8 ms·

Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand. My first experience with Windows 11 was figuring out some dumb workaround to use a lo

by windows2020 1y ago

Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand. My first experience with Windows 11 was figuring out some dumb workaround to use a local account. When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows. Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great.

GiorgioG 1y ago
As a .NET developer for 20+ years I’m down to my last Windows box - a gaming rig I pretend I have time to play on. Everything else is a Mac.
- hu3 1y ago
  mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it. Looking at Tahoe, seems things are getting worse.
  - GeekyBear 1y ago
    Mac window management using gestures has been miles ahead of anything available in Windows for over a decade.
    - Atlas26 11mo ago
      Hasn’t been true for years now as a 10+ year mac and windows user
    - bigyabai 11mo ago
      That's news to me. I've got a Magic Trackpad right in front of me and I'm still using it to tile windows into corners.
  - philistine 1y ago
    > I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it Are you installing those tools regularly? I have a couple of invisible helper apps but Time Machine backups and Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant has made those apps transparent. They're always there. But you know what, I think I know where you are mentally. I was there 2 years after I first bought a Mac. I wanted a clean Mac. Nothing untoward, nothing that wasn't Apple. I got rid of that feeling and learned to love the Mac as a platform, to love the Mac because of its vibrant third-party developers. That's why I use a Mac even though Apple is often a bad steward of this wonderful bicycle for the mind.
  - bashwizard 1y ago
    Raycast is all I need. AeroSpace if tiling windows is your thing.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it. There's exactly two you need to get macOS eye-on-eye with Windows: Hyperswitch for an alt-tab that actually works and SizeUp to get a "window arrangement like Windows with Win+arrow keys". Further migration pains can be eased with a Windows keyboard layout bringing special characters to where they belong in muscle memory (that however can and will bring pains with anything Adobe, their apps absolutely do not like non-Apple keyboard layouts and will refuse to load keyboard command presets) and Karabiner to map Ctrl+C/V to reduce hand strain.
rowanG077 1y ago
> Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Nothing as user focused as linux, and it's mostly compatible with windows programs with wine. Important to note though that user focused is not the same thing as easy to use.
- r00t- 1y ago
  I'm a linux fan but calling linux user-focused is insane.
  - john01dav 1y ago
    It's user-focused in the sense that the user's goals drive the design. The good non-profit distributions, such as Debian and Arch, would never even try to require or push an online account, since that is contrary to the user's interests.
    - lostmsu 1y ago
      I think in Linux developers drive the design more than users.
      - estimator7292 1y ago
        Linux developers are the primary users of Linux if you think about it
        esseph 1y ago
        Lot of network admins, sysadmins, security -types.
        lostmsu 1y ago
        There are no primary users. And no, Linux developers are a minority.
    - opan 1y ago
halJordan 1y ago
Ah, young people. This is the company that innovated a brand new style of monopolization and then lost a monopoly case about it.
al_borland 1y ago
> compatible with Windows programs It seems with each passing year this becomes less important, as more and more apps are either web based or cross platform.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore. To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365, basically forever. LibreOffice is nowhere near a replacement for Excel in an enterprise setting.
  - stackskipton 1y ago
    I wouldn't say it's Office365 as much as "What are my other options?" MacOS is good option BUT cheapest laptop option is 1000 bucks. Dell has 16 inch with 16GB of RAM for 600. There is Linux but Linux Desktop still is not ready and mass management of it is very painful. So you default to Windows. It works-ish, won't break the bank and just about every piece of software you need works with it.
    - 800xl 1y ago
      I agree with your overall point but I'm starting to regularly see older M series MacBooks on sale for around 600 or 700 dollars brand new. Maybe they are using the strategy of selling older hardware for less like they did with the iPhone SE.
      - stackskipton 1y ago
        Cheapest 16GB of RAM (Minimum I think for most workers) is 759 for 13 inch M3 Macbook Air. 15 Inch is 929. That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.
        trollbridge 1y ago
        A $600 - $700 Dell laptop's CPU does not come anywhere close to an M4 Macbook Air, which you can get right now at Best Buy in a 15" version for $999. The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.
gjsman-1000 1y ago
> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand. Microsoft realized after Windows 8 and Windows 10 that literally nobody, outside of niche tech circles, has positive associations with the Windows brand, or views "Windows" as a selling point beyond "runs my old software." As such, it doesn't matter to them anymore. It's like being the PR department at your local electricity provider or oil refinery. Keep the politicians happy, but people on the ground is a pointless endeavor.
- fortran77 1y ago
  Not true. I like Windows 11, and I think it's the best desktop OS out there.
  - wslh 1y ago
    Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels. I understand that the Windows kernel is pretty advanced but I find difficult to find that it ends up in a good desktop OS (e.g. UX)
    - Marsymars 1y ago
      > Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels. Hey, so I'm a different user, and I wouldn't claim it's the best desktop OS, but split between macOS/Windows for desktop use, there are definitely things about Windows I appreciate. Off the top of my head: * It has pretty approachable "config as code" built-in - with "winget configure" and some yaml files, you can define the apps you want, the Windows config, the registry settings, etc. without the overhead of MDM or something like Ansible. * UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
