8 ms·

Windows 11 Insider Preview Build

46 points by taubek 2y ago

ksec 2y ago
Really wish M$ work harder to attract me and other Mac user back to Windows. The PC hardware saw great improvements and continue to move in right directions. It is now up to the software / Windows to show what the are capable of.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  I manage the Windows 11 desktop system of my parents. The interruptions, feeding of click-bait news, trying to force Edge, Bing, OneDrive and other online services, tons of overt and covert telemetry, the older parts of Windows visible like a sore thumb... All of these things push me away and away from Microsoft every day. Thanks, but no thanks. I'm happy with my Linux desktops and Mac laptops. They're interoperable, using Macs are trouble free 99.99% of the time, and my Linux desktops just work. Life is good, at last.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    There are Windows 11 debloaters that I use. https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat If you must, of course. I stick to Linux.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Thanks! But, we have been taking chisels & sledgehammers to shape our Windows installations to the shapes we like but Microsoft doesn't approve and try to counter since Windows 95. I gave up the whole ecosystem. I'm fine.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        Good, I have given up a long time ago, I was around 13 years old when I installed my first Linux distribution and I am fine with it ever since. (I went through OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, too, for desktop).
        bayindirh 2y ago
        Looks like we migrated to Linux around the same time. Nice!
    - princevegeta89 2y ago
      And, god knows if you'll have to keep using these multiple times as the system updates are known to reset stuff.... lol
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        Yeah, most likely. It is awful.
  - defrost 2y ago
    I cannot recommend the Chris Titus Win Util enough here. It's a powershell GUI over power shell scripts overseen by one talented windows engineer with contributions from hundreds. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ There are youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisTitusTech https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisTitusTech It's a simple way to declutter windows 10 and or 11, build custom stripped install images, install useful utilities and dev environs, etc. For any that care to look under the hood (and there are a number) it's open and transparent and a good way to get that Windows VM image for hosted OS's, gameplay, Qubes OS, etc.
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    I’ve done both in my life and I thought Mac stuff would be better but managing iPad issues is just as frustrating and often more obtuse.
- patates 2y ago
  Just yesterday, I ordered a mac for me the first time in my life because I lost hope of PC hardware ever catching up to the convenience and stability of a mac. This is from a person who likes Windows and especially Linux much more than MacOS.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    You'll find out that macOS is much easier to interconnect with Linux than Windows, and will probably have a little happy ecosystem around you.
    - princevegeta89 2y ago
      Yup, have been using Lima and it has been rock-solid.
  - princevegeta89 2y ago
    WSL is really great, and I loved the fact Microsoft moved towards being more developer friendly and bringing all great tools and utilities to the Modern Windows (10 and above). But..... the predatory nature of Windows and the half-ass revisions done to the UI elements, with decades-old applications with the legacy UI that can still be accessed directly, makes Windows a mess. To add to this, The hold that Microsoft has on Windows is so nasty that it keeps overriding settings like default browsers and applications, to favor Microsoft-built apps like Edge, along with the heavy telemetry just leads this platform to be a mess. It is not a clean system at all, and even sometimes pales in comparison to Linux Desktop, let alone OSX.
    - ljm 2y ago
      Really does feel sometimes that Microsoft's tech is held hostage by growth KPIs. Nothing they build is left untouched by the invisible hand of ad-driven enshittification. Shows how skewed the market is when you can actively fuck up your products and still stay ahead of the competition. Nobody without hundreds of billions behind them would stand a chance if they tried the same.
- ItsBob 2y ago
  I reckon it depends on what kind of experience you want from your OS: there may be a variant that works for you already. Take me for example. I want my OS to GTFO of my way. It's a toolbox, like the one a carpenter would carry around. I use the applications on it (the saw, hammer, nails etc.), not the OS itself (the carpenter toolbox). In my case, the Enterprise LTO (or whatever it's called) is almost exactly what I need but the consumer variants are constantly trying to "help" me with shit I don't want.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > It is now up to the software / Windows to show what the are capable of. They did this in Windows 2000. Now Microsoft and Windows are only showing what they are _not_ capable of.
  - gjvc 2y ago
    Windows 2000 was really great.
