I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait. But then, since Linux adoption didn't meaningfully change in the last 20 years, I'm forced to confront the fact that either I'm wrong about its fundamentals, or the market is able to be irrational for longer than I find reasonable. Either way, Windows in my mind, represents a world I'd like to leave behind. Apple too, btw.
I've been interested in moving my windows machine to Linux. Do you have any recommendations for distros to use? Last time I used Linux was Linux Mint. It was fine, but definitely felt less polished compared to Windows or Mac OS
I just don't think people like having something shoved down their throats. The dedicated Copilot button on keyboards and adding Copilot shortcuts all over the OS (and automatic popups/ads) was far too far.
I think OS level integrations that are opt-in, not opt-out, may even be popular. But they have to be done carefully and tastefully.
I have the same feeling about any kind of integration. We're moving away from Google because we simply do not want to have this kind of forced relationship with products and/or services. It either fits and we'll pick it or it does not and then we don't. We won't pay for things we do not intend to use. And we don't want exposure to products that may constitute a security or a privacy risk.
And if the surprise is unpleasant you can disable it by turning off memories and holidays in the settings of the photo app. Not so easy to escape Copilot on Windows.
I'm not GP, so I can't comment on where their line is, but for me the difference between Copilot and Apple Intelligence is that I can turn off the latter and never see anything about it again. Copilot, on the other hand, is everywhere and it's almost all universally buggy garbage, even when it's disabled.
I actually trust the Apple Intelligence, when off, doesn't exfiltrate my data.
> So the issue isn't actually that it's baked into the OS, it's that you should have control over when it's used.
Baked into the OS implies that it's integral to its operation in a way that the two are fundamentally inseparable. Having a global off switch implies that's not true.
There are other irritating baked in aspects of the newest macos and other recent versions that are arguably less avoidable, like Tahoe's entire UI design, or the Settings app.
Have you even tried it? I'm a Mac user for 20+ years and I'm running Tahoe. Not once have I ever thought about Apple Intelligence. I don't even notice it. I think you have to switch it on.
Yea, I've replaced Windows with Ubuntu on my pc and have just ordered an M5 Macbook Air.
Sure both have their quirks, but it's just wild how much Windows goes out of its way to be annoying. From a billion startup notifications to basic UI stuff to copilot and the list goes on.
Or onedrive integrations and constant ‘backup your computer now’ popups which are _advertisements_ for onedrive, or Netflix, Spotify, or LinkedIn pre-installed and difficult to remove, or all of the above reinstalling during windows updates.
In fact, basically any feature added since Windows 10 is probably unwanted.
I have been on a MacBook Pro exclusively for the past 3 years and I do not ever see anything about iCloud. I also never signed up so may be that is why?
My iCloud is full. Every once in a while my iPhone nags me to upgrade for a few days in a row and I tell it no and it goes away for 6 months or so. My Mac has never once nagged me about iCloud storage.
Comparing windows to an OS I don’t use isn’t a fair comparison unless my work machine stops being windows. I assume Apple are a slightly less variant of bad though
I don’t care if it had the best UX of all apps on windows. I don’t want or need data scraping in the form of cloud storage.
Edit: but I am somewhat surprised that it’s qt and not the typical react electron bloat that Microsoft is slopping out. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
I don't think macOS will liberate you from OS-level integration with AI. If you really cannot tolerate built-in AI, Linux and the BSDs are your only choice.
Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc.
I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.
The only thing I'd add is that not only did he tweet the infamous tweet that caused the backlash, Pavan ridiculed those in the backlash (since deleted). Also, Satya still spews the same "agentic OS" narrative as recent as last week.
So, I hope for the best, but I don't plan on taking them at their word.
Absolutely nothing wrong with an "agentic OS", agentic UX is the future of personal computing. The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done.
Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus.
The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.
It all depends on where the the AI is running. The problem with the idea, is that for the majority of Windows boxes where it would be running do not have the bare metal hardware to support local models and thus it would be in the cloud and all of the issues associated with that when it comes to privacy/security. It would be neat, given MSFT's footprint, to look to develop small models, running locally, with user transparency when it comes to actions, but that doesn't align with MSFT's core objectives.
AFAIK the existing Copilot features always use the NPU and do not fall back to the cloud. Given that Windows 12 will require an NPU I don't see why it would fall back either.
> The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
I think your last paragraph is the real issue that will forever crush improvements over clicking on stuff. Once you get to "buy me socks" you're just entering some different advertising domain. We already see it with very simple things like getting Siri to play a song. Two songs with the same name, the more popular one will win, apply that simple logic to everything and put a pay to play model in it and there's your "agentic" OS of the future.
- "summarize the discussions on hacker news of last week based on what I would find interesting".
- "Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options"
- "Look at my household budget and find ways to be more frugal."
There are thousands of things I can think of when it comes to how an agentic OS would work better than the current Screen Keyboard paradigm. I mean all these things I could now do with Claude or Codex and some of these things I already do with these tools.
We’ve had computing technology that clearly understands what the user wants to do. It’s called a command line interface. No guessing, no recommendations, no dark patterns, no bullshit.
Even theoretical AI still has the other mind problem from economics.
Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.
Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.
Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.
We've already been through this when people a decade ago thought voice was the future of the computer.
When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.
You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.
I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.
I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.
And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.
This is just cheap damage control, just wait and see if they actually do all of those things correctly. Slow file explorer was an issue since very beginning of windows 11 and they "fix" it only now? But they took time to add copilot to snippet tool?
Saying and doing are very different. They have passed through the "fuck around" phase, and are entering the "find out" phase of this AI journey. Lots of companies are, suddenly.