      - vladvasiliu 1y ago
        > UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K) We can't be using the same windows. At work we have 27" 5k displays which I use at 200%, so a perfect multiple of the usual 100% I use everywhere else. The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached. Of course, if I go to the toilet and the screen turns off, when I come back it's just like hot-plugging it: a blurry mess. Apparently, updating the graphics driver also works, so I suppose it's enough to restart just that instead of the whole OS. Don't know how to do that, though. The resolution is reported as the correct one, changing scaling options doesn't help. 100% looks sharp enough, but it's unusable for me. And I don't use any old app, it's mostly new outlook and edge. But even the start menu is blurry! There's also the fact that afterwards, tray icons' menus tend to appear in random places, but I understand that apps draw those, so I guess this isn't completely windows' fault. My work machine dual-boots Linux, which is what I actually daily drive, and these screens have pushed me to switch to Wayland. Now there are some rough edges there, but the high-dpi is handled perfectly (same setup as windows: everything 100% except for that one screen at 200%). This is using Sway and mainly Firefox, Chromium and Alacaritty. Native GTK apps seem to work fine, too, but I don't use many of those. edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.
dehrmann 1y ago
I'm not sure if Microsoft knows it, but it doesn't care about or need Windows anymore. Office has native apps and is on the web, Xbox is doing its own things, dotnet has been freed from Windows, and Azure doesn't need Windows. Computing is generally moving away from the personal computing model, so Windows is just less relevant.
- mh- 1y ago
  I was with you until you listed Xbox - their consoles are dying in the market. They've adopted a strategy of calling everything "gaming" Xbox, and seem to be going all-in on Gamepass subscription revenue along with making their first-party games available on other platforms. I'll be surprised if there is another flagship console following the Series X. We'll see how that works out for them.
  - aeon_ai 1y ago
    They also just botched a price increase. Microsoft is floundering right now.
    - doodlebugging 1y ago
      XBox Game Pass looks a lot like the last straw to me. Looks like a(nother) cash grab.
  - tjpnz 1y ago
    "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." - Don Mattrick
- RedShift1 1y ago
  Office on the web sucks though. Slow AF and can't handle large documents.
ainar-g 1y ago
There's always ReactOS[1], a project for a bug-for-bug compatible Windows clone. It used to mostly aim at Windows 9x compatibility the last time I'd checked, though, but that could probably change. And if anyone wants to create a Win7 clone, at least some of the groundwork has already been made. [1]: https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/
- sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
  Sorry, but ReactOS is not seriously usable. Not to insult the work done on it but it is an experimental OS.
  - Delk 1y ago
    "Compatibility with Windows programs" is a massive undertaking in the first place, as evidenced by the huge amount of development effort that has gone into Wine without quite reaching 100% bug-for-bug compatibility. (The level of compatibility they've achieved is truly impressive but it's really difficult to get to 100% for a large existing base of arbitrary applications.) Reliable real-world compatibility requires not only implementing Windows APIs as documented (or reverse-engineered) but also discovering and conforming to quirks, undocumented features, and permissive interpretations of the specs or even outright bugs in Windows that some applications have either intentionally or unintentionally ended up relying on over the years. I don't know if modern apps would tend to be better engineered to actually follow the spec and to only build on features as documented but for example older Windows games were sometimes notorious for being quite finicky. And of course if the goal is a full-scale independent OS rather than a compatibility layer on top of an existing one, there's the whole "operating system" part to implement as well.
snovymgodym 1y ago
I'm not convinced Microsoft cares about the Windows market share in consumer PCs or the small amount of money they make from selling Windows licenses to regular consumers. If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already. They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically secured. For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
- getnormality 1y ago
  If something displaces Windows in the consumer PC market, I wonder how long it is before those new OS consumers start to want to use what they're comfortable with in the business as well. Windows will start to feel like some weird legacy system. By the time business starts moving away, it will be too late for Microsoft to save.
  - morkalork 1y ago
    This already sort of happened with kids using chrome books and android phones getting their first office job and having no clue about windows.
- hattmall 1y ago
  >those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely. To an extent sure, but when people that grew up as home consumers not using Windows become business leaders they won't have the brand loyalty to Microsoft that the current aging out generation does. If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years. Windows centric software development is pretty much completely driven by business leaders 50+ years old on the young end.
  - snovymgodym 1y ago