- aquir 2y ago
  They lost me a year ago for forever. The OS is just too hostile, annoying and pushy. What was the last drop is Edge and that awful Home Page plus the news/widget things. I would not mind any of them but enabling by default is just not right. It is incredible that how smoother the macOS experience is using a Macbook Pro M2 - it is not perfect at all, every OS have it's own annoyances but the OS is not working against me any more
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - princevegeta89 2y ago
    Yup, we could argue that it's not even targeted towards power users. It's just a total bloat of useless shit and a ton of Microsoft-controlled settings and features all over your OS. The promotions/ads and tracking that happens with every other screen on the OS just make it look very cheap and unprofessional. It's so stupid that Microsoft could not come up with a developer-focused version of Windows meant for Enterprises, with all the bloat that's targeted for other things just removed.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Given the market share of both platforms, and the relevance on server workloads, they have enough space to mess up. Additionally I guess this weeks announcements prove the point Apple has given up to Windows and Linux mindshare, the composable desktop space.
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  You use windows because you have to not because you want to. I was a Mac only user for decades but now run Mac laptops and Windows towers just to use Nvidia cards for 3D, CUDA simulation and processing and AI. Ended up getting back into PC games too as a side effect so that keeps me on the windows side too but if it wasn’t for Adobe and Cinema4D being windows I’d use Linux. Crazy using both because some things on windows, file browsing, file manipulation, image thumbnails, unzipping, copying etc are all so dog slow compared to Mac yet when you run something like Octane Render you truly see what the same hardware is capable of. It’s kinda sickening.
  - twilo 2y ago
    I use macOS and win11 and haven’t noticed any of those issues… if anything I prefer explorer over finder and file management on windows is much better
    - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
      It’s all there and so bad a side by side would be comical. You either can’t see it or you don’t deal with files on the same scale I do.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  I have a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (actually 2 of them, long story) because I _have_ to have a stylus, and don't find the trifecta of: iPad, MacBook, and Apple Pencil a workable option (and the "tick" of the Apple Pencil being touched to the screen and the need to keep yet another battery charged would drive me nuts). I'd give my interest in Hell for a successor to the Axiotron ModBook, and if the Wacom Movink 13 had a screen resolution to compeat w/ the 3K OLED on my GB3, I'd give up on having a battery and have it and a Mac Mini, so that I could get back to something like to my NeXT Cube w/ Wacom ArtZ (which was paired w/ an NCR-3125 running PenPoint for portability). So yeah, the hardware on the Windows side is better suited to some folks, and I agree that the software really, really needs work. Things I miss: - Miller Column File Browser - Services - emacs shortcuts when using a keyboard - TeXshop and other Cocoa apps Things which annoy me on Windows - the need to keep Settings open and toggle how the stylus behaves - not being able to select text in most web browsers (Firefox and derivatives at least still have a working configuration for allowing this) - the need to manage various settings to keep ads and Copilot from intruding That said, having a Wacom One paired w/ my MacBook works pretty well, it's just not something I can use away from my desk.
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  I'll bite: after writing and using komorebi[1], it's very painful for me to go back to using software like yabai or aerospace - macOS programmatic UI interactions are just too slow, while on Windows they feel comparatively instant. All of this is made possible for me as a developer by the excellent work Microsoft has done in providing Win32 bindings for Rust. If only Apple would provide the same. [1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
- mrcwinn 2y ago
  Not so fast. I really like the form factor of the Surface Pro and appreciate that a proper PC build runs circles around Macs for gaming - but features like nano-texture displays on the MacBook Pro from Apple is yet another hardware improvement that are, for me, now table stakes. I would not consider daily driving a Windows laptop without that. As for software, WSL2 is a step forward, but it's hard to beat a true native environment on my Mac. It's the modern version of "it just works" in the Mac vs PC debate.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  I switch back and forth with a Windows workstation because some very expensive software I use is Windows-only. The default installation is annoying, but I can go from a clean install to having the annoying widgets cleaned up in a few minutes (hint: Try right clicking on anything you don’t want to see. If that doesn’t work, Google it and you’ll find a lot of solutions) To my surprise, I’ve found my Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking. I basically never reboot except for updates. Meanwhile, my high spec Mac seems to bog down with a lot of multitasking over the course of a week. Reboot fixes it. I find myself wishing for the stability and consistency of the Windows machine, which is not something I ever expected.
  - p_ing 2y ago
    > Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking This has been true since the NT4 days where you could make that spinning rust beg for mercy under a heavily used page file and NT would never fall over. macOS will complain fairly quickly after it's swap space runs out. And if you read /r/macos or /r/mac, you'll see that happens with innocuous programs as well as 1st party Apple apps like Pages/Music. There's a memory leak in userland across a wide variety of apps in macOS right now.
