Let's say I'm a politician at a restaurant. I just want to eat. But even without opening the menu, you've had the chef call every person in town to let them know you're here.
That's not what's happening. that's not even a good analogy.
A better analogy would be this:
let's say I'm a politician at a restaurant. I just want to eat. But, without even opening the menu, the waiter needs to know that I'm there so they can bring the menu to me and greet me. They also bring water in case I am thirsty right now.
BY FAR (if not entirely) this is what Windows does. Do you need updates? Are you an Autopilot machine used in the enterprise? Do any of your installed applications need updates from the Windows Store?
These are all normal things, but people who don't understand how Windows handles these things consider them all spyware. None of them seem to be aware that you can install a telemetry viewer application and see everything sent to Microsoft from your PC if you're so concerned with what is being collected. You can also, from that application, delete the stuff Microsoft has collected about you from that machine. They go straight to "oh I can get views if I complain about Microsoft and sound very offended by it!" So, that's what they do.
The app you're talking about is called Diagnostic Data Viewer [1].
However, your statement is not correct. It's true that most system diagnostics / telemetry flow through this application; however, that's only one part of the network requests going out of your system.
There are network requests being made every time you type a character in the start menu (whether or not you have web search enabled). That is not considered telemetry so it does not show up in the Diagnostic Data Viewer. It is also not possible to disable it (there were various group policy and registry settings that worked at some point in time, none of them do any more on latest versions of Windows 11).
Similarly, when the "recommended" container of the start menu refreshes itself, it does a lot of network traffic, none of which is recorded in DDV. And of course, any applications that come with the system but are not core OS (OneDrive, Office, Store, Xbox, Cortana, Explorer, etc.) will send their own telemetry (and other network requests) which do not go through DDV.
I don't think you can fairly compare XP and Windows 11 given how much more Windows 11 does than XP. even just looking at enterprise management alone, XP is uncontrollable by comparison. forget all the end-user features that didn't exist in Windows XP.
might as well compare Win11 to MS-DOS if you're thinking along those lines.
For a regular home user, what does Win11 do that WinXP couldn't? Everything I can think of (drivers, screen res, multiple monitors) is incremental improvements to what we already had, I can't think of a feature they've introduced since XP than I want.
edit: This is probably too glib; certainly more recent Windowses are superior for application developers, which end users benefit from indirectly. It's the user-facing parts of the OS that seemed to have gone in the other direction.
> "Everything I can think of (drivers, screen res, multiple monitors) is incremental improvements to what we already had"
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? (Besides, they're just improvements on what we had before so they don't count).
Apart from the drivers, screen res, multiple monitors, virtual desktops, Windows Defender, updated DirectX, newer hardware support, hypervisor isolated secure password store, app store, WiFi, audio stack with per-program volume control, OCR engine, voice recognition engine, Cortana, online backup and file and settings sync, touch UI and the $8Bn/year Surface line it enabled, improved security, hypervisor backed WSL Ubuntu and Android engines, Windows Sandbox, SSD TRIM support, Bitlocker full disk encryption, ClearType and improved fonts for screen reading, GPU accelerated compositor, face recognition biometric login, QR codes on BSODs, all of...
That isn't really "the other hand". The claim I was rejecting was "Microsoft haven't done any development on Windows since XP". I say they have, and you also say they have.
Right, the problem is the difference between the DirectX/hardware support stuff on that list and the Cortana/app store stuff - I want the first part, and will pay for it, but I'm complaining that getting stuck with the second part is part of the price.
Honest question - what features does Windows 11 have that I would want? I've never tried Windows 11, but I already hate how invasive Windows 10 is. What is your definition of "better" because if I weren't forced to upgrade to play modern games I would have never bought 10 (and I hate it even after years of using it and spending countless hours tweaking it to suck less but it still fucking sucks balls).
I feel like every time I "upgrade" Windows I hate it. And that hatred doesn't go away, it just gets normalized.
I don't know what you want, you might be happy with MSDOS for all I know. But Windows 11 has support for the 6ghz spectrum for WiFi 6(e) and WSLg support for doing ML/Cuda in WSL. Those are both of high interest to me. Otherwise Win 11 feels like a large step backwards.