My employer trained us all on the Gartner hype cycle, tested us on how to remain level-headed before and during the peak of unreasonable expectations and now every single manager in the company is drooling over AI, saying that "this is the future, join us or find another job" and I cannot wait for the curve to come back down to a sane level where intelligence rules behavior as much as it used to. We'll see.
We’ve certainly done the “fucking around” and now we'll see if we "find out" enough to regain our sanity and our humanity.
They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.
Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.
Good point, and that one has actually caused logistical headaches. If someone tries to set up a new out-of-box computer without an internet connect, well, you just cannot. Even the previously working bypass has been removed in a recent update.
And, yes, I am aware that Pro/Enterprise don't suffer from this, but a LOT of computers sold are Windows Home/OEM licenses. It impacts a ton of people.
I find that this happens when you enter folders that have media files like audio files, video files and so on. One way to fix it is to enter one such folder, then remove all columns (like file name, date modified - those columns) and remove all the columns that are media metadata columns. Things like track length, artist, contributing artist or whatever else, then click in the File explorer menu on the 3 dots icon (**) and select View tab, then click 'Apply to folders'. This will apply the column and view settings that you just applied to all such folders.
Now all folders with media files open immediately. Also if you want no wait for video files folders, right click in the folder and select 'View -> Details or View -> List or some other option where it doesn't create thumbnails and it'll load even quicker.
Right now my start menu randomly crashes. Like all I see is a black box with no icons. I'm impressed with how even basic functionalities break pretty often
Well honestly, that's the easiest problem to fix: just install any of the dozens of excellent and stable third party file managers. I for instance am (or was, while I still used Windows) a fan of Total Commander (actually, when I started using it, it was called Windows Commander). As a bonus, you'll be spared the useless UI and usability changes inflicted upon you with every new Windows version.
If you're going to replace tools as fundamental as the file manager, you may as well switch to a stable and fast operating system like most Linux distributions or Mac.
Yeah, that's what I did, eventually, but some people still need some software that only runs under Windows, or want to play games without messing around with Proton etc. etc.
Can't help but feel like Microsoft is getting pressured by the laptop OEMs to make Windows not suck, because of the MacBook Neo is going to eat all their lunches.
Talk is cheap, I want to see heads rolling, head of whoever was responsible with the all the disastrous windows 11 decisions. Till then I won't touch windows 11 and I'm not the only one.
I've used Windows since 3.11 and I am using macOS for 5+ years now for work (requirement).
Switched to Linux on my personal devices 2 years ago and using Ubuntu and PopOS! on two different laptops. I've had very small number of issues. Can't understand people moving to Mac - it is the same messed half backed OS as both Windows and Linux (flavors). With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes.
With Linux at least I don't have to worry about privacy.
Interesting how often they use the word „craft“. For me, a sign that AI fatiguge is a real issue, not only among Windows users. Good, maybe a small, first step towards down-regulation of the hype.
I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions.
Her perspective was that consumer-facing products are not the primary revenue drivers and, therefore, are not central to executive priorities. While this may not be surprising to some, what stood out to me was how emphatically she underscored that the company’s strategic focus is squarely on enterprise customers rather than end users.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
Not OP, but I've got a friend of a friend in the Windows org that backs this up. Most engineers are teamed up by manufacturers. HP team, Lenovo team, etc. These are the primary drivers of feature development. If it won't sell grandma another $500 HP laptop, they're not interested.
Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.
So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.
MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.
No ads. No upselling. Being able to completely ignore Microsoft account and install offline. No telemetry if that’s what user decides, no opt-in - single dialog during installation. No dark patterns. That’s what people want.
Nothing on limiting dependence on online account/services and forced hardware requirements. The rest sounds like every text people could read for decades during Windows installation.
Sorry Microsoft, some people already transfer to a different train because you offered a crazy ride.
Whatever, I'm just counting the time until I can drop windows entirely... right now I just need it for gaming, but I'm thinking maybe Valve's OS will be the replacement
Feels like screaming "please don't leave us, we will now build what you ask for". On the one hand, this is great to hear, but on the other side I wonder how much this will matter. Apple is now winning on the hardware other than offering a better UX experience. But they also have lost their touch with it over the years!
To demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to Windows quality, you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen. No no, it's not vaporware, they even included four screenshots. Everyone can rest assured now.
A feature they removed due to their inability to make it performant in Windows 11
A feature that existed as early as win95.
The most requested change in user voice, since the earliest windows 11 betas.
I had to check the date on my phone as I was sure it was an April fools joke. After the absolute onslaught of negative feedback and the new term "Microslop", they put out an article saying you can now adjust the position of the taskbar. Unreal.
This. Microsoft has said similar things before, and always tripled down on bad behavior afterward. Their priority is business outcomes, not user experiences or support, and that’s why even this non-apology makes it clear the stuff customers, engineers, and support staff hate - invasive telemetry, outright surveillance/spyware, online-only requirements, AI-everywhere, constant arbitrary deprecation of APIs and endpoints for external tools to drive internal product adoption, refusal to support consumer technologies long-term (MCE, WMR) or do things contrary to everyone else (print drivers) - isn’t actually getting addressed.
Don’t listen to the smooth talk. Plan an exit strategy now, before you need it later.
> Plan an exit strategy now, before you need it later.
The idea that we'll all be forced off of Windows one day sounds like a dream, but so far we continue to be in a state where myself and many other are long past the point of wanting to leave, but we can't for some reason or another.
Microsoft knows that, which is why they've been able to do whatever they want and not worry about the consequences.
I keep a VM with windows on it. Unfortunately you have to purchase a license. Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade it like they've allowed since ~Vista. But now anyone tracking user agents knows I'm not using Microsoft. I didn't even put a browser on the VM. I have used the VM under 10 times over the past year and that's usually just to use Quick Assist to help others with their Microslop OS. Sometimes to deal with a particularly obnoxious excel file.