- tannhaeuser 2y ago
  Forget about it, Windows 11 is chock full of "telemetry" to train MS/"OpenAI"/Copilot models to predict user behavior (that is, to make you obsolete) and ads. At some point, MS management has decided it is more lucrative for MSFT stock in times of AI craze to turn Windows against its users. It didn't have to become like this, and while I've never been a Windows person, it's sad to see Windows go. I've just recently setup probably my last Windows 10 tablet/"convertible" (that will remain on Windows 10, just made sure to install Windows 11 in addition/in a dual boot setup so I don't risk a drama going forward when it eventually needs 11), and the tablet features Windows 8 had and to a lesser degree Windows 10 still has were not half-bad and even had "soul"; I wish MS hadn't given totally up on mobile, tablets in education, etc.
- varispeed 2y ago
  Desktop PC maybe, but for something more mobile there is currently no capable hardware that could be a match to any Apple Mx processor.
LeoPanthera 2y ago
It's shocking how often other companies just outright clone what Apple does. That new start menu grid isn't just similar to the iPhone App Library, it's identical.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  And the iPhone is just a copy and evolution of the PalmOS paradigm. I'm not mad at Apple, because when they put up that UI, the PalmOS was basically dead. Then (what remains of) Palm had cloned the UI of Apple Watch for their "small" phone.
  - GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
    I had a Palm Pre way back in the day, it was easily 5 years ahead of other phones. It's very clear that a lot of the iPhone's initial design language was inspired by PalmOS
- kypro 2y ago
  To be fair to MS I remember almost everyone was copying aspects of the Metro UI in the early 2010s.
  - smjburton 2y ago
    Yeah, it wasn't always the best experience on desktop, but on tablet and mobile, it helped small screens feel bigger and made apps feel more dynamic and organic with live tiles. The emphasis on typography was a nice touch as well. Although it's harder to tell now, a lot of the current UI design for apps draws from the Metro UI style with big, bold fonts for navigational elements, fluid, dynamic, animated content experiences, etc.
- princevegeta89 2y ago
  Actually, Apple copied a ton of things and features from Android 8 and above.
- jpalawaga 2y ago
ItsBob 2y ago
I'm genuinely curious why anyone would download a beta of Windows... can someone enlighten me? I can think of one scenario only - You have a desktop app or drivers that you want to ensure will work in the upcoming non-beta, so getting a head start would be good I suppose. But for anyone else, why would you test software for free from a trillion dollar company that have a bit of a track record now of hostility towards users. This isn't a troll, I'm a Windows 11 user myself. I am genuinely at a loss. Edit: I'm being a dumbass (on first coffee as I write this), there's plenty of reasons why people would download a beta... I was thinking from my perspective only!
- Strom 2y ago
  The beta versions contain lots of bug fixes. Some of those bugs are bad enough to want the fix fast.
  - ItsBob 2y ago
    True, I never thought of that one. I know that Windows gets a hard (justified?) time for stability and whatnot these days but it's been pretty solid for me so I forget sometimes.
- AndrewDucker 2y ago
  That's exactly the reason, so you can test in advance. (Unless there's some new feature you're really looking forward to. But I'm not aware of many of them.)
  - ItsBob 2y ago
    I'd usually bow out at this point but if you've ever been on any Windows/Microsoft-related subreddit, there are many many people that download these betas. I did it once, many years ago, for Windows 10 and my printer started printing out garbage in multiple pages no matter what you printed. At that time I used the printer quite frequently. I'd had no issues until then. I remember checking to see if printer issues were a thing in that build and they weren't listed. That was it for me.
  - 2y ago
nicman23 2y ago
fucking bring the folder menu back for start. win 7 had it perfect. everything else is stupid. it is not even nostalgia, it just worked.
- aquir 2y ago
  Back then, when I was using Windows my Start Menu was empty, I just used Search all the time. Of course, you have to disable all the other search features like web search and suggestions etc.
- kypro 2y ago
  Win 98 was basically perfect imo... Everything about that UI was simple and predictable. Menus were descriptive and information dense. No unnecessary widgets and fancy UI. If you're looking for pure productivity then Win 98 was great. XP and 7 were great too, but they had more unnecessary UI junk while becoming overly minimalistic where it matters. I strongly disagreed with removing the "Start" button and replacing it with the four squares button for example. And presumably they only did that because some UI dude thought it looked better... It's not like modern screens don't have room for the text.
  - reginald78 2y ago
    To me 2000 was the peak since it combined stability of NT with 98 UI and plug and play (which had gotten over its ugly early period). Also 98/2000 had a file search that actually worked, even if it was slow. XP added an animated dog to it.
