so you need to go through a ridiculous lenght rebooting the PC multiple times and go through a bunch of sub menus. I tried but it didn't work, so we unplugged the hd we suspected it was failing and used my linux laptop with an external hd case to diagnose it.
I have a w10 corporate version in a pc, and it works kid of fine. I had to install windows 10 home to a laptop recebtly and everything feels like an abuse.
If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?
"If I have to fight with a system more than I fight with linux, with it's drivers issues and the problems that I can't fix without googling as I'm not intimate with the SO, what's the point?"
Linux with universal good drivers, is probably what most of us would want and need.
(except for the lucky few, who never had an issue)
Are you complaining about missing drivers in Linux? For the life of me, I never had to install any particular driver since like 2010 on both laptops and workstations. Not even for printers.
Specialized audio/video equipment? Probably, and of course the vendor will only provide them for Windows.
I've had light issues on every new PC I've had in the past 5 years. Be it the sound card, or the WiFi, or the NIC, or suspend / sleep. I will state all the issues were usually fixed in 6 months to a year as new kernels with improved drivers were released. So Linux on bleeding edge hardware is usually so so. (My TR workstation wouldn't even boot Linux without a specially compiled kernel and some boot parameters when it came out).
But if your hardware is over a year old, the Linux experience tends to be rock solid.
"Are you complaining about missing drivers in Linux? For the life of me, I never had to install any particular driver since like 2010 on both laptops and workstations. Not even for printers."
Yeah well, then you are among the lucky few, or you are not aware of the difference a good driver makes.
Right now I cannot get my linux workstation to do screencasting with hardware encoding(with OBS). On windows no problem.
And the laptops. On ALL my laptops I owned (6+) I tried linux, but experience was always worse, or even impossible. That includes tweaking, messing with grub, tlp and and in one instance even compiling the kernel.
Still way worse battery life, performance, standby resume issues, freezes and dont get me started about touchscreen. I hate windows. But I have work to do.
Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.
Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnings and developing monoculture, that they can continue to be successful in a financial sense in spite of their actions rather than because of them.
Until there is a credible challenger for the desktop OS market, a market that is itself evolving as other types of device now appeal to users who might have primarily used a desktop/laptop a few years ago, it is difficult to see how that changes. And the market is probably shrinking for desktop users who aren't in large organisations running "enterprise" software, with casual home users often preferring mobile devices and games consoles to a full PC now (though perhaps less so in light of recent world events and wanting to do more from home). So where is the serious competitor going to come from? I can think of a few at least slightly plausible scenarios but whether most of them would lead to anything less user-hostile than modern Windows is a different question.
What is wrong with Linux nowadays? I've used it as my main driver for long enough that I can't see the big problems that are preventing everyone from switching. Like, it seems easier than even WSL to me. Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else. If a person has good hardware compatibility, in the face of the bloated pushyess of Windows 11, why not use Linux? What am I missing?
Linux is great for doing things on your own. Where it fails is when you have to sync up with other people's proprietary norms.
For example, I'm a researcher who gets funding from the US government. I can do my day-to-day technical work in Linux. But I'm forced to still use Windows to present PowerPoint slides over Teams to my funding overlords, because that's what they use, and I have to conform to that. Linux ports/knock-offs of those products just don't interoperate with proprietary MS systems well enough for me to rely on them. Unless the US government (or at least the relevant parts I deal with) ditches Microsoft products, I have to keep a foot in MS-land to carry out the accountability parts of my job.
Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else.
But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it. Professionals need "good" and judge that by the standards of what is available on other platforms. 95% compatibility with the industry standard doesn't cut it. 80% of the features working at least 90% of the time doesn't cut it. Free instead of paying a few hundred bucks for the extra percentage points isn't even a question worth asking from a business perspective.
Linux has great software, sometimes the best available on any platform, in certain areas. Developer tools is an obvious one. Servers is another. Some of the multimedia stuff is good. The picture for running games is getting better all the time even if most of them are still ports of some kind rather than truly native applications.
But as much as I hate to say it, the reality is that in most areas that most users are going to care about the Linux ecosystem is still lacking in both quality and quantity. I'd bet on the evolution of web technology disrupting Windows long before the Linux desktop does. But that is hardly a solution to the phone-home and forced-update problems that a lot of us don't like about modern Windows.
> But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it.
However bad Linux is at package management, Windows is even worse. So I'm not sure how your argument convinces people that Windows package managers are superior?
Most business software can be installed by the network admins, software that can't doesn't matter for a lot of these companies and just won't be used. Even in my smaller but rapidly growing company they are doing more to restrict what software can be installed. Easy install of packages isn't what a large company wants
I didn't say anything about package managers. What counts is the software that is available. The best package manager in the world isn't worth anything if it doesn't have the packages that you need.
This article has a laundry list of things that annoyed the heck out of me. So I decided to try and dual boot to Ubuntu on my Surface Pro 7.
This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken:
- HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on the menu, but such poor fonts in firefox that my eyes started to hurt.
- The SurfaceLinux sub-reddit seemed to suggest KDE/Plasma is better at this, which it is. I am trying this as my daily driver. The LTS version is still on X11, which means a common app like Obisdian.md actually caused the system to go to swap; I am still trying to figure out if this is the culprit.
- Trying Plasma on Wayland caused the system to hang. Fair enough, this is still under development.
- KDE minimal install, in its infinite wisdom, does not include the network manager applet. It is 2022, do you think users will not want to connect to wifi?
- Each time I switch from clamshell mode to multi-monitor, I need to reset the layout of the widgets on my desktop.
- Another easter egg in fractional scaling; the size of the cursor changes when you hover over certain windows or the task manager panel. I am not as familiar with the Linux ecosystem as I used to be, so I am not sure why this happens.
- Abandoning all hope of legible, anti-aliased fonts, I have tried to increase the font size across the system and in certain apps like Firefox and VS Code. You should see some of the hilariously bad KDE setting screens that cannot work with a font size of 16px (the default is 12px).
- SDDM seems to think I want an onscreen virtual keyboard even though I have a keyboard attached. It literally does not show me the login screen. I have to blindly tap in my password making sure focus is not lost on that box lest I never be able to login.