    A striking amount of business software runs on Windows because Microsoft was dominant during the peak PC era (e.g. 1990-2010). The companies running that stuff aren't doing so because old guys think Windows is good, they're running it because it's been built already and there's no real reason to change. The next generation of business leaders already didn't build their companies on Windows or any other PC operating system because web apps replaced desktop apps and mobile devices overtook PCs in market share. But it doesn't really matter to Microsoft. Microsoft isn't really the "Windows Company" anymore and hasn't been for some time. Azure, Office365, Sharepoint, etc. revenue dwarfs what Windows brings in and wouldn't be affected by Windows losing market share because everything is a web/electron client for a cloud service now. In some ways, I suspect Microsoft views the Windows market share as more of a liability than an asset these days, because it makes them responsible for bad press events like BlueKeep and WannaCry. Business customers frequently buy support contracts with their licenses, whereas private consumers expect indefinite updates for a one time $120 fee. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if they were intentionally letting consumer Windows slowly fade away.
blasphemers 1y ago
Part of Satya reorg in 2018 moved windows into a weird leadership structure where it was part of bing iirc. I think they recently finally fixed that org mistake and hopefully they quickly push an improved windows 12.
- jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  I remembered something weird like this, & went looking for coverage last week. I thought it'd maybe gotten divied up between Azure Services and like some ads or online experience thing? I ended up giving up, so much noise and I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I'd love to see some coverage. Incredible seeing Windows broken up like that & internally sold for parts, just total throwing it to the MBA wolves to milk some money out of, it felt like & seems like.
  - kasabali 1y ago
    I remember listening it from Paul Thurrott in a podcast, and it wasn't only 2018, it was reorganized several times during Satya's lead. no wonder it sucks
perryh2 1y ago
If you _have_ to use Windows 11, check out this useful tool called Win11Debloat: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
- bashwizard 1y ago
  This is another good one: https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
- ta12653421 1y ago
  Does this allow to: - remove all this Games & XBox related stuff? - remove everything pre-installed but not used stuff? (Internet Explorer legacy?) - remove all this "fancy" Icons & links: Video/Music etc. in Explorer - deselect to install most of all these Background Services? And: Does it work for the Windows Server versions as well?
somenameforme 1y ago
It being the year of Linux is definitely a meme at this point, but Microsoft's trying their hardest to make it a thing. Steam's latest survey [1] shows Windows losing 0.19% marketshare. 3/4 of it went to Mac, 1/4 to Linux. 0.19% over a single month is a fairly significant shift, especially because the Steam survey is biased towards Windows gamers to begin with (Windows has 95.4% marketshare on the Steam survey), so it's probably understating the shift. [1] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- philistine 1y ago
  PC ownership is NOT a zero-sum game. You assume that lost marketshare must be replaced by something else. I'm confident this is not people replacing their PC for a Mac, this is people who stopped using a PC completely. Microsoft, by ruining Windows, is not leaving the field open for a replacement OS; they're slowly killing the PC itself.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    I think you can approach this 3 different ways: Mathematical: If this were the case then all competitors would have seen an increase in marketshare proportional to their existing marketshare. This isn't what happened - Mac saw 3x the increase of Linux, even though Linux has greater marketshare on the survey. Statistical: It's often said that the PC is dead or dying, but that's a misrepresentation of the issue. 25 years ago, a new computer was dated in 3 months and obsolete in a year, so PC sales were huge. Now a days, a ten year old PC is still fine for just about everything, even including relatively high end gaming. So sales have plummeted, but ownership rates are around historic highs. [1] The main limiting factor is money. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%. Pragmatic: PCs are still necessary for many types of games as well as content creation. Mobile devices and tablets (to a lesser degree) are limited by their input mechanisms to a subset of all experiences, and there's a pretty big chunk of people that utilize experiences outside that subset. [1] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-56.pdf https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...
octo888 1y ago
> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand Well their stock certainly isn't tanking. Do they care about anything else?
OptionOfT 1y ago
There is no Microsoft in this story. There is the structure of the company which roll up to the CEO. And they have 1 priority: make the shareholders happy. This has caused incentives to shift thought the company. No more long-term work. Only short term stuff, where each change needs to make impact somewhere. This is why you see CoPilot in 20 places in Edge. This is why OneDrive shows you nagging screens to upload your data there. And this is why the OOBE now makes it harder. That change is used by a PM / Developer to justify their existence in the company at review time.
anonymous982347 1y ago
Developing a new consumer-grade OS is literally not possible. I don't mean it would take a herculean effort like the software ecosystem issue takes to address, I mean actually not possible regardless of how much effort any development team put in. Virtually all hardware on the open market is made for Windows, largely powered by proprietary, closed-source drivers. Linux gets some afterthought from a percentage of vendors, but even for it, hardware support is in an absolutely atrocious state. Hardware vendors will obviously not give the time of day to any uppity new OS. This relegates any attempt to a hobbyist project targeting virtual machines or obsolete hardware. The only way a new player could enter the game is by using Apple-level money to develop their hardware in-house, but any kind of corporation fronting Apple money to do that would certainly not be aiming to produce a user-driven experience.
- toast0 1y ago