Of course the proof in the pudding is in the eating, but just saying that they want to do this stuff is at least a slight improvement over before, where we mostly just saw apathy and enshittification. It's also a promise that people can hold them to if they fail.
Interesting headline. And I start reading as a MS skeptic. Maybe they finally got it? Maybe MS have realized why Windows really is so crappy. I read the first entry, bolded, in the bullet list. It reads “ More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions”.
I didn't switch to linux because windows was bad. I was running LTSC IoT Enterprise and selectively ran scripts from AtlasOS.
What finally pushed me to linux was because specifically in my narrow usecases it's just plain better, but if we were to completely ignore that, even if linux was worse, I just don't want to support evil companies anymore.
Now I'll admit that this is what AI would say, but it's not always about what is better, it's about sending a message, a message that microsoft appears to have heard loud and clear, however, we will have to see if this is just PR or not.
Lifelong user and 11-year Insider Program participant (i.e., since the literal start of the program).
Just this past January I implemented something on my workstation I should've done a long time ago: outbound filtering all network traffic via so-called 'Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security'. I've also skipped more Insider builds in the past two months than I have in the past 11 years.
The only thing keeping me around at this point is the migration overhead and (at least I tell myself) window 'snapping'.
The first thing I did when a mac was handed to me by an employer was find an app for window snapping. It served me well.
I went back to windows, using WSL in 2017. In 2023 I got sick of how everything was getting progressively worse and switched to linux (which has window snapping). I'm never looking back.
If Bill is reading this: Another way to commit to quality would be (a) fund a $200M+ open source foundation to migrate/port/rewrite all of Windows (drivers, utilities, applications) to Linux; (b) give the foundation full IP rights to do so; (c) put all Microsoft Windows employees on the effort too.
I am sus. Optimistic but sus. I am hoping for some combo of:
- MS doing what they say here. (Uphill battle given the perverse incentives others have mentioned) My gut says Windows is going to be *worse* vs better, and I am willing to settle for stagnating...
- Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.
It's like you could take the good from both and discard the bad, but it hasn't happened yet.
It sure looks like a PR campaign to take the attention away from how bad the things are, and I need to see it to believe it.
Also, why couldn't they make this announcement as they release the taskbar change. Taking away the most basic features and bringing a few back doesn't mean things are improving, it means things are getting petty.
There is no reason for the start menu to take 2 seconds to show up on a computer with 8 CPUs running at 4GHz. We all know that they're completely half-assing everything now.
> Linux desktop makers taking UX, ABI/linking compatibility, and "just works" seriously.
Would you settle for 2 out of 3? UX is improving, and things get more polished every year, but we've mostly settled on shoving things into some sort of package (container, flatpak, snap) alongside all its dependencies specifically so we don't have to actually stabilize any sort of ABI
Yep. Will take what I can get! Re the flatpacks, snaps, docker etc. Yea... I don't like those much more than the Apple/Google/MS app stores. They don't have the perverse incentives, but are still setting up friction points vs being able to just have an executable work, expect to work in 5-10 years, and work on diff distros. (This is something MS actually does right; possibly the best thing about Win)
I was coincidentally just updating old softare I wrote, and I just ripped out the snap, RPM and Debs because I can't be bothered to maintain all of them.
I'm not sure these problems are solvable once a company gets big enough and incentives completely take over. It's like the hands are trying to sew a parachute while the legs are sprinting towards a cliff.
> File Explorer is one of the most used surfaces in Windows. Our first round of improvements will focus on a quicker launch experience, reduced flicker, smoother navigation and more reliable performance for everyday file tasks.
Really? it took "user feedback" for one of the world's best software companies to realize one of the most fundamental parts of the OS was broken?
I have been long on $MSFT for a while now, but my faith as an investor stands shook.
Ugh. They horribly borked Notepad. The whole reason I use it is because it's dumb and simple. The moment you change it into a full-featured rich text editor with AI assistants and autocorrect ... you should just make it another app, because it's solving a different problem.
At the very least, don't forget my font setting on the update.
My personal opinion is "Copilot is pretty good as a chatbot [1] but don't waste your time trying anything multimodal." So I don't mind it at all, in fact I like it enough that I installed the app on my phone. I've got no interest in having it rewrite stuff for me in Word or for LinkedIn though.
On the other hand, Microsoft is famous for killing something good (like OneNote) but spamming the UI with numerous entry points that will make you think "this is some piece of crap that Microsoft is spamming because nobody in their right mind would want it." That they are getting some self-awareness of this is a good sign.
[1] I'd say Google's AI Mode gives consistently better answers (like use "vite-ignore" instead of writing a Vite plugin that doesn't work) than copilot with the reservation that if Google seems to get uncomfortable about a conversation it will end the conversation with a ten pack of search results whereas Copilot tries to simulate a person with healthy boundaries (e.g. "I will help you write a romance story but I won't help you write a sex scene")
My own anecdotal experience is that Copilot doesn't even do a good job as a chatbot. I usually only use it in a few occasions where I don't have access to ChatGPT/Claude.
And I could tell that. In one instance where I asked it to write a script that does a bunch of things, it provided a series of steps to do in the terminal. This is very off my typical experience with other chatbots. I immediately went to Claude which gave me a complete script that does exactly what I need.
> "… by making them necessary entry points! Muahahaha!"
Starting with Windows 11 26H2, the Start Menu will be removed and replaced with Copilot. In order to use a locally hosted app, an externally hosted LLM will need to be instructed to launch it. The reliability is phenomenal: our testing has shown it can launch the right app with 95% accuracy.