- Every time firefox starts the application renders like there is a rift in reality in the left bottom corner of screen. A forced maximize fixes this, but still.
I love my Wobbly Windows. I so want it to succeed. But architecturally, something just feels broken. The split between a display manager, a window manager and a compositor just means that instead of having to worry about one thing to make sure I have a working display, I need to worry about three things.
I still run Unity on a bunch of machines here, but it's old now and starting to bitrot. I haven't even tried on the 1 or 2 boxes that have hi-DPI displays: it's not worth it.
On non-*buntu distros, I use Xfce. It can't do fractional scaling.
Only a handful of desktops support it. From my research, I found 3:
• GNOME Shell. No thank you.
• KDE 5. Better, but still a no thank you from me.
• Cinnamon.
I looked at Cinnamon on Ubuntu and Debian, but the versions are quite out of date (Cinnamon 4.8.x). I wanted the latest 5.x series, and that means Linux Mint, the parent distro of Cinnamon.
So I now have a box with Mint 20.3 and a Liquorix kernel. It works well, it natively can mount my NTFS partition with the in-kernel driver and understand a Core i5 11th-gen GPU.
Cinnamon is a little clunky and a little hard to customise, but it does actually work in the way I broadly expect and can put up with, unlike either GNOME 3 or KDE 5.
Ubuntu Unity the desktop environment Ubuntu abandoned back in 18.04? On X11 with Gnome 3 with Ubuntu 20.04 it does actually support fractional scaling and if IIRC does it in a somewhat similar way to MacOS where it scales up the res*2 then downscales it. For whatever reason either GNOME didn't accept Ubuntu's changes or they didn't submit them upstream so it doesn't work in any other distro for GNOME 3. It actually works pretty well IME. It possible to mimic it with the right call to xrandr in other DEs.
There's a lot of software not on Linux or that doesn't run well on Linux.
People pick their OS based on what software they want to run, not the other way around. And they pick from what they can buy. Go into a BestBuy and you can choose between Windows machines, Apple machines, and a few Chromebooks.
If you did manage to buy a Linux machine somewhere, you are going to be disappointed when you go back into that BestBuy to get a printer or webcam or some other accessory and the box says "compatible with macOS and Windows".
Ironically, printers are now easier to get working on Linux than they are on Windows. The whole no-driver setup in the unix world murders the "must install this driver and possibly restart" shenanigans on Windows.
I was quite surprised when I switched my main dev machine to Linux and the printer not only appeared by itself, but worked out of the box.
But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers. If Brother feels that there are enough people running Linux and want to own a Brother printer, they will make the driver. Maybe that is the issue we need solve, or at least the part we need to be vocal about. If brother gets a significant number of emails asking for linux support, perhaps they will finally make linux a first class citizen?
I think it's interesting you chose Brother here, because Linux support is a first class citizen -- they not only offer CUPS drivers, they offer Deb and RPM packages that also set up dependencies.
I just picked the first vendor off the top of my head and Brother came to mind. Feel free to replace it with any other vendor/manufacturer. In no way is it meant to single out brother as being poor on Linux.
> But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers.
Users don't care. For them things either work or not. Users are not going to e-mail Brother or Nvidia or Microsoft to fix their issues with printers, video cards or Onedrive. How is that so hard to understand?
If the vendors got metrics that showed that desktop linux user share was enough and viable enough, they would. The issue is, Linux users are a small share of the desktop market. But, if that number grew, it changes. Hardware vendors would port their drivers over once the potential revenue of customers on a different platform outweighs the cost in doing so. Otherwise, I don't think Brother or Nvidia really give a damn if an end user is running Windows or Linux, they just care that enough of those user exists in their respective ecosystem to justify the engineering costs.
This is true, but still - people want to print documents. They don't want to run Linux (or Windows). If they can't print documents, that's a problem.
The solution was Google Cloud Print, IMO. That was a great idea. Who cares what you run, as long as it can connect to the internet you can print. I don't know how in-depth it got with the various crazy menu systems
That brings up an excellent point. Services like these start to eventually render driver support useless. I haven't heard of Google cloud print, but I just looked it up. Even though it looks to be EOLed, there are alternatives still going, just not from google. My HP printer has an app. I can push documents to the app that goes up to HP then comes back down on to my printer, if I have my printer configured with that. I think my last printer, which was a bother had something similar where I could set it up on my home network in such a way that I can just email a document to a special bother email address which then prints it out on the brother printer.
With Linux while sitting idle my laptop burns battery about twice as fast as it does on Windows while I go about my normal workflow. This is a laptop which is certified for both Fedora and Ubuntu.
I've been wondering about that as well, never found a comprehensive answer to why is the difference so stark. I'd be willing to use Linux on my laptop when the difference would be 10-12%, but as of now I just can't. I have laptop because I need to use it on the go and linux makes it harder for me.
I have tried tlp which includes cpu frequency scaling on numerous distributions over the last couple of years with little if any noticeable difference.
Installation is utterly broken and hopeless on Linux. Let's not pretend like it's in any way ready for the general consumer. Including Ubuntu, the "flagship" poster boy for widescale adoption of Linux.
We're more likely to see people going back to dumb-terminals with GUIs being streamed to their ChromeOS from a server running linux than we are to see people using Linux.
Application installation is broken. If software isn't hand-curated in the distro's repository and kept up to date by someone, then get ready to set up a dev environment and compile from source. Hopefully you will not break your entire system trying to cater to whims of whatever insane build environment it uses. This includes new versions that no one has got around to packaging yet.
AppImage and Flatpak are making inroads to eliminating this foolishness, but I still routinely run into software that isn't yet on board with that.
This reads like a comment from Slashdot, circa '97. If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.
Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
> This reads like a comment from Slashdot, circa '97
Sadly, while some parts of the Linux Desktop have come a long way since the 90s, many others have not.
> If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.
Presumably people use software to do something, and many times there simply isn't alternative software that does what you want to do and you're stuck with it even though it is toxic.
> Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.
Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.
>Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.