From my anecdotal experience, Windows 11 works faster on the same work PC I used (up-to-date) Windows 10 on. And I didn't clean install, so it's not that kind of placebo.
>Blizzard added DirectX 12 support for their award-winning World of Warcraft game on Windows 10 in late 2018. This release received a warm welcome from gamers: thanks to DirectX 12 features such as multi-threading, WoW gamers experienced substantial framerate improvement. After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available.
>At Microsoft, we make every effort to respond to customer feedback, so when we received this feedback from Blizzard and other developers, we decided to act on it. Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have ported the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. This unblocks developers who want to take full advantage of the latest improvements in D3D12 while still supporting customers on older operating systems
Windows keeps taking away useful features too though so either way you lose.
They took it away a long time ago, but i missed the option to arbitrarily arrange icons in folders (as you can on the desktop). It used to be very easy to sort through lots of files by moving them into piles of icons and then moving the piles into folders for example.
Also the ability to move items in the taskbar wherever you want. (for example, I want one of 8 open notepad documents moved to the end of the taskbar next to one of the 6 browser windows while all other notepad and browser windows are on the other side)
> I don't think you can fairly compare XP and Windows 11 given how much more Windows 11 does than XP
Considering how much work it took to get wrangle 10 LTSE into a usable Win environment I'd much prefer the simple OS that stayed out of my hair than one that "does so much more" I didn't ask for.
I hope someday software is regulated as tightly as other consumer goods. Abusing one's position as the issuer of security updates to force choices, undesired changes, and bloat down user's throats shouldn't be possible; users should have the option to separate the two.
I'm aware that that seems like a tall ask given the state of "modern" software development, but that's its own can of worms.
There are zero features I need from Windows 11 that Windows XP didn't already have. The only reason I'm not still running XP is that security vulnerabilities in it are no longer being fixed.
The vast majority of security issues with XP (and some with 7) are architectural. E.g.: you can't fix some security vulnerability relating to GDI on XP without essentially replacing it with Vista/7's DWM. Conversely, 7 has a few security weaknesses compared to 8/8.1 due to missing kernel security features that are, essentially, a binary diff between 7 & 8 rather than a small patch.
"Updates" for XP POS Edition and the like are mostly support filler and don't bring it up to the same security level as a modern OS. I.e.: There's still a bunch of logical vulnerabilities present.
> On the other hand, I bet there are plenty more vulnerabilities in Windows 11 that still haven't been discovered yet.
There probably are, but I'd rather have a bunch of vulnerabilities that nobody knows about yet, and that will be patched once people do learn, than slightly fewer vulnerabilities that everyone is constantly trying to exploit and that will be there forever.
That means vendors should be legally forced to publish source code of any software they abandon / stoped providing support. Hope this will happen soon. Regarding Windows XP, full source code has been leaked already (not SP3 but close to recent).
Don't be so certain --- the enthusiast community will fix them if they're important enough, even more so if they're ones that "everyone is constantly trying to exploit". Also, no one who knows what they're doing is going to be facing the Internet without a NAT or firewall that blocks incoming connections by default.
Indeed, these lame comparisons are just as bad today as I remember them over 20 years ago when I was a young lad and Windows XP launched and everyone hated it thinking it would bomb (including me) because "why do I need this bloated OS with a colorful paintjob when Win98 does everything just fine?"
It's pretty hilarious to see history repeat itself at every new Windows launch. Rinse and repeat.
"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!"
What features would the average user miss out on? I'd go back to win7 in a heartbeat if I could, and I really don't remember a great difference between XP and 7 to begin with.
Now Win 11 is a data hog... It's great for collecting and transmitting personal user data and ads... Fair trade. You never really notice unless you work off of a hotspot that has a data cap on it though, so there's that.
that means nothing. fresh install of a custom image? fresh install of what ISO image? insider build or release build? maybe the DNS server being used by default is being hijacked, or the ISO they created, if they created one, has an app installed by the ISO creation tool which made it. not all of those are legit.