Users will also need to drink a Monster™ verification can every time they launch the start menu if they do not have a Premium AI PRO Ultra MAX account. Users may chose to skip verification process if they agree to the new EULA where it is stipulated that they must meet a weekly quota of Big Macs™ stamps. Failing that your Copilot™ Account will enter lock-down mode where a full document, body and facial scan must be "performed" to recover it.
> "A more relevant Recommended section in Start will surface apps and content you care about most, with clear controls to customize the experience or turn it off"
It feels like Windows is old and tired. Remember when Microsoft and Intel seemed unstoppable in the 1990s and early 2000s? The momentum is no longer there. The latest bad decisions around AI for Microsoft are just the straw breaking the camel’s back.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions: Repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we’ve heard from you. We are introducing the ability to reposition it to the top or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace.
I wonder if this will include being able to put it on the non-primary display once again. It's not mentioned, but that was one of the biggest frustrations with Windows 11. It seems their focus is exclusively on single display devices.
It also ruined my flow for my flight sim until I found a workaround. The fullscreen window wishes to launch to the primary display, which means losing the useful bits of the taskbar.
I love what they're saying, but my faith in them is very, very is low.
I have also configured my Windows 11 to look and act like Windows 7. I like my taskbar to be a taskbar with labels. The tray area and the start menu is replicated across all my monitors.
I also have set the classic right-click menus.
There are some things about Windows 11 I like but a lot of it seems to be designed by people who use Mac OS (graphic designers).
I can't believe I'm reading about those things being presented as new and exciting in 2026.
I had to dig around because I could not remember since when I take this stuff - putting as many toolbars as you'd like anywhere on multiple monitors you feel like as granted and yes, 14 years ago xfce 4.10 was released. Time flies, I guess.
Oh, someone's feeling the heat of MacBook Neo and getting pressured by their hardware partners.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:
Pfft. Still slow, react-based, and ad-riddled
> reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
Must have failed to meet the metrics goals
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
You can bet they will still flash the screen take-over riddled with all the dark patterns in the world to get you to upload all your files to their cloud "for backup"
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer [..] quicker launch experience:
Oh, the preloading of explorer into ram before it's launched? Lmao. Entirely embarassed by File Pilot https://filepilot.tech
We used to be able to make any folder a popup menu on taskbar, including any subfolders. Served the need for quick shortcuts to whatever we need within 2 clicks. Sorely miss it in Win11.
Is this a joke? Is this guy for real? And he calls himself a REAL engineer?
He’s a manager doing damage control because all this time Microslop is greedy and has stopped caring about power users.
We’re not first time users, we don’t want Microsoft BOB as our UI, we don’t want ads and internet search “functionality” in our Start menu, we don’t want AI everywhere and we don’t want things hidden from us.
Make Windows 11 Pro for real pro users and 11 Home for new users. I hope a few people from MS are reading this, especially Mr Engineer.
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but I don’t care.
It's crazy how windows blew its dominance isn't it?
Even for gaming, the only reason why I would stick with windows is not an issue anymore. Thanks to Steam gaming just works on Linux. I'm using Omarchy and it's very easy.
I can't see ever going back to windows personally.
It's got to be somewhat depressing working on a household name product in its trashy downturn. Surely you can't have the pride in your work that an equivalent employee once would have.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong cause I don't recall where I got this understanding from, but I believe Windows 11 still has the Windows 10 taskbar, but a startup process basically hides it and replaces it with a brand new one they made for Windows 11, built with web technologies. And they probably just never got around to figuring out how to put it somewhere else on the screen since they didn't inherit that behaviour from before.
I am not convinced that Microsoft is all of a sudden deciding to try again to become a consumer-oriented company based on something Pravan Davuluri says.
I was hoping for: "We understood the insanity and the insult of trying to replace native UI with cheap web stack imitation and it will never happen again".
> Windows touches more people’s lives than almost any technology on Earth.
Thankfully Ballmer failed and this isn’t even close to true. I, like a lot of highly technical professionals, have been Windows sober for many years now.
In 10 and prior you could even move it to other monitors, just by dragging and dropping it. It's baffling they thought that functionality was a bug that people wanted 'fixed'.
Reminds me of when they finally apologized for the train wreck that was IE6 [1] and resumed Internet Explorer development in the 2000s after Firefox came along and started eating IE's market share.
In this case it's the MacBook Neo that's causing them to get off their butts and reinvest in the quality of their software after letting it stagnate for years, but the pattern is the same: rest on their monopolistic laurels until competition makes them feel threatened, then magically start caring about their users again all of a sudden.
Windows has been going downhill for too long for me to take them at their word. I'll believe it when I see it.
> Windows is as much yours as it is ours.
Microsoft has been inflicting unwanted crap on me for years now, and they keep expanding with more unwanted crap (even to the point of wanting to force people to have Microsoft accounts) as time goes on. Reading this line actually made me laugh out loud. No, Microsoft, you don't believe this even a little.
Something tickles me about describing the forced inclusion of Copilot as “entry points” in things like Notepad. It reveals Microsoft’s intentions SO precisely.
They aren’t trying to add Copilot in useful ways for their users. They’re forcing it into Notepad when they know it doesn’t fit there, because it might be your “entry” into their slop generator.
User experience be damned, these shareholders must have their value.
Are they microsofter in the brain than MicroSlop? MegaSlop? GigaSlop? Reading "Windows" and "quality" in the same sentence already triggers every bullshit alert in the book.
This is good to hear, as someone who has used basically nothing but Windows since 2000. I haven't stepped off the Windows train yet. I use Linux at arm's length for my homelab's hypervisor and at work, but my daily driver is still Windows 10.