  - nicman23 2y ago
    nah i like the search it had
- princevegeta89 2y ago
  Kind of insane that the right-click menu took about 2 seconds to show up after right-clicking on the desktop. I don't know if it was ever fixed, but that was my impression after trying to understand Windows 10.
- 2y ago
out_sider 2y ago
Last December I bought a Asus Zenbook S14 with the Core 7 Ultra (lunar lake) and to be honest I'm loving windows + wsl, being able to have a premade ubuntu image configured with my building tools and just import and work on my balcuny for 9h is amazing. On top of that , although it's not the best gaming machine (far from that) I can still run a cs2 and Halo inifinity prety well :).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- globnomulous 2y ago
  Did you post this comment in the wrong thread?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  That has been my experience since Windows 7, back then I used a mix of VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation, WSL makes it one less thing to install. Windows 7 was my turning point, moving away from dual boot, something I have been doing since installing Slackware 2.0 on that 1995's summer.
- diggan 2y ago
  Some year ago I bought a Surface Pro 8 thinking it was the best hardware to run Windows on and holy hell was I wrong. Overheats in two seconds, performance is probably worse than my Steam Deck purchased years ago and the only way I can have it run relatively well is a barebones Linux install. Before that, I gave WSL(2) a try and besides giving me half the performance compared to running Linux the normal way and introducing various compatibility issues (although it's just a VM?!), a recent Windows update broke the WSL image on disk leading to a corrupted install, never managed to recover from that and gave up. I can't wait for Ableton to (eventually) get their thumbs out of their asses and make Ableton work on Linux so I can dump Windows fully. Written from my Linux X1 Carbon which also somehow magically works on my patio, don't ask me how.
  - in_a_hole 2y ago
    You may have already heard this but Bitwig runs on Linux and has an Ableton-like workflow, as well as a richer effects system, I'm told.
staticelf 2y ago
Windows is spyware, every time you update it asks if it can use a keylogger on you and track you. It doesn't matter if you've said no before. There is not a single windows application that doesn't include a lot of telemetry. It's sad what Windows has become.
- tartoran 2y ago
  > It's sad what Windows has become. It's sad users aren't running away.
abcd_f 2y ago
Yeah. This thing outright crashes in SystemParametersInfo() when trying to query if the system supports "full-window dragging". Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  > Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA. You are their QA!
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    That would be nice, if they truly listened to their users.
- tehbeard 2y ago
  John Q. Public is the QA for Microsoft these days.
- roskelld 2y ago
  > Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA. They got laid off in 2014. MS relies more on insiders, early update roll outs, automated testing. I'm still on Windows 10 so can't comment on the state of 11, but I feel like I see a good number of headlines about botched updates. The recent 24h2 screwed up users that had Ubisoft software installed and caused them to pause roll out. In October an update caused systems to get into a bluescreen loop requiring a rollback. The fact that they're pushing people to 11 this year and stopping 10, when 11 is still having "teething" issues is not good.
pjmlp 2y ago
When I was a WinRT/UWP believer, I used to follow the preview builds regularly, always looking forward to Windows evolution, what cool features would take us one step further from hungarian notation into healthy mix of .NET and C++ new world. After the disaster management has made out of UWP and related developer experience, and the follow-up Project Reunion efforts, I couldn't care less. They come when they come.
- jimbob45 2y ago
  Why do you feel WinRT/UWP (and probably MAUI) were such failures?
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    It starts by Microsoft not following the "Developers, Developers, Developers" meme they became famous for. While, from my point of view, UWP is what .NET 1.0 should have been (see [0]), the way it was introduced, requiring a complete rewrite from Win32/.NET applications, with limited capabilities, already required some adoption love. Then while trying to achieve feature parity with Win32/.NET, this was done at the expense of breaking compatibilty across WinRT generations (8 => 8.1. => 10 => WinAppSDK), and if that wasn't enough, also breaking the .NET and C++ tooling experience in the process. I think it was a mix of issues, management naturally, lack of empathy for the Windows developer community, whatever internal KPIs they had/have to meet, and most likely also quite relevant, it appears new employees don't have much experience with Windows development or its culture, were raised in a world without Windows. People like myself have been PC users since the early days of MS-DOS 3.3, naturally new employees now have other backgrounds. [0] - https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
    - fifticon 2y ago
      basically MS has dropped the ball on UI since the time of WPF (I maintain apps stuck in WPF at work). It looks like the crayon electron browser kids are running the ship now adays :-/ I find WPF incredibly unsexy; unfortunately everything they have tried afterwards is even more amateurish. As others have mentioned, they have probably doomed themselves to eternal KPI hell, so with zero management vision, zero management talent, zero management strategy and zero management commitment, they are incapable of delivering anything to rise above Q3 mediocrity (Ie, they cannot deliver on any meaningful multiyear strategy, because they all have their heads up Q4 asses). They are the Intel of UI, at this point.