I am a long time windows user who recently switched to PopOS.I'll say its getting better. This was one thing I was worried about switch back to linux. After I got fed up with what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, I decided I had it and switched. So far it has not been as a pain in the ass as much as it used to be. There are a few things I still have to tweak to get my work flow back to the way it was on Windows.
This describes Windows as well though, just read all the complaints from the original article and thread. Sadly there is no decent OS any longer, they all had/have their flaws and now they are being dumbed down and control taken away.
As a developer I want to implement everything possible on the web platform.
It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.
As a user I want to use cross platform applications as much as possible. I use e.g. libreoffice instead of ms office now by choice. This means that the eventual switch away from it will be easier.
Microsoft don't help themselves by making desktop app production very confusing. A huge range of possible GUI frameworks, every one looks like a trap/dead end like Silverlight.
Microsofts successful cross platform apps like VSCode and Teams ignore all of them so following suit seems pretty sensible to me.
Teams is only successful because it's free and integrates with the M365 ecosystem. All its competitors are so much better.
It wasn't actually so bad at the start, it was just a poor slack knock-off. (Poor because the visual density is much lower with these oversized chat bubbles)
But now they are spending all their dev time cramming so much stuff into it without considering performance that it's become tooslow and cluttered. Now it's a wiki, a file storage thing, a video chat app, an interface to Yammer, not to mention the tons of plugins. Cool idea to have one app that does everything but performance and usability have gone down the drain. It feels very beta to me.
Oh and the choices they make are so stupid sometimes. When I decline a meeting it still adds me to its associated chat and pings me for everything that's said in it. Constant distraction and no way to turn off this stupid default.
I would agree Teams itself is a mess. I was just pointing out that Microsoft have successful apps across 3 different operating systems, and neither of them use Microsoft GUI frameworks.
I don't see why I should use a Microsoft GUI any more either. Once you stop using their libraries, you no longer need their OS at all. Pretty strange behaviour from MS if you ask me, encouraging your users to get off their systems.
> It's now a viable competitor for enterprise applications, both because web is getting more feature rich and these days has pretty much anything you need, and because desktop is getting worse with anti-features and jank. It's a sad state of affairs but that's where we are.
Actually web is getting worse with anti-features and jank as well.
I agree with all of your points yet come to the opposite conclusion. Choosing the web means everything I make goes through Google’s hands in one way or another, which irks me. Plus it evolves so quickly that you can’t just make a good product and let it be.
> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.
> Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do.
There's the challenge.
Who cared about "hardware"? Jony Ive and Jobs perhaps?
Who cares about OS performance? Linus Torvalds. I'm sure there are MS insiders who we don't know.
Who cares about the desktop? .....
The funny thing is the desktop was a solved problem with the mother-of-all-demos, and everything else is sugar on top, and yet there has to be this continual awful rebranding. Ok we went from VGA, to HD, to 4k HDR, but the underlying design and UI doesn't have to change so poorly each time.
It's such an interesting contrast, for both ends of Microsoft to have reversed so heavily. The core consumer product once fought for betterment and improvement. "Where do you want to go today" was the slogan, suggesting users the helm, piloting their Personal Computer wherever they may. Oh, and it was a complete vision, totalizing. Microsoft did not care at all about open source, webdev, Linux, or broader ecosystem outside their castle.
The extent to which Microsoft has become the inverse in a mere decade of time is mind-boggling. Core products seem to lack the internal political strength to resist becoming naggy, crappy ad-ware, pushing other people's not your own desires. Teams and Office are the new core focus, asking, Where does your company want to go today? Teams has boss-ware pro-harassment features like letting people re-raise notifications at you every 5 minutes. This is expressly hostile anti-personal computing, is deeply mechanized corporate processes applied to people. But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing Linux in the data center, releasing vast amounts of their systems as open source, providing & sponsoring copious onramps & cross-platform integrations, doing everything they can to make themselves appealing as a broad partner to the rest of the world, rather than Castle Microsoft, Windowsland.
Another thing that really bothers me about Microsoft is all the logging they do. They don't care about privacy at all.
They send me emails about how I haven't done an @mention to enough colleagues on teams this week or that I should spend less time in meetings. Besides this being total nonsense due to not taking into account the type of job I have (of course different jobs have different balances of meetings etc), I also don't want them looking over my shoulder.
I can turn off the emails but not the logging itself. They proclaim that admins can't see what I do but as I was an admin I was actually able to see a lot more than they let on :( Sure some of it was anonimised (not all) but it's easy to filter by criteria narrow enough that that doesn't matter.
They seem convinced that they are helping us manage by data etc but they totally ignore the fact that many people frown on this practice. In fact some of it is illegal in the EU especially countries like Germany. Microsoft is clearly in the church of "Data driven everything" but they should not impose this on customers IMO.
> But in terms of open source, Linux, webdev, the broader world of development & making things happen, Microsoft has completely reversed course, embracing
Embracing is the first step in dominating. Don’t fall for it.
I think there is a danger, but hubris has gotten them way up shits creek & their relevance was rapidly moving to 0. Desktop platform is dying, mobile barely matters and they have no presence there... Microsoft started playing with others because pretending they were the unilateral giant that could dictate terms to the world landed them on a small shrinking pathetic island. So help them gods if they try that shit again.
That said, I 100% absolutely endorse caution. The past couple years of behaviors are no indicator Microsoft will stay a societally-positive technological force. The corruption & darkness & manipulation could play back in at any moment. Already, Microsoft creating very special terms of service for things like VSCode Remote Development Plugin, having extremely fantastically proprietary implementations for the incredibly useful/popular/fantastic LiveShare are harbingers of the old ways, indicators that Microsoft just wants to force the door open, not really engage & participate.
For now though, I still overall think they are doing good work, pariticpating/not domineering (with some caveats). They learned very very very personally what happens when you violate the core rule of software, the most important maxim, not couched as such but absolutely of key vitality to computing: "Create more value than you capture." -Tim O'Reilly. Of course, all organizations forget the/their past. And I quake thinking of how many people pretend they are using/learning Linux while never seeing systemd, freedesktop, the greater Linux project: WSL is amazing but a dark & tragic small death for the real open source, & it's cheered on & fanboyed endlessly for enabling the blessed ignorant. You are right. Adopter beware.