I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very frankly I prefer the developer experience on Windows, where you can write a (relatively) high-quality native desktop application with purely first-party tooling and release a single, tiny (~10^4 bytes) executable that quite literally runs anywhere. The Windows API surface area is huge and developers can write entire multi-domain programs without ever looking for a third-party library.
This probably sounds like a lot of copium, but I feel like recent events like the rising costs of memory and competition like the MacBook Neo will light a fire under Microsoft's arse. I really hope some of the AI overboard in Windows 11 is rolled back over the near future. They should migrate core Windows applications back to native and CLI technologies, actually support and maintain these without chasing the next big thing, and release frameworks for safer compiled languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin, and allocate more resources to F#.
I found the microsoft development experience to be terrible aside from win32. Yes, win32 lasts forever and outlived every attempt to replace it. There's been no end in half-baked APIs such as winforms, direct video, etc. I once had a problem where i was writing a video streaming thing that had to touch a bunch of meta-data inside a WPF program and then have it run on different versions of windows. There was no "one true way" and ended up doing it all in QT.
Windows is still a solid 'gets out of the way' operating system (with numerous tweaks, customizations, and stripping) when it works. If they focus on fixing UX issues and improving stability and performance, it may be enough to slow the rise of desktop Linux.
Better support for F#, or really any language other than C# is a longshot though. Those resources were likely 'reallocated' to AI R&D indefinitely.
> Windows is still a solid 'gets out of the way' operating system
A good way to put it.
There are third-party tools that Microsoft really need to adopt to make Windows a bit nicer (WizTree, VoidTools Everything, adopt improvements from Total Commander, make more PowerToys default), but broadly it is still a decent OS. There are issues like slow `CloseHandle()` because of Defender (which needs to be a bit less zealous), and maybe more first-party adoption of WinGet.
On the other hand, every time I use desktop Linux I get some paper cut because some edge case that I just don't ever think about is broken on Linux, whether it be my multi-monitor high pixel density layout, my USB audio interface and peripherals, or my touchpad sensitivity and gestures that Windows was widely derided for in the early 2010s and suddenly after 'Precision Touchpads'[1] no one ever complained about again, or random GPU glitches even on Intel/AMD integrated graphics that I have literally never seen on the Windows desktop, or poor battery life (Windows somehow gets 2-3x the battery life of Linux).
> I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible.
Nah, NT always had... mostly... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved inside of an operating system that actively hates me. But the core OS is cool.
> The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices
NTFS is plenty fast, even for thousands of small files; it is the Windows Defender file system filter driver that slows things down. Specifically, it slows down CloseHandle[1].
> NT's core tech
I'm not just talking about NT. I think most of the user mode is great, too. Office blows the pants off most other 'office' suites. D3D is generally very forward-looking, and many extensions are released on D3D first, sometimes years before they're ported to Vulkan (ray-tracing, mesh shaders, descriptor heaps, etc). Windows has had a superb low-latency audio subsystem in WASAPI since Vista, which is something like a decade before Linux got Pipewire. There are many other examples of random cool stuff in Windows that Linux 'rediscovered independently' but Windows got there much earlier just because of the sheer install base and surface area.
Too little and too late. I’ll believe it when I’ll see it. And so far everything I’ve seen has told me to abandon ship. Even if you reverse course, you’d need a miracle to make me trust you anytime soon.
This is how goodwill works. Easy to burn, hard to earn back. I’m not touching any products by Meta, Google or Microsoft, and none of them are getting me back on board with a cute blog post.
This is vague lip service with little substance, as far as I can tell. That is unsurprising consider it's from Microsoft and it's about Windows. It addresses (in cheap words) a few real pain points, but completely fails to address the dozens of either incredibly painful and stupid decisions MS has made.
On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.
> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus
Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions
This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer
See comment on task bar above.
> More control over widgets and feed experiences
Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.
On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:
- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.
- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.
- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.
- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.
- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.
- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps
- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.
- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.
- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.
My next laptop will be a MacBook Pro.
My Surface Laptop 5 will be collecting dust in case I need it, but that’s highly unlikely.
I think OS level integrations that are opt-in, not opt-out, may even be popular. But they have to be done carefully and tastefully.
Of course this might change in future. And Mac OS has other popups where there is no “skip” and only “remind me later”.
I actually trust the Apple Intelligence, when off, doesn't exfiltrate my data.
I too would not want any unprompted access to my files.
At the end of the day this issue is that we don't trust the OS and we cannot easily validate how it is designed to behave.
Baked into the OS implies that it's integral to its operation in a way that the two are fundamentally inseparable. Having a global off switch implies that's not true.
There are other irritating baked in aspects of the newest macos and other recent versions that are arguably less avoidable, like Tahoe's entire UI design, or the Settings app.
Maybe it's doing stuff that doesn't rise to my level of attention, but it isn't actively annoying me.
Sure both have their quirks, but it's just wild how much Windows goes out of its way to be annoying. From a billion startup notifications to basic UI stuff to copilot and the list goes on.
In fact, basically any feature added since Windows 10 is probably unwanted.
Edit: but I am somewhat surprised that it’s qt and not the typical react electron bloat that Microsoft is slopping out. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc.
I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.
The author of this commitment is the same person (Pavan Davuluri) spearheading move of Windows into an Agentic OS: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
The only thing I'd add is that not only did he tweet the infamous tweet that caused the backlash, Pavan ridiculed those in the backlash (since deleted). Also, Satya still spews the same "agentic OS" narrative as recent as last week.
So, I hope for the best, but I don't plan on taking them at their word.
Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus.
The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.