  Drivers are a lot of work. IMHO, do some core stuff, and then build in driver adapters. NDIS wrapper, linuxkpi, etc. If you want to work hard to make things easy, I bet you could build a hypervisor that does pci passthrough for each device to a guest that runs a different OS driver and rexports the device as a virtio device, and then the main OS guest can just have virtio drivers for everything. It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in. That indirection will cost performance and latency, but windows 11 feels like more latency than windows 10 too, so eh. You can also build native drivers for important stuff as needed / over time.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    > It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in. ReactOS has been working on that for like, what, the last 20 years and still is far from generally usable.
userbinator 1y ago
Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. That's either Linux with WINE, or a "custom distro" of Windows from the remaining neighbourly hackers in the modding scene (they can't embed the hostility everywhere and as deep as the kernel, although they are most likely trying.)
- soraminazuki 1y ago
  WINE it is. I can't see any point in playing cat and mouse with an actively hostile OS. When a new Windows update starts stealing IMAP credentials[1] before the modding community catches on, it's game over for the user. Better to not use anything based on Windows. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453
  - userbinator 1y ago
    New Outlook is exactly the sort of thing that the modders would not want you to use anyway.
pjmlp 1y ago
Not really, the same people are doing their best to kill XBox brand as well. By the way they also already did enough damage to those of us that were keen into doing Windows development, due to how WinRT has been managed. Now only game developers, and big names with existing native applications are left.
mythz 1y ago
Damage has been done, Windows has become synonymous with user-hostile ad/spyware OS. Everything under the "Windows" brand is meaningless to me now. Can't think of a single feature Windows could add to get me to switch back from Linux.
jeroenhd 1y ago
The thing is, Microsoft did plenty of user-hostile stuff back then. Games for Windows Live with its weird DRM and making games unplayable after shutting down, for instance. And the push for using all kinds of "Live" services. Something called a .NET Passport also comes to mind during the mid-XP days. .NET framework applications had their own special kinds of installers, Microsoft Silverlight thrived for a short moment, and the introduction of their (initially mediocre) antivirus program also wasn't well-received by the industry. They just never shoveled their crap into the OS itself. It was always recommended addons, recommended freebies, and recommended optional features that came along with other products. When MS started unifying everything into Just Windows, all of the crap they pulled with separate software packages merged into one digital blob, Windows 8/8.1/10/11. With Windows 8, I can at least appreciate the attempt to unify things so they are easier to use for consumers (if only they hadn't bunged up Windows Phone, repeatedly). I wonder what Windows would be like if they hadn't tried to the Windows 8 experiment.
- pndy 1y ago
  > Something called a .NET Passport also comes to mind during the mid-XP days That's essentially Microsoft Account nowadays, which went thru few rebrandings on the way. In XP it was promoted via Windows Messenger with popup message which for less experienced people would suggest that in order to access the Internet they need this "passport". Considering how many sites now offer (still optional) logins with apple/meta/microsoft accounts I wonder if the goal here is to be the provider of identity for sites and services and at the same future-proofing for any digital ID checks govt's may introduce
  - pjc50 1y ago
    There was for a few years a South Korean national identity scheme which linked your national ID card to .. an ActiveX control. Making it not only IE-only but effectively tying it to IE6.
    - pndy 1y ago
      Oh yes I remember reading news about that and being dumbfounded how's that actually possible
0rdinal 1y ago
Their reputation is irrelevant, at least whilst they maintain an OS monopoly. Enterprise customers don't care because all the issues you described are not present on Enterprise editions. The vast majority of users want a machine that "just works". I would never use a machine running Windows 11 S mode whilst a good chunk of the home PC market would likely not notice a difference.
- vladvasiliu 1y ago
  Enterprise edition is as much of a clownshow as the others. I actually run one such edition at work and since a few weeks ago I've noticed in the "home" screen of the settings a new tile, inviting me to add my microsoft account to benefit from something or other. Now, this is a machine I mostly use for goofing out, so it actually has my microsoft account connected to it. It's fully entra id joined: I log into my windows session with my office 365 account, which has a full license (p2 or whatever it's called), I can see the bitlocker key in entra id, the works. Now, curiosity got the best of me the other day, and I figured I might just as well click that button. Guess what? It didn't work! It apparently doesn't support business accounts! On my home pc (pro edition, which I use for photoshop and the occasional game), which does have a consumer microsoft account, that tile doesn't show up.
sebtron 1y ago
Who needs a brand when you have a monopoly? > maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great. What made Windows great were the contracts with hardware manufacturers to have it installed by default on every single PC ever sold.
jwrallie 1y ago
I don’t even mind logging in on a personal laptop but we have shared computers at work to operate machines. It does not make any sense to login with your account in one of those.
BruceEel 1y ago
> Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great. Microsoft have done 180's in the past. I still hope that at some point they'll see the light and what you say here above will suddenly click and become evident to them. Windows, and DOS before that, did not succeed by holding customers as hostages.
cobbaut 11mo ago
> When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows. I think Windows 98 was the last user-focused Windows. At least then all the useful settings were a single right-click away, and it just worked without invading your privacy. (WinME never worked and WinXP was the first in a long series of shareholder-focused Windows.)