Even stuff like WSL is loosing it's shine now for me. I've personally hit a bug on multiple computers that I can reliably repo a blue screen if I attempt to update a specific package.
The github bug for this issue last had activity from MS 4 months ago.
Kinda makes it hard to take it seriously if such a major blocker is treated with such low priority.
Try doing anything I/O intensive in WSL and it all falls apart. I have a 32 core machine with 128GB using nvme disks and it's getting murdered performance wise by an 8 core AWS instance with 16GB of ram on gp2 disks.
My system bluescreens when I so much as install WSL2 on my second work laptop with Windows 11. Tried to track it down and it seems to be some stupid Lenovo driver but it's almost impossible to fix :(
Yeah I’ve never had issues. I’ve used Linux as a daily driver since Vista came out so wsl has been nice for me. I can finally have a gaming PC that can also serve as a docker server and just generally test my backend on. With that said my two coworkers, who are very much Windows daily driver users, have had nothing but issues. Some times I think my Linux knowledge is what’s helped me here, ironically.
AFAIK WSL 1 isn't actively being worked on anymore, now that there's WSL 2. As for your issue with WSL 2, it runs off hyper-v, so my guess is that there's something with your BIOS/UEFI/firmware settings that's breaking it (eg. secureboot/CSM, TPM, virtualization).
You might be right about WSL 1 being dead, which is just annoying since it's useful for me.
Ironically with your comment about Hyper-V: I moved to using Linux in a Hyper-V VM for now for this workflow. It's in that category of category of "ugh, not worth the time to figure out" for now, which probably means I won't bother for quite a while. Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks.
Agreed. The concept of WSL1 was much more interesting. Interfacing with Windows through a Linux userland. Actually do stuff on the windows system with a familiar interface.
WSL2 is just Linux in a VM which has been around like forever.
By the way it also put my system in a boot loop (blue screen on boot). I tracked it down to a buggy Lenovo driver but when I removed that it crashed on something else and I got sick of it and gave up.
omg thank you for this. The amount of people trying to tell me WSL2 is groundbreaking - meanwhile I have been rocking Fedora in virtualbox for years.
WSL1 was really interesting, but ultimately Microsoft needed a flagship product to demonstrate the capabilities of Hyper-V and WSL was the perfect project.
To be clear, wsl 2 lets you interact with the Windows filesystem. I believe you can launch exes in wsl1, but not 2. However, I've never needed to do that. It's definitely not groundbreaking, but it is convenient.
Using it with the new terminal app is nice. It will load and unload the ram for the instance immediately whenever you pop open a linux shell. IMO opening and closing virtualbox/hyper-v takes longer and is clunkier. Overall it reduces friction.
It seems like 9p is the defacto standard for this. With all the network filesystems available, anyone know why that's the case? I personally don't have any experience with 9p.
It's not just running a vm on windows. The integration between the two makes it a lot more streamlined than just running something on virtual box. You can do stuff like browse the windows file system from Linux easily and vice versa. You can also run windows executables from inside Linux to do things like write stdout to your windows clipboard by piping it to powershell.
"Honestly, when things slow down again, I'll probably just flatten this machine and install Linux. MS is kinda killing whatever inertia I had for dealing with their quirks."
In 2028, we'll be reading news articles about how the Year of Linux on the Desktop never really came, but the Year of Anything But Monetized Microsoft Windows sure did.
If I were making a list of companies and software packages that should be focusing on long term value rather than trading short term value for everyone hating your product, Windows would be a strong contender for top of the list. Microsoft may not want to depend on Windows, but throwing away so much user value for so little money is a stupid decision.
I just can't hammer on this point enough. There isn't that much money in advertising. The best advertisers in the world are looking at ~$10-20 per user per year at scale [1]. Advertising makes a lot of money because there's a lot of those users, not because they make that much per user. (That's why all the plans to "share the revenue" with the ad consumer are just hopeless. The money can't support it.) Windows ads can not necessarily jump to that level of performance right away, either. I really don't see how they could possibly be making enough money in their OS ads to make up for the goodwill they're pissing away. They're trading a money stream that still has at least a good decade in it, quite possibly more, for short term gain that isn't even all that impressive. Who is pressing for all these ads? What kind of analysis is being done internally that shows this is worth it? I find it hard to believe. Even a Windows in decline picking up licensing fees on new computer sales should be bringing in vastly more revenue than advertising possibly could. Ruining your 2025 sales for not really all that much money right now seems a very bad decision for a product coming up on 30 years old and still making lots of money.
[1]: You can do better for very targeted things like mesothelioma ads, but at scale, that's what Facebook is looking at.
Every time Microsoft does something that a couple of people aren't happy with the trumphets of "now is the year of Linux" sound everywhere, in the end the large majority of consumers and the developers that care to get money from those consumers, keep using Windows.
When XP came to be, when Vista was released and DX 10 was vista only, when Windows 8 arrived, when all the talk about WinRT started, .... now Windows 11 with these issues.
Indeed, another way it's like an abusive relationship is people's reluctance to leave despite all they've experienced.
I hear all the horror stories and then say "I've been using for ten years and it works well" and I get "oh, but I don't want to have to fiddle with things" (after discussions of how hard Windows is to get to do things).
Linux has glitches but Microsoft manipulates people. Maybe people stay because they think that because Windows hurts them, it cares.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community. GNOME in particular is pretty user-hostile in both design and in its community interactions, and while you can use a different DE GNOME is the default for the most popular and recommended distributions.
Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use, where you get your choice between "up to date but frequently broken" rolling-release[0] or "several years out of date but probably stable". To me, the idea it is considered reasonable to expect a user to set up a dev environment and compile software from source is ludicrous, but until relatively recently that's been the norm[1]. Thankfully, AppImage and Flatpak have been gaining popularity and making that much less of a problem.
Now the two biggest things keeping me from switching immediately are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane[2], and my Oculus isn't supported at all[3]. Still, I'll go to Linux before I go to Win 11.