Maybe? For a couple of decades, we believed that computers you can talk to are the future of computing. Every sci-fi show worth a dime perpetuated that trope. And yet, even though the technology is here, we still usually prefer to read and type.
We might find out the same with some of the everyday uses of agentic tech: it may be less work to do something than to express your desires to an agent perfectly well. For example, agentic shopping is a use case some companies are focusing on, but I can't imagine it being easier to describe my sock taste preferences to an agent than click around for 5 minutes and find the stripe pattern I like.
And that's if we ignore that agents today are basically chaos monkeys that sometimes do what you want, sometimes rm -rf /, and sometimes spend all your money on a cryptocurrency scam. So for the foreseeable future, I most certainly don't want my OS to be "agentic". I want it to be deterministic until you figure out the chaos monkey stuff.
I think you and I have very different meanings of "intelligent", "understands" and "gets it done"
typing "open hackernews" into copilot instead of clicking the browser and typing hackernews?
I think 99% of OS interactions already boil down to 2 clicks and a search phrase.
- "Plan my summer vacation with my family, suggest different options"
- "Look at my household budget and find ways to be more frugal."
There are thousands of things I can think of when it comes to how an agentic OS would work better than the current Screen Keyboard paradigm. I mean all these things I could now do with Claude or Codex and some of these things I already do with these tools.
There's everything wrong when "agentic" means that the regular bread-and-butter functionality of the OS becomes unusable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV01B5kVsC0
Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.
Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.
Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.
When that completely didn't work, we thought that augmented reality was the future of the computer, which also didn't work out.
You need a screen to be able to verify what you're doing (try shopping on Amazon without a screen), which means you also need a UI around it, which then means voice (and by extension agents which also function by conversation) is slower and dumber than the UI, every time.
Meanwhile I have yet to see any brand excited to be integrated with ChatGPT and Claude. Unlike a consumer; being a purely "reasoning-based" agent, they're most likely to ignore everything aesthetic and pick the bottom of the barrel cheapest option for any category. How do you convince an AI to show your specific product to a customer? You don't.
I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.
I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.
And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.
Saying and doing are very different. They have passed through the "fuck around" phase, and are entering the "find out" phase of this AI journey. Lots of companies are, suddenly.
My employer trained us all on the Gartner hype cycle, tested us on how to remain level-headed before and during the peak of unreasonable expectations and now every single manager in the company is drooling over AI, saying that "this is the future, join us or find another job" and I cannot wait for the curve to come back down to a sane level where intelligence rules behavior as much as it used to. We'll see.
We’ve certainly done the “fucking around” and now we'll see if we "find out" enough to regain our sanity and our humanity.
They are not saying "we will remove the mandate to use a Microsoft Account." By itself, that shows their "care" is purely corporate, likely driven to calm down furious OEMs who will happily remind them Apple doesn't need an Apple Account to use a now-cheap Mac.
Also, because Nadella can't stand the word, I'll say it right here: Microslop is still making Winslop to help people make Officeslop to then upload to Slopdrive.
And, yes, I am aware that Pro/Enterprise don't suffer from this, but a LOT of computers sold are Windows Home/OEM licenses. It impacts a ton of people.
but, yeah, mandatory microsoft accounts are asinine.
How is it even possible to spend 4-5 seconds to show a list of files in a local freaking folder?
Now all folders with media files open immediately. Also if you want no wait for video files folders, right click in the folder and select 'View -> Details or View -> List or some other option where it doesn't create thumbnails and it'll load even quicker.
Surely you don't mean remove all columns, and if you did you wouldn't have to also specify removing media metadata columns?
That's a why, but it raises more questions than it does answers.
(that's an overstatement, early OS X were buggy too, but they just switched to Unix after OS9, so, understandable.)
it's just better than Windows, which is just aggressively bad. (and I guess Linux is eating their gamers market with Proton? but I am not a gamer)
""" ok copilot, implement these changes, make no mistakes """
Having learned absolutely nothing from their existing sins.
Switched to Linux on my personal devices 2 years ago and using Ubuntu and PopOS! on two different laptops. I've had very small number of issues. Can't understand people moving to Mac - it is the same messed half backed OS as both Windows and Linux (flavors). With the llms these days, any linux issue is fixable within minutes.
With Linux at least I don't have to worry about privacy.
That said, this business model has historically proven effective for companies such as IBM. Microsoft allocates its resources toward segments that offer meaningful revenue growth.
Windows used to be built for the user. Now, Microsoft builds it for themselves, as a way to help hardware partners sell hardware which includes a windows license.
So if Microsoft makes Windows for their own benefit, and not for the users benefit, I see no reason to use it at all. I don’t like games that much.
MacOS has gone downhill in a hurry but it’s still very good. Far better than Windows for me in every way.
Sorry Microsoft, some people already transfer to a different train because you offered a crazy ride.
And when all is good and everybody's too busy to pay attention we'll force feed you an update that will revert all changes to what we want.
Windows 11 is finally catching up to MATE desktop (which is maintained possibly by a single guy from their basement), what a time to be alive!
Don’t listen to the smooth talk. Plan an exit strategy now, before you need it later.
The idea that we'll all be forced off of Windows one day sounds like a dream, but so far we continue to be in a state where myself and many other are long past the point of wanting to leave, but we can't for some reason or another.
Microsoft knows that, which is why they've been able to do whatever they want and not worry about the consequences.
I press snooze and get on with my day
Spoken like a true AI.
I gave up a long time ago hoping Windows would get better. At this point, I just hope it does not get worse.
Microsoft Copilot 365 Operating System App is just trash, plain and simple.
I am doing my part - I managed to get 6 people in my family and friend group off Windows onto Debian last year.