nbzso 2y ago
For all that have circumstances which require using Win 11 I have advice. Buy a Win Explorer replacement. I tested this one and the experience is tenfold. Customization is immense, and you will not wait it to load at all. Directory Opus https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ https://www.gpsoft.com.au/
- francislavoie 2y ago
  I use xplorer2, works pretty well. I don't do anything fancy with it, but I like the two-panel layout and the "scrap" panel for quick links
- varun_ch 2y ago
  The biggest shock for me when moving to macOS from Windows was discovering how much better Finder is compared to Explorer. It’s night and day in speed, usability, design, etc. And yet, I still see people complaining about macOS Finder… which just goes to show how far behind Explorer is.
  - nbzso 2y ago
    On a Mac I use PathFinder. https://cocoatech.io/ https://cocoatech.io/:)
  - ndiddy 2y ago
    Finder is fast until you need to use a network share. Your choices are NFS (wait on a loading screen for 10-30 seconds every time you change directories) and SMB (changing directories is fast, but Finder does a bunch of blocking calls or something so when you scroll it beachballs every few seconds). I don't have any problems using the same shares on Explorer, Dolphin, or Nautilus, it's Finder specific.
    - madjam002 2y ago
      I had a good experience with an app called Owlfiles for network shares
  - p_ing 2y ago
xunil2ycom 2y ago
All I want from Microsoft with respect to Windows 11 is the ability to put my task bar on the left side of my screen again.
- Semaphor 2y ago
  It's not a 100% solution, and paid (dirt cheap though), closed source, but as I also have my monitor in landscape mode, I use https://startallback.com https://startallback.com
- fifticon 2y ago
  erh you can do this somehow,I did it to mine? now what _I_ want, is to be able to resize the taskbar again. also, I would prefer win11 didn't disable just about everything I had configured, particularly preview for file types. and - I dont know how they did it, but basic file explorer view feels much slower than win10,on the same machine. given that file explorer is basically all windows boils down to, i am not happy that they tske efforts to make it crappier. and given that win95 was able to show a file grid in 1995, I wonder how they are able to screw that up, 30 years later?
- billfor 2y ago
  Does windows classic (open) shell not work on Windows 11? I use it all the time on 10 and have the task bar on the right side.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mihaaly 2y ago
  You are a dreamer. I'd settle for having the real taskbar shown in Teams screen sharing instead of having the time rolled back to the time Teams started, or something. When I dare I dream of proper renaming experience inside of a OneDrive folder, without overriding me while typing. But that must be too much for the developers nowadays, unbearable difficulty! Me the humble servant of MS might must shut up.
  - 2y ago
jmward01 2y ago
My first MS OS was DOS 2.x (forgot the exact point release...). I remember going to Costco as a kid and getting excited whenever a new version of DOS, and later Windows came out because each and every one of them was a true upgrade in every sense of the word. They built things for the users and it showed. I even got to beta test Windows 95 and was blown away when it came out. The last good OS MS released was Windows XP. After that the trend was clear. They were no-longer building stuff for users and instead were building for companies to take advantage of users. MS has completely lost my trust and I doubt they will ever get it back.
- estebank 2y ago
  > The last good OS MS released was Windows XP. I'm reminded of how much people hated it when it came out. Post Vista it was widely liked. A lot of people are also nostalgic of 7 now. I wonder if we'll have a batch of people nostalgic for 10 or 11 in a decade in the same vein. I doubt it, but who knows. The old rule was "every other release is loved/hated", which held until at least 10 (8 was hated, 10 was somewhat accepted). I also remember that 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows".
  - codezero 2y ago
    Yeah a lot of people stayed on 98 SE2 until the XP service packs were out and XP was solid.
  - isk517 2y ago
    Don't think I've ever encounter someone that didn't become nostalgic for 10 after having to switch to 11. So many pointless UI changes, and just like with 8 none of them are necessary to force the user to use beyond some incessant need to dictate how users do things on the part of Microsoft.