GiorgioG 1y ago

As a .NET developer for 20+ years I’m down to my last Windows box - a gaming rig I pretend I have time to play on. Everything else is a Mac.

hu3 1y ago
mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it. Looking at Tahoe, seems things are getting worse.
- GeekyBear 1y ago
  Mac window management using gestures has been miles ahead of anything available in Windows for over a decade.
  - Atlas26 11mo ago
    Hasn’t been true for years now as a 10+ year mac and windows user
  - bigyabai 11mo ago
    That's news to me. I've got a Magic Trackpad right in front of me and I'm still using it to tile windows into corners.
- philistine 1y ago
  > I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it Are you installing those tools regularly? I have a couple of invisible helper apps but Time Machine backups and Mac-to-Mac Migration Assistant has made those apps transparent. They're always there. But you know what, I think I know where you are mentally. I was there 2 years after I first bought a Mac. I wanted a clean Mac. Nothing untoward, nothing that wasn't Apple. I got rid of that feeling and learned to love the Mac as a platform, to love the Mac because of its vibrant third-party developers. That's why I use a Mac even though Apple is often a bad steward of this wonderful bicycle for the mind.
- bashwizard 1y ago
  Raycast is all I need. AeroSpace if tiling windows is your thing.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > mac window management is borderline unusable and I'm tired of installing 5 tools to fix it. There's exactly two you need to get macOS eye-on-eye with Windows: Hyperswitch for an alt-tab that actually works and SizeUp to get a "window arrangement like Windows with Win+arrow keys". Further migration pains can be eased with a Windows keyboard layout bringing special characters to where they belong in muscle memory (that however can and will bring pains with anything Adobe, their apps absolutely do not like non-Apple keyboard layouts and will refuse to load keyboard command presets) and Karabiner to map Ctrl+C/V to reduce hand strain.

rowanG077 1y ago

> Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. Nothing as user focused as linux, and it's mostly compatible with windows programs with wine. Important to note though that user focused is not the same thing as easy to use.

r00t- 1y ago
I'm a linux fan but calling linux user-focused is insane.
- john01dav 1y ago
  It's user-focused in the sense that the user's goals drive the design. The good non-profit distributions, such as Debian and Arch, would never even try to require or push an online account, since that is contrary to the user's interests.
  - lostmsu 1y ago
    I think in Linux developers drive the design more than users.
    - estimator7292 1y ago
      Linux developers are the primary users of Linux if you think about it
      - esseph 1y ago
        Lot of network admins, sysadmins, security -types.
      - lostmsu 1y ago
        There are no primary users. And no, Linux developers are a minority.
  - opan 1y ago

halJordan 1y ago

Ah, young people. This is the company that innovated a brand new style of monopolization and then lost a monopoly case about it.

al_borland 1y ago

> compatible with Windows programs It seems with each passing year this becomes less important, as more and more apps are either web based or cross platform.

gjsman-1000 1y ago
To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore. To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365, basically forever. LibreOffice is nowhere near a replacement for Excel in an enterprise setting.
- stackskipton 1y ago
  I wouldn't say it's Office365 as much as "What are my other options?" MacOS is good option BUT cheapest laptop option is 1000 bucks. Dell has 16 inch with 16GB of RAM for 600. There is Linux but Linux Desktop still is not ready and mass management of it is very painful. So you default to Windows. It works-ish, won't break the bank and just about every piece of software you need works with it.
  - 800xl 1y ago
    I agree with your overall point but I'm starting to regularly see older M series MacBooks on sale for around 600 or 700 dollars brand new. Maybe they are using the strategy of selling older hardware for less like they did with the iPhone SE.
    - stackskipton 1y ago
      Cheapest 16GB of RAM (Minimum I think for most workers) is 759 for 13 inch M3 Macbook Air. 15 Inch is 929. That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.
      - trollbridge 1y ago
        A $600 - $700 Dell laptop's CPU does not come anywhere close to an M4 Macbook Air, which you can get right now at Best Buy in a 15" version for $999. The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.

gjsman-1000 1y ago

> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand. Microsoft realized after Windows 8 and Windows 10 that literally nobody, outside of niche tech circles, has positive associations with the Windows brand, or views "Windows" as a selling point beyond "runs my old software." As such, it doesn't matter to them anymore. It's like being the PR department at your local electricity provider or oil refinery. Keep the politicians happy, but people on the ground is a pointless endeavor.

fortran77 1y ago
Not true. I like Windows 11, and I think it's the best desktop OS out there.
- wslh 1y ago
  Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels. I understand that the Windows kernel is pretty advanced but I find difficult to find that it ends up in a good desktop OS (e.g. UX)
  - Marsymars 1y ago
    > Sincerely curious about why do you think it's the best desktop OS and/or where it excels. Hey, so I'm a different user, and I wouldn't claim it's the best desktop OS, but split between macOS/Windows for desktop use, there are definitely things about Windows I appreciate. Off the top of my head: * It has pretty approachable "config as code" built-in - with "winget configure" and some yaml files, you can define the apps you want, the Windows config, the registry settings, etc. without the overhead of MDM or something like Ansible. * UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K)
    - vladvasiliu 1y ago
      > UI scaling took a long time to get good, but it's more flexible than macOS now for pixel-perfect output on displays that aren't multiples of 1440p. (e.g. 4K) We can't be using the same windows. At work we have 27" 5k displays which I use at 200%, so a perfect multiple of the usual 100% I use everywhere else. The screen is blurry 99% of the time. The only reliable way to get it sharp is to boot the PC with the screen attached. Of course, if I go to the toilet and the screen turns off, when I come back it's just like hot-plugging it: a blurry mess. Apparently, updating the graphics driver also works, so I suppose it's enough to restart just that instead of the whole OS. Don't know how to do that, though. The resolution is reported as the correct one, changing scaling options doesn't help. 100% looks sharp enough, but it's unusable for me. And I don't use any old app, it's mostly new outlook and edge. But even the start menu is blurry! There's also the fact that afterwards, tray icons' menus tend to appear in random places, but I understand that apps draw those, so I guess this isn't completely windows' fault. My work machine dual-boots Linux, which is what I actually daily drive, and these screens have pushed me to switch to Wayland. Now there are some rough edges there, but the high-dpi is handled perfectly (same setup as windows: everything 100% except for that one screen at 200%). This is using Sway and mainly Firefox, Chromium and Alacaritty. Native GTK apps seem to work fine, too, but I don't use many of those. edit: not sure about your mac point. I sometimes use a mac and it works at 200% on two separate 4k screens.