All positive feedback so far :).
Sure it's only a small victory - but a meaningful one to me.
What finally pushed me to linux was because specifically in my narrow usecases it's just plain better, but if we were to completely ignore that, even if linux was worse, I just don't want to support evil companies anymore.
Now I'll admit that this is what AI would say, but it's not always about what is better, it's about sending a message, a message that microsoft appears to have heard loud and clear, however, we will have to see if this is just PR or not.
Just this past January I implemented something on my workstation I should've done a long time ago: outbound filtering all network traffic via so-called 'Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security'. I've also skipped more Insider builds in the past two months than I have in the past 11 years.
The only thing keeping me around at this point is the migration overhead and (at least I tell myself) window 'snapping'.
I went back to windows, using WSL in 2017. In 2023 I got sick of how everything was getting progressively worse and switched to linux (which has window snapping). I'm never looking back.
https://rectangleapp.com
https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/use-this-awesome-trick-to-g...
The fix is upside down UI?
Also, why couldn't they make this announcement as they release the taskbar change. Taking away the most basic features and bringing a few back doesn't mean things are improving, it means things are getting petty.
There is no reason for the start menu to take 2 seconds to show up on a computer with 8 CPUs running at 4GHz. We all know that they're completely half-assing everything now.
Would you settle for 2 out of 3? UX is improving, and things get more polished every year, but we've mostly settled on shoving things into some sort of package (container, flatpak, snap) alongside all its dependencies specifically so we don't have to actually stabilize any sort of ABI
I was coincidentally just updating old softare I wrote, and I just ripped out the snap, RPM and Debs because I can't be bothered to maintain all of them.
Really? it took "user feedback" for one of the world's best software companies to realize one of the most fundamental parts of the OS was broken?
I have been long on $MSFT for a while now, but my faith as an investor stands shook.
Great!
At the very least, don't forget my font setting on the update.
On the other hand, Microsoft is famous for killing something good (like OneNote) but spamming the UI with numerous entry points that will make you think "this is some piece of crap that Microsoft is spamming because nobody in their right mind would want it." That they are getting some self-awareness of this is a good sign.
[1] I'd say Google's AI Mode gives consistently better answers (like use "vite-ignore" instead of writing a Vite plugin that doesn't work) than copilot with the reservation that if Google seems to get uncomfortable about a conversation it will end the conversation with a ten pack of search results whereas Copilot tries to simulate a person with healthy boundaries (e.g. "I will help you write a romance story but I won't help you write a sex scene")
And I could tell that. In one instance where I asked it to write a script that does a bunch of things, it provided a series of steps to do in the terminal. This is very off my typical experience with other chatbots. I immediately went to Claude which gave me a complete script that does exactly what I need.
Starting with Windows 11 26H2, the Start Menu will be removed and replaced with Copilot. In order to use a locally hosted app, an externally hosted LLM will need to be instructed to launch it. The reliability is phenomenal: our testing has shown it can launch the right app with 95% accuracy.
How about, turn it off by default?
I wonder if this will include being able to put it on the non-primary display once again. It's not mentioned, but that was one of the biggest frustrations with Windows 11. It seems their focus is exclusively on single display devices.
It also ruined my flow for my flight sim until I found a workaround. The fullscreen window wishes to launch to the primary display, which means losing the useful bits of the taskbar.
I love what they're saying, but my faith in them is very, very is low.
I also have set the classic right-click menus.
There are some things about Windows 11 I like but a lot of it seems to be designed by people who use Mac OS (graphic designers).
I had to dig around because I could not remember since when I take this stuff - putting as many toolbars as you'd like anywhere on multiple monitors you feel like as granted and yes, 14 years ago xfce 4.10 was released. Time flies, I guess.
fire most of your leads & new programmers.
hire back anyone willing to come back with competence.
return to the Windows 10 LTSC codebase.
try again.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions:
Pfft. Still slow, react-based, and ad-riddled
> reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points, starting with apps like Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets and Notepad.
Must have failed to meet the metrics goals
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
You can bet they will still flash the screen take-over riddled with all the dark patterns in the world to get you to upload all your files to their cloud "for backup"
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer [..] quicker launch experience:
Oh, the preloading of explorer into ram before it's launched? Lmao. Entirely embarassed by File Pilot https://filepilot.tech
gtfo.
Microsoft has proven itself the undisputed king of enshittification and a blog post will not change my mind on that.
Maybe my grandkids will give it a shot.
We’re not first time users, we don’t want Microsoft BOB as our UI, we don’t want ads and internet search “functionality” in our Start menu, we don’t want AI everywhere and we don’t want things hidden from us.
Make Windows 11 Pro for real pro users and 11 Home for new users. I hope a few people from MS are reading this, especially Mr Engineer.
I’m going to get downvoted for this, but I don’t care.
P.S. Yeah yeah guys, I know about Linux ;-)
This would be great. It's still easy to freeze up File Explorer when moving thousands of files. The same operation from the command line works fine.
Even for gaming, the only reason why I would stick with windows is not an issue anymore. Thanks to Steam gaming just works on Linux. I'm using Omarchy and it's very easy.
I can't see ever going back to windows personally.
Seems more like FUD.
“More fluid and responsive app interactions: Reducing interaction latency by moving core Windows experiences to the WinUI3 framework.
* Improving the shared UI infrastructure that Windows experiences rely on, reducing interaction latency and overhead at the platform level
* Faster responsiveness in core Windows experiences like the Start menu, by moving more experiences to WinUI3”
Thankfully Ballmer failed and this isn’t even close to true. I, like a lot of highly technical professionals, have been Windows sober for many years now.
When did they get rid of that?