  - dowager_dan99 2y ago
    I really have not seen anything material since windows 7 that would meet the bar of major improvement. Windows 7 with bug & security fixes, adding support for new hardware standards and SW developments, and feature evolution would be superior to what we have today IMO. Prior to win7 all the revolutionary "coming next" things either became impractical or were dropped. I have a desktop that still runs all tripe-A games and is my main development machine running win10 that MS says is a boat anchor come the fall; this will be my last windows machine. Microsoft has been pretty good to me as a developer (despite some of the technologies intentionally designed to do nothing but distract and consume attention) but the consumer side is a pathological shit-show and appears to really hate people (or at least love money more). MS looks a lot like the White House these days.
haunter 2y ago
Daily reminded that LTSC exists
- _fat_santa 2y ago
  The problem I have with LTSC is that it's specifically for Enterprise customers. Sure you can download a copy of Win10 LTSC but you're never going to be running it as a "legit customer".
  - hollandheese 2y ago
    Not even Microsoft cares about that anymore. MAS would've been shutdown years upon years ago if they did.
  - vitorsr 2y ago
    You can buy legitimate licenses from legitimate bulk license resellers. Thank the Court of Justice of the European Union.
edude03 2y ago
First time I've seen a windows update on the front page of HN. What's particularly interesting or news worthy about this update?
- lr0 2y ago
  Nothing. As you can see almost 99% of the comments are not about it but about Windows itself and unrelated questions. This is a very common phenomenon in HN.
  - sieabahlpark 2y ago
    [dead]
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    True, I do wonder how it got upvoted then though
    - _fat_santa 2y ago
      IMHO It's better to think about these posts as "proxy discussions posts". I think many HN users yearn for a post where they can argue about a particular topic but straight up posting "Hey lets discuss and argue about Windows" would be seen as a low quality post, even though everyone secretly wants to dive into the comments on those kinds of posts. I find that the HN community has many unique and charming aspects to it compared to other communities on the internet.
    - hnuser123456 2y ago
      Drag and dropping files from PC to phone as an officially supported first-party feature is nice.
- throwaway888abc 2y ago
  It serve as reminder that Windows (my laptop) will be potentially broken again ? Alert message ? Upvoted the news, appreciate. Will stay vigilant
jpalawaga 2y ago
The new file sharing menu looks great. Honestly it looks like something I'd expect to see in macOS.
dheatov 2y ago
And yet it still can't reliably stay up for more than a few days without being forcefully rebooted.
layer8 2y ago
> When you start dragging a local file with mouse (or touch) from File Explorer or your desktop, a handy tray appears at the very top of your screen allowing you to drop the file into one of the displayed apps or choose “More…” to open the Windows share window. Great, that way we now get an animation at the top of the screen every time we start dragging a file, whether we want to “share” the file or not. Who is coming up with stuff like this and thinks it’s a good idea? Especially since you could drag objects to apps on the task bar since forever, and also the context menu is arguably a more practical way to share a file? At least integrate the drag targets into the Explorer window somehow, or hover them next to the mouse pointer (like the mini-toolbars upon selection in Word), instead of showing them maximally far away at the top of the screen. Geez.
akomtu 2y ago
"Windows Insider" sounds like an AI feature that watches your work, creates a daily intelligence report and uploads it to Microsoft, thus giving it the insider info on your work.
zamadatix 2y ago
Ironically with Insider Preview it's been harder to track what all is coming in the next version of Windows. On one hand it's all there in the blog posts, on the other hand it's not clear "between stable and current preview + announced road map, what's the total list". Prior to rolling Insider Preview program builds news sites used to publish regular articles with the list. Maybe some still do but my difficulty has been sorting through the ones just rehashing each blog post vs summarizing the upcoming versions differences. What's everyone's go to place for keeping up with that kind of thing these days, if any?

46 points by taubek 2y ago

ksec 2y ago

Really wish M$ work harder to attract me and other Mac user back to Windows. The PC hardware saw great improvements and continue to move in right directions. It is now up to the software / Windows to show what the are capable of.

bayindirh 2y ago
I manage the Windows 11 desktop system of my parents. The interruptions, feeding of click-bait news, trying to force Edge, Bing, OneDrive and other online services, tons of overt and covert telemetry, the older parts of Windows visible like a sore thumb... All of these things push me away and away from Microsoft every day. Thanks, but no thanks. I'm happy with my Linux desktops and Mac laptops. They're interoperable, using Macs are trouble free 99.99% of the time, and my Linux desktops just work. Life is good, at last.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  There are Windows 11 debloaters that I use. https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat If you must, of course. I stick to Linux.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Thanks! But, we have been taking chisels & sledgehammers to shape our Windows installations to the shapes we like but Microsoft doesn't approve and try to counter since Windows 95. I gave up the whole ecosystem. I'm fine.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      Good, I have given up a long time ago, I was around 13 years old when I installed my first Linux distribution and I am fine with it ever since. (I went through OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, too, for desktop).