dehrmann 1y ago

I'm not sure if Microsoft knows it, but it doesn't care about or need Windows anymore. Office has native apps and is on the web, Xbox is doing its own things, dotnet has been freed from Windows, and Azure doesn't need Windows. Computing is generally moving away from the personal computing model, so Windows is just less relevant.

mh- 1y ago
I was with you until you listed Xbox - their consoles are dying in the market. They've adopted a strategy of calling everything "gaming" Xbox, and seem to be going all-in on Gamepass subscription revenue along with making their first-party games available on other platforms. I'll be surprised if there is another flagship console following the Series X. We'll see how that works out for them.
- aeon_ai 1y ago
  They also just botched a price increase. Microsoft is floundering right now.
  - doodlebugging 1y ago
    XBox Game Pass looks a lot like the last straw to me. Looks like a(nother) cash grab.
- tjpnz 1y ago
  "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." - Don Mattrick
RedShift1 1y ago
Office on the web sucks though. Slow AF and can't handle large documents.

ainar-g 1y ago

There's always ReactOS[1], a project for a bug-for-bug compatible Windows clone. It used to mostly aim at Windows 9x compatibility the last time I'd checked, though, but that could probably change. And if anyone wants to create a Win7 clone, at least some of the groundwork has already been made. [1]: https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
Sorry, but ReactOS is not seriously usable. Not to insult the work done on it but it is an experimental OS.
- Delk 1y ago
  "Compatibility with Windows programs" is a massive undertaking in the first place, as evidenced by the huge amount of development effort that has gone into Wine without quite reaching 100% bug-for-bug compatibility. (The level of compatibility they've achieved is truly impressive but it's really difficult to get to 100% for a large existing base of arbitrary applications.) Reliable real-world compatibility requires not only implementing Windows APIs as documented (or reverse-engineered) but also discovering and conforming to quirks, undocumented features, and permissive interpretations of the specs or even outright bugs in Windows that some applications have either intentionally or unintentionally ended up relying on over the years. I don't know if modern apps would tend to be better engineered to actually follow the spec and to only build on features as documented but for example older Windows games were sometimes notorious for being quite finicky. And of course if the goal is a full-scale independent OS rather than a compatibility layer on top of an existing one, there's the whole "operating system" part to implement as well.

snovymgodym 1y ago

I'm not convinced Microsoft cares about the Windows market share in consumer PCs or the small amount of money they make from selling Windows licenses to regular consumers. If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already. They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically secured. For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.

getnormality 1y ago
If something displaces Windows in the consumer PC market, I wonder how long it is before those new OS consumers start to want to use what they're comfortable with in the business as well. Windows will start to feel like some weird legacy system. By the time business starts moving away, it will be too late for Microsoft to save.
- morkalork 1y ago
  This already sort of happened with kids using chrome books and android phones getting their first office job and having no clue about windows.
hattmall 1y ago
>those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely. To an extent sure, but when people that grew up as home consumers not using Windows become business leaders they won't have the brand loyalty to Microsoft that the current aging out generation does. If Google doesn't characteristically fumble the bag their dominance with ChromeOS in schools has potential pay major dividends in 10-15 years. Windows centric software development is pretty much completely driven by business leaders 50+ years old on the young end.
- snovymgodym 1y ago
  A striking amount of business software runs on Windows because Microsoft was dominant during the peak PC era (e.g. 1990-2010). The companies running that stuff aren't doing so because old guys think Windows is good, they're running it because it's been built already and there's no real reason to change. The next generation of business leaders already didn't build their companies on Windows or any other PC operating system because web apps replaced desktop apps and mobile devices overtook PCs in market share. But it doesn't really matter to Microsoft. Microsoft isn't really the "Windows Company" anymore and hasn't been for some time. Azure, Office365, Sharepoint, etc. revenue dwarfs what Windows brings in and wouldn't be affected by Windows losing market share because everything is a web/electron client for a cloud service now. In some ways, I suspect Microsoft views the Windows market share as more of a liability than an asset these days, because it makes them responsible for bad press events like BlueKeep and WannaCry. Business customers frequently buy support contracts with their licenses, whereas private consumers expect indefinite updates for a one time $120 fee. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if they were intentionally letting consumer Windows slowly fade away.