I set up a VM and installed Windows 11 Home on it and captured all traffic after initial setup and a reboot. I saw nothing going to any non-microsoft domain.
because you will not update until forced in most situations.
you simply are not aware of every security fix or vulnerability found, and therefore can't know when you should update.
in the early 2000s there a few very large profile windows viruses that spread like crazy, despite patches being released months or years earlier. the viruses took out networks across the globe and caused considerable mayhem for days.
congress had hearings and several tech companies testified, including Microsoft. congress wanted to know why users weren't forced to update their computers, and Microsoft said that they can't control what their users do.
congress blamed Microsoft for users not patching their systems.
so this happened a few more times and Windows Update was improved continuously going forward.
now you're forced to update, because people who thought they knew all about security failed to update when they should have.
now, users blame Microsoft for forcing them to patch their systems.
I blame Microsoft for requiring reboots for updates and making those reboots destructive to my state. If I could go to bed at night and know that everything will be where I left it in the morning, that would be fine. I can't, so I take extraordinary measures to ensure that my computer remains under my control. Up until fairly recently it rebooted while under active use; something which is never acceptable. No update ever made is that important.
It updates when I say it updates, and not a moment before. Congress and Microsoft can GFT if they don't like it.
well when you write your own operating system you can decide how that works, I guess.
If you choose to stop hiding icons in the notification area, windows will tell you days in advance of any forced reboot. It does for me, anyway. I don't know why the default is to hide icons down there, but it's probably because a lot of apps like to stay running for some reason and pollute the notification area.
If you unhide all icons there and occasionally glance down at it, you'll see when Windows wants you to reboot. It is only after days of you not interacting with that icon that the reboot is forced. That's how it's been for me, anyway.
You all just want to complain about Microsoft. None of you have anything of value to say. I wish you would all just admit that to yourselves.
The purpose of Windows is to support the staff I want to do on the computer, not to support Windows. There is a priority inversion here, refusing to acknowledge that does not make it go away. Neither does making excuses for Microsoft's user hostile design make it not hostile.
> "congress wanted to know why users weren't forced to update their computers"
That sounds made up. Happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt congress demanded to know why people aren't being forced to update Windows. It's too weirdly specific.
In the early 2000s, nobody was forced to do anything. Even for games, patches were uncommon because people bought the CD-ROM. If the game had bugs, the process of finding the patch, if it existed, was not accessible to most people.
well, it would be weirdly too specific if the conversation didn't lead to it, but it did.
"how did this happen?
> Bugs were found in windows systems which allowed this.
"can you not fix those?"
> we can.
"why didn't you fix them?"
> We did, the patches have been available for months in the worst case.
"then why are computers running your operating system still affected?"
> Because users have not downloaded and applied the patches.
"why not? are they not encouraged to do so?"
> We make them available but a user must choose to do it.
"Why do you not force this? This seems like an easy way to address the issue of unpatched operating systems."
> We cannot control what the users of our operating systems do.
"Not good enough. Clearly your current stance is not sufficient given the state of the Internet right now."
> Ok.
========
Very much paraphrased, but that's how I remember it going. I watched the thing live on C-SPAN and I don't know if it was blogged about anywhere. Even then the internet hated Microsoft even though most of its users ran Windows.
This is blatantly, flat out wrong. Even the implicit premise here is wrong.
It is not Microsoft’s prerogative to update my device. They don’t own my device. They don’t get to decide when I decide to install new software. That right exclusively belongs to me. Even congress doesn’t get to have a say in this. Users have private property rights. And this, what Microsoft is doing, is bordering illegality.
Unless it is matter of national security. Then, you put masks on, sit home, let your locations transferred to CIA/NSA, update your device, have a full body scan and go some other country to be killed at war.
I don't lose work because of an update, because I don't use windows.
I can't be why windows updates are forced, because I haven't used windows since 7. I can update a system package, a library or even a kernel without losing a process.
Tell me again why windows needs to force the user to update?
Your waiter is calling every Tom Dick & Harry to just wait. I'd say if everything requires a phone call, you've already lost me as a customer. Your analogy is worse, if we're...y'know. Doing that.
It's just, gross.