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        Looks like we migrated to Linux around the same time. Nice!
  - princevegeta89 2y ago
    And, god knows if you'll have to keep using these multiple times as the system updates are known to reset stuff.... lol
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      Yeah, most likely. It is awful.
- defrost 2y ago
  I cannot recommend the Chris Titus Win Util enough here. It's a powershell GUI over power shell scripts overseen by one talented windows engineer with contributions from hundreds. https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ There are youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisTitusTech https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisTitusTech It's a simple way to declutter windows 10 and or 11, build custom stripped install images, install useful utilities and dev environs, etc. For any that care to look under the hood (and there are a number) it's open and transparent and a good way to get that Windows VM image for hosted OS's, gameplay, Qubes OS, etc.
- whywhywhywhy 2y ago
  I’ve done both in my life and I thought Mac stuff would be better but managing iPad issues is just as frustrating and often more obtuse.
patates 2y ago
Just yesterday, I ordered a mac for me the first time in my life because I lost hope of PC hardware ever catching up to the convenience and stability of a mac. This is from a person who likes Windows and especially Linux much more than MacOS.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  You'll find out that macOS is much easier to interconnect with Linux than Windows, and will probably have a little happy ecosystem around you.
  - princevegeta89 2y ago
    Yup, have been using Lima and it has been rock-solid.
- princevegeta89 2y ago
  WSL is really great, and I loved the fact Microsoft moved towards being more developer friendly and bringing all great tools and utilities to the Modern Windows (10 and above). But..... the predatory nature of Windows and the half-ass revisions done to the UI elements, with decades-old applications with the legacy UI that can still be accessed directly, makes Windows a mess. To add to this, The hold that Microsoft has on Windows is so nasty that it keeps overriding settings like default browsers and applications, to favor Microsoft-built apps like Edge, along with the heavy telemetry just leads this platform to be a mess. It is not a clean system at all, and even sometimes pales in comparison to Linux Desktop, let alone OSX.
  - ljm 2y ago
    Really does feel sometimes that Microsoft's tech is held hostage by growth KPIs. Nothing they build is left untouched by the invisible hand of ad-driven enshittification. Shows how skewed the market is when you can actively fuck up your products and still stay ahead of the competition. Nobody without hundreds of billions behind them would stand a chance if they tried the same.
ItsBob 2y ago
I reckon it depends on what kind of experience you want from your OS: there may be a variant that works for you already. Take me for example. I want my OS to GTFO of my way. It's a toolbox, like the one a carpenter would carry around. I use the applications on it (the saw, hammer, nails etc.), not the OS itself (the carpenter toolbox). In my case, the Enterprise LTO (or whatever it's called) is almost exactly what I need but the consumer variants are constantly trying to "help" me with shit I don't want.
hulitu 2y ago
> It is now up to the software / Windows to show what the are capable of. They did this in Windows 2000. Now Microsoft and Windows are only showing what they are _not_ capable of.
- gjvc 2y ago
  Windows 2000 was really great.
aquir 2y ago
They lost me a year ago for forever. The OS is just too hostile, annoying and pushy. What was the last drop is Edge and that awful Home Page plus the news/widget things. I would not mind any of them but enabling by default is just not right. It is incredible that how smoother the macOS experience is using a Macbook Pro M2 - it is not perfect at all, every OS have it's own annoyances but the OS is not working against me any more
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- princevegeta89 2y ago
  Yup, we could argue that it's not even targeted towards power users. It's just a total bloat of useless shit and a ton of Microsoft-controlled settings and features all over your OS. The promotions/ads and tracking that happens with every other screen on the OS just make it look very cheap and unprofessional. It's so stupid that Microsoft could not come up with a developer-focused version of Windows meant for Enterprises, with all the bloat that's targeted for other things just removed.
pjmlp 2y ago
Given the market share of both platforms, and the relevance on server workloads, they have enough space to mess up. Additionally I guess this weeks announcements prove the point Apple has given up to Windows and Linux mindshare, the composable desktop space.