blasphemers 1y ago

Part of Satya reorg in 2018 moved windows into a weird leadership structure where it was part of bing iirc. I think they recently finally fixed that org mistake and hopefully they quickly push an improved windows 12.

jauntywundrkind 1y ago
I remembered something weird like this, & went looking for coverage last week. I thought it'd maybe gotten divied up between Azure Services and like some ads or online experience thing? I ended up giving up, so much noise and I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I'd love to see some coverage. Incredible seeing Windows broken up like that & internally sold for parts, just total throwing it to the MBA wolves to milk some money out of, it felt like & seems like.
- kasabali 1y ago
  I remember listening it from Paul Thurrott in a podcast, and it wasn't only 2018, it was reorganized several times during Satya's lead. no wonder it sucks

perryh2 1y ago

If you _have_ to use Windows 11, check out this useful tool called Win11Debloat: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

bashwizard 1y ago
This is another good one: https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
ta12653421 1y ago
Does this allow to: - remove all this Games & XBox related stuff? - remove everything pre-installed but not used stuff? (Internet Explorer legacy?) - remove all this "fancy" Icons & links: Video/Music etc. in Explorer - deselect to install most of all these Background Services? And: Does it work for the Windows Server versions as well?

somenameforme 1y ago

It being the year of Linux is definitely a meme at this point, but Microsoft's trying their hardest to make it a thing. Steam's latest survey [1] shows Windows losing 0.19% marketshare. 3/4 of it went to Mac, 1/4 to Linux. 0.19% over a single month is a fairly significant shift, especially because the Steam survey is biased towards Windows gamers to begin with (Windows has 95.4% marketshare on the Steam survey), so it's probably understating the shift. [1] - https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

philistine 1y ago
PC ownership is NOT a zero-sum game. You assume that lost marketshare must be replaced by something else. I'm confident this is not people replacing their PC for a Mac, this is people who stopped using a PC completely. Microsoft, by ruining Windows, is not leaving the field open for a replacement OS; they're slowly killing the PC itself.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  I think you can approach this 3 different ways: Mathematical: If this were the case then all competitors would have seen an increase in marketshare proportional to their existing marketshare. This isn't what happened - Mac saw 3x the increase of Linux, even though Linux has greater marketshare on the survey. Statistical: It's often said that the PC is dead or dying, but that's a misrepresentation of the issue. 25 years ago, a new computer was dated in 3 months and obsolete in a year, so PC sales were huge. Now a days, a ten year old PC is still fine for just about everything, even including relatively high end gaming. So sales have plummeted, but ownership rates are around historic highs. [1] The main limiting factor is money. More than 96% of households earning $150k+ have a desktop/laptop, while only 56% with income less than $25,000 do. The overall average is 81%. Pragmatic: PCs are still necessary for many types of games as well as content creation. Mobile devices and tablets (to a lesser degree) are limited by their input mechanisms to a subset of all experiences, and there's a pretty big chunk of people that utilize experiences outside that subset. [1] - https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-56.pdf https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...

octo888 1y ago

> Not sure Microsoft realizes the damage they're doing to the Windows brand Well their stock certainly isn't tanking. Do they care about anything else?

OptionOfT 1y ago

There is no Microsoft in this story. There is the structure of the company which roll up to the CEO. And they have 1 priority: make the shareholders happy. This has caused incentives to shift thought the company. No more long-term work. Only short term stuff, where each change needs to make impact somewhere. This is why you see CoPilot in 20 places in Edge. This is why OneDrive shows you nagging screens to upload your data there. And this is why the OOBE now makes it harder. That change is used by a PM / Developer to justify their existence in the company at review time.

anonymous982347 1y ago

Developing a new consumer-grade OS is literally not possible. I don't mean it would take a herculean effort like the software ecosystem issue takes to address, I mean actually not possible regardless of how much effort any development team put in. Virtually all hardware on the open market is made for Windows, largely powered by proprietary, closed-source drivers. Linux gets some afterthought from a percentage of vendors, but even for it, hardware support is in an absolutely atrocious state. Hardware vendors will obviously not give the time of day to any uppity new OS. This relegates any attempt to a hobbyist project targeting virtual machines or obsolete hardware. The only way a new player could enter the game is by using Apple-level money to develop their hardware in-house, but any kind of corporation fronting Apple money to do that would certainly not be aiming to produce a user-driven experience.

toast0 1y ago
Drivers are a lot of work. IMHO, do some core stuff, and then build in driver adapters. NDIS wrapper, linuxkpi, etc. If you want to work hard to make things easy, I bet you could build a hypervisor that does pci passthrough for each device to a guest that runs a different OS driver and rexports the device as a virtio device, and then the main OS guest can just have virtio drivers for everything. It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in. That indirection will cost performance and latency, but windows 11 feels like more latency than windows 10 too, so eh. You can also build native drivers for important stuff as needed / over time.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > It can't be that hard to take documentation for writing Windows drivers and use that to build a minimal guest kernel to run windows drivers in. ReactOS has been working on that for like, what, the last 20 years and still is far from generally usable.