[0] which still often has out of date and missing packages
[1] for anything not packaged by the distro or if you need a newer version
[2] thanks Bitcoin Idiots, LLC
[3] and from everything I gather no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
> Personally I've stuck with Windows because I rather hate the package manager/repo model that Linux distros use
I have the opposite feeling: installation by search engine and speculative .exe downloads feels so dirty. There's the Windows store but it doesn't seem to actually work very often.
Then again, following StackExchange or blog posts to add keys and deb repos for Ubuntu is no better. The AUR is also similar, but I trust that a bit more than a random blog post since at least there's a flagging mechanism.
FWIW, I rarely have issues with rolling releases on Arch, certainly fewer issues than I have with Ubuntu repo package versions.
Fwiw, I used Linux with an 1080 Ti for years; it was the first card I tried Linux on. The only hitch is having to install Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Distros with GUI tools for drivers (e.g., Manjaro) make this easy.
The only problem was actually my G-SYNC monitor. It was one of those super expensive ones with G-SYNC hardware in it. It turns out those just go black if you're not using an Nvidia card && aren't running proprietary drivers.
At some point, I gave it and my 1080 Ti away and got an AMD card with FreeSync monitors. Funnily, the FreeSync doesn't actually work. (Luckily, I don't care that much about tearing, and it's less noticeable at >=144 Hz.) AND, with AMD, you don't have a nice GPU settings panel like Nvidia provides (as basic as it is compared to its Windows equivalent). I've noticed no other differences. Nevertheless, having the open source driver in-kernel and not worrying about installing it out of band is nice.
>no VR solution really works that well on Linux, even Valve's.
Yep, probably; tech is too new. I don't even try stuff like that until it's 30 years old and mainlined. ;D
>GNOME
Yeah, I don't know how anyone sane likes GNOME, and it's insane to me that KDE isn't the default DE instead. I reckon it's a combo of inertia, the fact that the GNOME faction were the GPL purists compared to TrollTech back in the day, and (enduring?) convergence/low-tech user adoption hopes.
While I don't necessarily disagree with the initial statement, I will say that Linux Desktop has its own kind of abusive relationship, especially if you have to deal with certain parts of the community.
As mentioned, I've been using Linux for ten years as my only system and I installed at time over the twenty years before that. At worst, twenty years ago, I would contact people and got "I ignore your bug 'cause you don't have the very latest thing everywhere". In my current experience, I've never had to "talk" to anyone. It's not without hiccups but it's not "abusive" in the sense of Windows 'cause no one is fixing one thing to break another or gaslighting you about bugs.
> are that I have an Nvidia 1080ti and buying an equivalent AMD card in this market is insane
If you're worried about support for the Nvidia 1080ti, I've found no problems with the Nvidia drivers for a 1050, a 1060, and the 1650 I'm currently using now. If you're just wishing to upgrade and would rather go the AMD route because of binary drivers, I get it. If you're worried about bad Nvidia drivers in linux, I've found them to be very good lately as long as you keep them updated.
I've seen so many people say things like: "Windows is fine, all you have to do is [gigantic list of obscure settings changes, registry edits, external freeware programs] to turn off the telemetry!"
It will eventually get to the point where it will take more settings-twiddling to make Windows do what you actually want than Linux does.
I used an Ubuntu 21.10 installer recently, it was completely uneventful to set up with the default side-by-side configuration and actually easier than the Windows one (which must create a Windows account, you can then disconnect this from your local account later with a magic settings dance).
The one thing I find the most terrible is the "10 different UI conventions" thing. Dig enough and I bet you'll find a control panel or some other thing the has Windows NT 3.1 look and feel.
It says a lot how low the abstraction levels must have been that it's impossible, even to Microsoft, to update the UI widgets of a long-dead Windows release without breaking something else.
Disappointingly this wasn't in the ARM version (the access driver). Just SQL Server.
Wonder if it can be found anywhere else. I did try the old progman.exe (via x86 compatability), and while it worked, it uses the modern API for the file dialog.
Yes, the UIs Apple make are no longer anywhere near as intuitive as they were in Steve Jobs’ days, but Apple definitely still have their soul. You don’t even have to look further than the latest iMacs.
Really? It's all so painful sterile. Even their attempts at deviating from that coldness feel like someone with a spreadsheet calculated they should increase the brand-safe fun quotient in sector 7G by 4%.
WSL is a threat to open software. At best a gateway. Anyone who believes Microsoft has changed is at best naive and at worst a fool. We have decades of evidence to show that Microsoft doesn’t change. The sooner you move to a new platform the better. And don’t bring Microsoft with you.
I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.
Which makes me wonder: why? Do MS not have enough top-flight kernel engineers any more to do an in-kernel version of gvisor?
https://github.com/google/gvisor
> I called it a distant relative of the NT POSIX environment and some senior MS bod disagreed and – when I said [[citation needed]] – eventually linked to a bunch of videos and stuff that say that WSL1 is a whole new translation layer and not a kernel personality at all.
As far as I understand it, WSL1 was a complete reimplementation and did not use any code from the old POSIX subsystem/SUA/Interix. In particular, SUA had a number of long-standing limitations (like when replacing open files) which were probably unfixable without rewriting everything anyway. It allegedly is a continuation of Project Astoria which implemented only the minimum necessary part to make Android apps run, but was refocused to run all Linux applications.
> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares.
I don't know if it started with Ballmer, but they do care, but it is just about sales, and making money. It's not as if selling and making money is antithetical to making good software either.
It's always the same in the IT industry. The "non technical" managers are invariably higher in the org chart than developers and they have no concept of what people actually want, and make disastrously poor decisions. Falling sales... improve product, increase the price, or introduce ads?
I haven't booted Windows at home for close to 3 years. KDE on Ubuntu is rock solid for me, all the peripherals work, powers both my screens, has all the software I need.
And best of all, it's still 100% offline and I don't have to sign into anyone's "cloud".
Or they do have an idea what the users want, but it is still bad... at my job, the non-technical managers bought the SAP marketing koolaid, promised our internal users the cool new stuff they were going to get with the new software, and we in the IT just want to scream and say, no, you can't get that, that's not supported, or will take a year to build because we would have to revamp almost everything ourselves... and, yes, all because at SAP no one knows what users need. We have had several rounds with SAP PMs already were they basically said "huh, that's interesting, that's how you work with the software? We need to discuss this internally." Well... good thing you didn't ask before launching the new version then.