In 10 and prior you could even move it to other monitors, just by dragging and dropping it. It's baffling they thought that functionality was a bug that people wanted 'fixed'.
In this case it's the MacBook Neo that's causing them to get off their butts and reinvest in the quality of their software after letting it stagnate for years, but the pattern is the same: rest on their monopolistic laurels until competition makes them feel threatened, then magically start caring about their users again all of a sudden.
[1] https://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/183701230/gates-of...
> Windows is as much yours as it is ours.
Microsoft has been inflicting unwanted crap on me for years now, and they keep expanding with more unwanted crap (even to the point of wanting to force people to have Microsoft accounts) as time goes on. Reading this line actually made me laugh out loud. No, Microsoft, you don't believe this even a little.
They aren’t trying to add Copilot in useful ways for their users. They’re forcing it into Notepad when they know it doesn’t fit there, because it might be your “entry” into their slop generator.
User experience be damned, these shareholders must have their value.
These people don’t even know their own product.
They are still investing in AI, when they should be investing in ARM.
Apple silon is winning developers, even enterprise and with NEO the entry level market where MS was king.
I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very frankly I prefer the developer experience on Windows, where you can write a (relatively) high-quality native desktop application with purely first-party tooling and release a single, tiny (~10^4 bytes) executable that quite literally runs anywhere. The Windows API surface area is huge and developers can write entire multi-domain programs without ever looking for a third-party library.
This probably sounds like a lot of copium, but I feel like recent events like the rising costs of memory and competition like the MacBook Neo will light a fire under Microsoft's arse. I really hope some of the AI overboard in Windows 11 is rolled back over the near future. They should migrate core Windows applications back to native and CLI technologies, actually support and maintain these without chasing the next big thing, and release frameworks for safer compiled languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin, and allocate more resources to F#.
Better support for F#, or really any language other than C# is a longshot though. Those resources were likely 'reallocated' to AI R&D indefinitely.
A good way to put it.
There are third-party tools that Microsoft really need to adopt to make Windows a bit nicer (WizTree, VoidTools Everything, adopt improvements from Total Commander, make more PowerToys default), but broadly it is still a decent OS. There are issues like slow `CloseHandle()` because of Defender (which needs to be a bit less zealous), and maybe more first-party adoption of WinGet.
On the other hand, every time I use desktop Linux I get some paper cut because some edge case that I just don't ever think about is broken on Linux, whether it be my multi-monitor high pixel density layout, my USB audio interface and peripherals, or my touchpad sensitivity and gestures that Windows was widely derided for in the early 2010s and suddenly after 'Precision Touchpads'[1] no one ever complained about again, or random GPU glitches even on Intel/AMD integrated graphics that I have literally never seen on the Windows desktop, or poor battery life (Windows somehow gets 2-3x the battery life of Linux).
Nah, NT always had... mostly... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved inside of an operating system that actively hates me. But the core OS is cool.
NTFS is plenty fast, even for thousands of small files; it is the Windows Defender file system filter driver that slows things down. Specifically, it slows down CloseHandle[1].
> NT's core tech
I'm not just talking about NT. I think most of the user mode is great, too. Office blows the pants off most other 'office' suites. D3D is generally very forward-looking, and many extensions are released on D3D first, sometimes years before they're ported to Vulkan (ray-tracing, mesh shaders, descriptor heaps, etc). Windows has had a superb low-latency audio subsystem in WASAPI since Vista, which is something like a decade before Linux got Pipewire. There are many other examples of random cool stuff in Windows that Linux 'rediscovered independently' but Windows got there much earlier just because of the sheer install base and surface area.
[1]: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/06/surprisingly-slow/
LMAO
This is how goodwill works. Easy to burn, hard to earn back. I’m not touching any products by Meta, Google or Microsoft, and none of them are getting me back on board with a cute blog post.
On the subject of what they address, I have thoughts and many doubts.
> Integrating AI where it’s most meaningful, with craft and focus
Just don't, bro. Don't do it. I don't want copilot icons in all the system apps. None.
> More taskbar customization, including vertical and top positions
This feels like it's too little, too late. They redesigned the UI in yet another toolkit and in the process broke something had worked for decades. Perhaps they could add a 147th different UI toolkit with a different look instead, just to change things up.
> Reducing disruption from Windows Updates
Would be welcome, but I have my doubts. MS has shown clearly they don't care.
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer
See comment on task bar above.
> More control over widgets and feed experiences
Get out of it. If I see one more stock ticker on a screen share from someone I know does NOT track the stock market I'll know you for the lying liars you are. Don't promise "more control" just stop being so invasive and annoying.
On the subjects they didn't address, I have feedback:
- Remove advertising from the start menu, the system, apps, everywhere. Just remove it forever.
- Remove invasive telemetry. Again, forever.
- Respect user choice. Stop trying to force things to open in Edge, ignoring my default browser. I am a Firefox/Zen user, keep a single (other) chromium-based browser around for sites that don't work right (another rant for another time), and try not to touch Edge if I can help it.
- Stop turning the bundled native apps into crappy web apps. "New Outlook" is a real tire fire.
- Make the default Edge page ANYTHING but the advertising and nasty "news" summary that shows up. Why not a simple search page, like when Google was new.
- Stop making start menu searches return web results instead of local apps
- Make start menu searching actually search in a useful way. Why does QGIS not show up when I type GIS? Because it doesn't start with Q? That's garbage. Make it work how users would expect it to work.
- Let people say no, fully and completely, to OneDrive. You can make adding it later easy at user discretion, but don't ask to set it up automatically. Don't use fear mongering like "your files are not backed up" to try to trick people into signing up for it.
- Local accounts should be easy, not a nasty workaround with a moving target for instructions.