userbinator 1y ago

Maybe someone will develop a new user-focused OS that's somehow compatible with Windows programs. That's either Linux with WINE, or a "custom distro" of Windows from the remaining neighbourly hackers in the modding scene (they can't embed the hostility everywhere and as deep as the kernel, although they are most likely trying.)

soraminazuki 1y ago
WINE it is. I can't see any point in playing cat and mouse with an actively hostile OS. When a new Windows update starts stealing IMAP credentials[1] before the modding community catches on, it's game over for the user. Better to not use anything based on Windows. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38212453
- userbinator 1y ago
  New Outlook is exactly the sort of thing that the modders would not want you to use anyway.

pjmlp 1y ago

Not really, the same people are doing their best to kill XBox brand as well. By the way they also already did enough damage to those of us that were keen into doing Windows development, due to how WinRT has been managed. Now only game developers, and big names with existing native applications are left.

mythz 1y ago

Damage has been done, Windows has become synonymous with user-hostile ad/spyware OS. Everything under the "Windows" brand is meaningless to me now. Can't think of a single feature Windows could add to get me to switch back from Linux.

jeroenhd 1y ago

The thing is, Microsoft did plenty of user-hostile stuff back then. Games for Windows Live with its weird DRM and making games unplayable after shutting down, for instance. And the push for using all kinds of "Live" services. Something called a .NET Passport also comes to mind during the mid-XP days. .NET framework applications had their own special kinds of installers, Microsoft Silverlight thrived for a short moment, and the introduction of their (initially mediocre) antivirus program also wasn't well-received by the industry. They just never shoveled their crap into the OS itself. It was always recommended addons, recommended freebies, and recommended optional features that came along with other products. When MS started unifying everything into Just Windows, all of the crap they pulled with separate software packages merged into one digital blob, Windows 8/8.1/10/11. With Windows 8, I can at least appreciate the attempt to unify things so they are easier to use for consumers (if only they hadn't bunged up Windows Phone, repeatedly). I wonder what Windows would be like if they hadn't tried to the Windows 8 experiment.

pndy 1y ago
> Something called a .NET Passport also comes to mind during the mid-XP days That's essentially Microsoft Account nowadays, which went thru few rebrandings on the way. In XP it was promoted via Windows Messenger with popup message which for less experienced people would suggest that in order to access the Internet they need this "passport". Considering how many sites now offer (still optional) logins with apple/meta/microsoft accounts I wonder if the goal here is to be the provider of identity for sites and services and at the same future-proofing for any digital ID checks govt's may introduce
- pjc50 1y ago
  There was for a few years a South Korean national identity scheme which linked your national ID card to .. an ActiveX control. Making it not only IE-only but effectively tying it to IE6.
  - pndy 1y ago
    Oh yes I remember reading news about that and being dumbfounded how's that actually possible

0rdinal 1y ago

Their reputation is irrelevant, at least whilst they maintain an OS monopoly. Enterprise customers don't care because all the issues you described are not present on Enterprise editions. The vast majority of users want a machine that "just works". I would never use a machine running Windows 11 S mode whilst a good chunk of the home PC market would likely not notice a difference.

vladvasiliu 1y ago
Enterprise edition is as much of a clownshow as the others. I actually run one such edition at work and since a few weeks ago I've noticed in the "home" screen of the settings a new tile, inviting me to add my microsoft account to benefit from something or other. Now, this is a machine I mostly use for goofing out, so it actually has my microsoft account connected to it. It's fully entra id joined: I log into my windows session with my office 365 account, which has a full license (p2 or whatever it's called), I can see the bitlocker key in entra id, the works. Now, curiosity got the best of me the other day, and I figured I might just as well click that button. Guess what? It didn't work! It apparently doesn't support business accounts! On my home pc (pro edition, which I use for photoshop and the occasional game), which does have a consumer microsoft account, that tile doesn't show up.

sebtron 1y ago

Who needs a brand when you have a monopoly? > maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great. What made Windows great were the contracts with hardware manufacturers to have it installed by default on every single PC ever sold.

jwrallie 1y ago

I don’t even mind logging in on a personal laptop but we have shared computers at work to operate machines. It does not make any sense to login with your account in one of those.

BruceEel 1y ago

> Or better yet, maybe Microsoft will realize very important parts of Windows are going downhill and remember what made Windows great. Microsoft have done 180's in the past. I still hope that at some point they'll see the light and what you say here above will suddenly click and become evident to them. Windows, and DOS before that, did not succeed by holding customers as hostages.

cobbaut 11mo ago

> When I think back to Windows 7, the good feeling isn't nostalgia. It was the last user-focused Windows. I think Windows 98 was the last user-focused Windows. At least then all the useful settings were a single right-click away, and it just worked without invading your privacy. (WinME never worked and WinXP was the first in a long series of shareholder-focused Windows.)