Hah, you cannot adopt SAP to your needs, it's the other way around, you have to adopt to them. If that matches your use case, allright, but otherwise forget about it.
Making money and caring about users are related, but there's definitely a difference between making a good product that people would like to use, and trying to make money. The latter may well make you rich, but it may make your product much worse, which you shore up with lots of salespeople and complex pricing schemes and dealmaking to keep people locked in.
There's also that they "decided" that none of their core customer bases actually matter. They no longer cater to the needs of anyone.
Some random examples:
Enterprise -- It's cloud or the highway. You're either migrating to Azure and Microsoft 365, or stuck in dead-ends with virtually no maintenance/attention. Core products have just been left twisting in the wind. Active Directory for example has had no major feature updates since 2016. Microsoft themselves use Linux for many of their Azure PaaS/SaaS services, which is very telling. There's no on-prem equivalents of CosmosDB, Log Analytics, and a range of other "core" services developed for Azure.
Gamers -- Windows gaming is a shit-show and all development effort is focused on XBox. Occasionally, reluctantly, features will be backported from XBox to PC, but usually broken or limited in some critical way. For example, DirectStorage for PC was under NDA until very recently, and there were few (zero?) games shipping with that capability. HDR gaming on Windows is a total mess as well, with one lone blog article talking about bringing the HDR tuning app to PC form XBox "some unspecified time in the future". Without this, HDR is totally and utterly broken, unless the PC is plugged into an external TV... like an XBox.
Content Creation -- Windows used to be better and more commonly used than Apple for a while, especially in some areas. Not any more. The endless series of penny-pinching decisions and broken features have driven artists away in droves. Some random examples: Windows 11 shipped with totally broken colour management. As in, absolutely non-functional. Windows 11 also broke HDR even further, and it was broken in Windows 10 to begin with. You literally cannot display or view HDR correctly on the primary ("built in") monitor of any Windows PC. It was broken on purpose, and then... left like that. It's possible the next semi-annual build will "fix" it, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Dolby Vision is not enabled by default. Camera RAW decoders are not installed by default. H.264 is not installed by default. The built-in photo viewers and editors are not color-managed. Wide Color Gamut (WCG) support was removed at every level. It's just gone. Microsoft wants to enshrine SDR sRGB forever in an era where every new phone and every Apple device is wide-gamut and HDR.
Software Developers -- See Casey Muratori's rants about the ludicrous degradation of basic quality controls in Visual Studio, Windows Terminal, etc... For example, VS 2022 can't keep up with debug single-stepping on that fastest machine money can buy, but ancient PCs running older versions had no trouble. But that's just a small annoyance. The real problem is that Windows GUI development is dead. It may as well not exist any more. There is no supported GUI framework that isn't a dead-end, formally unsupported, or restricted to "mobile phone app" levels. Even Microsoft recognises this, and most of their new GUI products (e.g.: Teams) are Electron apps. What little new stuff they're putting out (e.g.: Visual Studio Code) is a tyre fire of low quality tools trying to appeal to the Linux/Mac crowd at the expense of majority used to Windows.
To summarise: if in 2022 I want to develop a GUI app, or display anything with the correct colour, or HDR, or any similarly advanced features, my best approach is to use Google's Chromium. If I want to write a game, use Vulkan, not DirectX. If I want to create a web app, use Linux. If I want to use a database, Postgres. If I want authentication, then anything but Active Directory. If I want to use dev tools, use IntelliJ.
There is nothing left where the #1 best approach is Microsoft Windows or some other Microsoft product.
Bingo. All these posts that say "oh just use Linux, it's compatible!" must be from naive junior devs who never have had to to deal with external organizations (especially governments) that require you to use their Word templates and share PowerPoint slides on their Teams calls.
It "works," but not well enough for my purposes. I need to be able to share PowerPoint on Teams with my full slides visible to participants, and speaker notes visible only to me. There's no native PowerPoint for Linux, so that's a no-go.
PDFs? Unless participants need to edit the actual slides themselves what's wrong with PDFs? Most half decent PDF readers these days have a presentation mode where it goes full screen and arrow keys page through. Yes, you lose swoopy animations, sound effects and video but that's arguably a plus. And participants can read the slides on a wider range of devices with little hassle. Your speaker notes can stay with whatever slide program was used to make them.
My government funding overlords require me to send them PPTXs and DOCXs. And MS Teams on Linux only supports full-screen sharing, not window-specific sharing, so I can't do presenter view on my screen and slides-only on the call.
I feel a lot of responses here are missing the point. Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to. Linux is a bad tool for my required workflow (a workflow that isn't all that uncommon), so I keep Windows around because it's a more suitable tool for that.
I'll repeat what I said: Linux is a great tool when you're a junior individual contributor, but it sucks when you're responsible for external communications with MS Office organizations.
While I'm sympathetic to this because it's, well, simply true for many people, I think it's always important to bear in mind that
> Linux doesn't do what I need it to do with respect to the established MS Office norms I have to conform to.
Is an entirely deliberate outcome that Microsoft has pushed hard for over decades (as you'd expect, since losing that monopoly is an existential threat to them).
I have no idea why the Linux Teams application is so limited. Instead on Linux to get the missing features you can run browser based teams in Chrome or Edge. It supports window specific sharing. Can also do blurred and virtual webcam backgrounds (but does not support custom virtual background).
It kind of works on Linux now. The only way I was able to join a call as a guest (not to my tenant!) was to launch it in Edge -- the native client crashed on launch if invoked to join an external meeting.
That is why I think Microsoft should someday consider Open Source Windows, or at least the kernel. Leave the UI and Library on top closed source as a moat on user for compatibility.
It is popular because it filled a niche where next to nothing existed, so for people in those fields anything is a step up.
For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.
For example, instead of making improvements to the PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE), Microsoft marked it as deprecated and "forced" everyone over to Visual Studio Code, whether they like it or not. E.g.: it's the only Microsoft IDE with PowerShell Core (pwsh) support.
Despite being the only supported Microsoft PowerShell IDE, VS Code does not play nice with PowerShell. For example, if I open Code, it opens three(3!) PowerShell terminals for unfathomable reasons. One of those starts with errors, the other works, but the third one is the default and crashes if you look at it sideways. Tab-complete just... stops. Even when tab-complete "works", it'll often start mid way through the list, hiding all of the relevant items and showing your random garbage like "quick start snippets" that make zero sense in the given tab-complete context.
I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.
Then there's always the smart-ass that explains patiently that this is all my fault for not "customising" my VS Code experience with JSON configuration settings that are seven levels deep and documented only in some blog article from three years ago. Meanwhile, I've never had to customise anything in Visual Studio. It "just works" the way you'd expect a Windows application to work. Not some Linux-Windows hybrid intended to be the "embrace" part of the unholy "embrace-extend-extinguish" trio.
There are a ton of editors both free and paid for that niche you mentioned. Visual Studio code wasn't even the first one made with Electron, there was one called Atom before it. I have used and continue to use Sublime Text, and at work they install Notepad++ on all computers by default.
I guess though if you're coming from raw notepad then that is a step up.
And with anything "browser based" like VS Code you're going to always spawn a ton of processes to do even the simplest things.
> For people like me forced to come over from Visual Studio and other editors, it's a huge step down.
Sure, if your entire usage is the stuff that VS does well (which is a very narrow range compared to Code), and you are used to VS, it's probably an annoyance.
> I could rant for hours on how poor the Visual Studio Code quality is, but nobody will listen, because for people upgrading from Notepad, it's the second coming of Jesus.
Almost none of the things I do with Code I would have done with Notepad before. There are lots of non-IDE programmers editors that existed before Code. It may not be as good as VS or some IntelliJ variants for the use cases those IDEs are best for, but it's better for almost everything else than almost anything, and even for the things those major commercial IDEs specialize in, it's good enough for lots of specific use cases that when you need to do that plus other things, the context switch of using the commercial IDE for some tasks isn't worth it.
I don't think the (not very good) PowerShell extension is a great basis for judging VS Code as a whole.
I've spent most of my career in Visual Studio, I have a great deal of respect for how it just works, nobody's forcing me to leave it and yet... I'm mostly done with it. I'd rather use VS Code for C# development these days; it nails a lot of speed+UX things that Visual Studio doesn't.
Popular is not the same as quality. That's something that MS seem genuinely unable to understand - examples of a better product are countered with "our product is X times bigger, it is better". Well, no - X times bigger is probably momentum, or network effect, or sneaky placement/contracts - it has nothing to so with the quality of the product.
Similar "well liked" very often really means "the only product I've used" or "the only product I know well" :(
I got the impression that Windows used to make APIs so that others could use the same UI elements as the OS in their programs. Have they stopped doing that?
Win32 was the one and only GUI framework. If you wrote your app for Windows, it would look like Windows. This was true for Windows NT, Windows 2000, and XP.
Then Office got the Ribbon UI but they decided not to let anyone else use it. Then Vista got the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was a lot like HTML, but used XML and had a more powerful styling+templating system. At one point they even tried to make JavaScript Windows applications a thing over a decade before it unfortunately did become a thing (Electron).
The problem is that WPF, like HTML, allowed nearly "anything". You could style any control any way that you wanted. So WPF apps looked somewhat... random.
Worse, it turned out that WPF was just too slow for applications, to the point that Microsoft themselves almost never used it. Instead, they used incompatible bits and pieces of it with C++ so that they could have something reasonably fast. But this wasn't WPF, and didn't look the same as user apps, and wasn't even internally consistent!
Now there are something like 10+ UI frameworks from Microsoft alone, not including third-party ones that can run on Windows.
This is why the Windows 11 interface is such a mess.
To be fair, that legacy control panel doesn't list any apps that use the AppX/MSIX packaging model introduced with Windows 8. I'm still not on Windows 11, so I don't know if Teams is listed in the newer list of apps available in modern Settings, but it's worth looking there.
"Microsoft Teams" is present for in Settings -> Apps -> Apps & Features on Win11 for me. But given how they're integrating Teams into the OS, I wouldn't be surprised if I lose the ability to uninstall it soon.
The fact that they are making that huge hunk of trash a core part of Windows tells me everything I need to know about the direction they are headed into. How does anybody put up with Windows in 2022?
Would be interestng to know how many non-enterprise Windows users have ever made a direct payment to Microsoft. For that segment, the company suffers from the same problem as "tech" companies. The non-enterprise Windows user is not the customer.
Identitities and personal information are a Microsoft product. Some of that personal data is acquired through Windows or other software and some is acquired through acquisitions of "tech" companies such as LinkedIn.
since the announcement that windows 11 will require a microsoft account to install, I've decided that windows 10 is the last version of windows I will use for my personal computers. Your description of microsoft's opinion of their customers ('nobody at microsoft...actually cares') is apt.
They are doing this with Teams and it gets better, it’s a different Teams than normal that looks the same but only accepts personal MS accounts not business / 365 ones. WTF?
Windows Ink? Do you mean Windows Ink Workspace or Windows Sketchpad?
It was Windows Sketchpad that I really loved. After Microsoft axed it, they released Whiteboard. It felt very... not-native but had the titlebar of a UWP app. It was terrible compared to Sketchpad but new functionality like being able to select elements and reposition and resize them was great. UWP's own restrictions meant I could set certain expectations with windowing and suspension. And then they made Whiteboard a pure Electron app which was just too choppy for drawing anything at all. The closest I found to replacements were Inkodo and Scrble.
Windows Ink was just one of Microsoft's phases, just like XR. They now refuse to add support for a partial eraser in WinUI.
Windows and macOS users have different expectations. On a Mac, I expect my login account to also know my Apple ID and connect seamlessly with my iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, Messages, and all other Apple cloud services. I like being able to answer phone calls on the computer when the phone is nearby. When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like, it faces a couple problems - not everyone wants to be on Skype or Teams - some people use Zoom or Slack. To make things worse, even Microsoft products are not well integrated into the platform. Depending on how I open a SharePoint document, I can either have another Edge window, with an online version of an Office app or the standalone app opening (with different UI conventions on how shared edits work).
The article mentions the backwards compatibility. Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now). It also mentions dual booting, which is something completely alien to me - this is what VMs are for. When I needed to run Windows on either my Mac or my Linux box, I'd just spin up a small VM with enough brains to run what I needed.
And, since we are talking VMs, WSL 2 is a horrible user experienced compared to a real Linux environment - file sharing with the Windows side is clunkier than it was with WSL 1 (as things don't exist on a single filesystem, and that silly CRLF convention is what Windows expects) or even the venerable Cygwin (which saved me many times when I needed to use a Windows machine). With Macs and Linux you have full Unix environments without any border separating you from the rest of the machine.
Yeah I expect that my MacBook, Mac Mini, IPad and IPhone are all connected. I can open up browser tabs from one device to the other, take phone calls or send texts, not have to worry about sharing passwords etc.
I expect, want in fact, none of these things on my Windows PC. I do not trust Microsoft with my data, and this was before the last year of them being owned. It may not be right or even logical, but I imagine a ton of other users fit this same archetype. To me windows is the spyware ridden OS I use to pay a handful of games, and it basically always will be.
> When Microsoft tries to make Windows more Mac-like
Just a consideration: Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? In other words: Should Microsoft not rather assume that making Windows more Mac-like might be a bad idea considering their core customers?
> Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem?
Not sure. Macs are not that available and, in some places, are prohibitively expensive. Others would love the everything-integrated experience while using software that runs only on Windows.
I'm not sure Microsoft even has that "core customer" as neatly defined as Apple (or Linux). Getting a Mac or a Linux box is a deliberate action, whilst, for the end user, getting a Windows box is the default when you get a "generic" computer.
One group I can think of is the corporate administrators, who want to deliver a locked down set of functions to corporate workstations - VPN settings, firewalls, blocked websites, custom update schedules, and so on. That same crowd also orders Macs and Chromebooks with the same goals.
What Microsoft can do is to offer tailored experiences for specific groups - people who want everything to just work (who'll be happy with Skype logging them on on boot, with OneDrive backing stuff up...), gamers who'll definitely not want Skype to interrupt them and who have nothing to back up to OneDrive, but, sometimes, want to record and stream their games, Windows developers who'll spend most of their time within Visual Studio and the MSDN KB (am I dating myself here?), and so on. I'm very sure they have a list of personas already built for that.
It depends on the direction Windows itself wants to go in really. This isn’t the early 2000s where Windows was the used OS everywhere and was some hyperpower among software. Most apps are cross platform and there is a healthy ecosystem of OSs. Microsoft can let itself be the gaming and office PC, it can attempt to remain being the jack of all trades and master of none, or it could plot its own new course. I think either way they’ll have plenty of costumers.
As the techie helping my folks with their Windows issue, it was far easier and better for my mental health to spend my own money buying everyone chromebooks and ipads.
Is it nobody cares or they care about different things? If you want to be cynical, they care about making money. But could it also be that they're more focused on the general population (who don't care as much about this stuff)?
It's hard to tell for me to be honest, but are we (e.g. HN crowd) just a minority of power users that are in our own echo chamber complaining and making us happy doesn't really move the needle for MSFT?
It is, as is the embedding of Edge as a default browser. The attitude seems to be that it doesn't matter anymore or that it's worth doing even if they do get in trouble.
They're all paid up on their bribes now so they aren't worried. What's a bit of monopolistic and anticompetitive behavior when you've got a few Senators and other Bedfellows in your pockets?
I don't even know what is my microsoft account anymore. I have created so many for so many services and devices over the years that I don't have a "main" one anymore.
So every new install is a crapshot, I try to go local account only, but something gets in the way and I end up creating yet another one for that specific device.
I think any developer that could long moved from their ecosystems by now. You can see that if you try to get technical knowledge.
I can imagine that there are many departments that have to continually justify their existence and management tries to find the one-hit wonder that gets users engaged. All these departments try to have their dejure product integrated into Windows to have a chance to pump up their KPI.
You should be able to tell an operating system that it is not allowed to phone home. That is not possible in Windows, on the contrary, they have increased their spying dramatically. It has been a adversarial relationship for a long time by now and I don't see any attempts to change course or anyone that really cares for the platform. Their corporate integration and PC gaming keeps Windows relevant for now, but people will look elsewhere.
I dont think it is contempt for the users, It is more that consumers (i.e non-enterprise editions of windows) is the Beta Test group for windows
Microsoft has always been, and will always be an enterprise company, they do not care about Consumers, and they do not care about SMB business. they care about Large Enterprise.
I have seen it countless times in my career, SMB space and can be complaining up a storm about a problem for years but until some 20,000+ employee CTO has the problem MS will not give it the time of day.
It is all numbers, and if you are not a government or Large corporation Microsoft does not give you the time of day
You are not the target audience for Microsoft, the corporation is. Who uses a home computer anymore? (it's all smart phones now) You start work, you get a pre-installed Windows laptop to use by the corporate IT department, configured to be used as they see fit. You no longer own a computer. Nobody is expected to, these days.
Me (but not Windows), my three grown children, my sister, at least one brother in law. At least half of the people I know personally. Half of them using laptops, the rest desktop machines. All of them have smartphones, and sometimes tablets, as well.
I think combining Macbooks and gaming PCs then home computers are being used more than ever, but I'm not sure, it's true that you don't need one to browse facebook anymore. But at the same time I don't know anyone without a laptop.
For every egregious user-hostile behavior, you can search and find a ton of forum threads where people discuss at length how to reverse or mitigate them. The fact that Microsoft is aware of this and continues to prioritize this kind of abusive growth hacking over user trust, knowing fully how that impacts the company's reputation among enthusiasts, is perhaps more damning than the actual practices.
Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Contempt for the users is so deep in the DNA that this will never get better. It's disappointing, because it ultimately undermines all of the great effort that people elsewhere in the company have put into features like WSL that might otherwise make the platform attractive to modern developers.
It creates a really adversarial posture between the user and the platform. When they introduce new features, I'm reluctant to even try them because I don't trust their intentions. It's like being in an abusive relationship.