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
You use windows because you have to not because you want to. I was a Mac only user for decades but now run Mac laptops and Windows towers just to use Nvidia cards for 3D, CUDA simulation and processing and AI. Ended up getting back into PC games too as a side effect so that keeps me on the windows side too but if it wasn’t for Adobe and Cinema4D being windows I’d use Linux. Crazy using both because some things on windows, file browsing, file manipulation, image thumbnails, unzipping, copying etc are all so dog slow compared to Mac yet when you run something like Octane Render you truly see what the same hardware is capable of. It’s kinda sickening.
- twilo 2y ago
  I use macOS and win11 and haven’t noticed any of those issues… if anything I prefer explorer over finder and file management on windows is much better
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    It’s all there and so bad a side by side would be comical. You either can’t see it or you don’t deal with files on the same scale I do.
WillAdams 2y ago
I have a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (actually 2 of them, long story) because I _have_ to have a stylus, and don't find the trifecta of: iPad, MacBook, and Apple Pencil a workable option (and the "tick" of the Apple Pencil being touched to the screen and the need to keep yet another battery charged would drive me nuts). I'd give my interest in Hell for a successor to the Axiotron ModBook, and if the Wacom Movink 13 had a screen resolution to compeat w/ the 3K OLED on my GB3, I'd give up on having a battery and have it and a Mac Mini, so that I could get back to something like to my NeXT Cube w/ Wacom ArtZ (which was paired w/ an NCR-3125 running PenPoint for portability). So yeah, the hardware on the Windows side is better suited to some folks, and I agree that the software really, really needs work. Things I miss: - Miller Column File Browser - Services - emacs shortcuts when using a keyboard - TeXshop and other Cocoa apps Things which annoy me on Windows - the need to keep Settings open and toggle how the stylus behaves - not being able to select text in most web browsers (Firefox and derivatives at least still have a working configuration for allowing this) - the need to manage various settings to keep ads and Copilot from intruding That said, having a Wacom One paired w/ my MacBook works pretty well, it's just not something I can use away from my desk.
bsnnkv 2y ago
I'll bite: after writing and using komorebi[1], it's very painful for me to go back to using software like yabai or aerospace - macOS programmatic UI interactions are just too slow, while on Windows they feel comparatively instant. All of this is made possible for me as a developer by the excellent work Microsoft has done in providing Win32 bindings for Rust. If only Apple would provide the same. [1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
mrcwinn 2y ago
Not so fast. I really like the form factor of the Surface Pro and appreciate that a proper PC build runs circles around Macs for gaming - but features like nano-texture displays on the MacBook Pro from Apple is yet another hardware improvement that are, for me, now table stakes. I would not consider daily driving a Windows laptop without that. As for software, WSL2 is a step forward, but it's hard to beat a true native environment on my Mac. It's the modern version of "it just works" in the Mac vs PC debate.
Aurornis 2y ago
I switch back and forth with a Windows workstation because some very expensive software I use is Windows-only. The default installation is annoying, but I can go from a clean install to having the annoying widgets cleaned up in a few minutes (hint: Try right clicking on anything you don’t want to see. If that doesn’t work, Google it and you’ll find a lot of solutions) To my surprise, I’ve found my Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking. I basically never reboot except for updates. Meanwhile, my high spec Mac seems to bog down with a lot of multitasking over the course of a week. Reboot fixes it. I find myself wishing for the stability and consistency of the Windows machine, which is not something I ever expected.
- p_ing 2y ago
  > Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking This has been true since the NT4 days where you could make that spinning rust beg for mercy under a heavily used page file and NT would never fall over. macOS will complain fairly quickly after it's swap space runs out. And if you read /r/macos or /r/mac, you'll see that happens with innocuous programs as well as 1st party Apple apps like Pages/Music. There's a memory leak in userland across a wide variety of apps in macOS right now.
tannhaeuser 2y ago
Forget about it, Windows 11 is chock full of "telemetry" to train MS/"OpenAI"/Copilot models to predict user behavior (that is, to make you obsolete) and ads. At some point, MS management has decided it is more lucrative for MSFT stock in times of AI craze to turn Windows against its users. It didn't have to become like this, and while I've never been a Windows person, it's sad to see Windows go. I've just recently setup probably my last Windows 10 tablet/"convertible" (that will remain on Windows 10, just made sure to install Windows 11 in addition/in a dual boot setup so I don't risk a drama going forward when it eventually needs 11), and the tablet features Windows 8 had and to a lesser degree Windows 10 still has were not half-bad and even had "soul"; I wish MS hadn't given totally up on mobile, tablets in education, etc.
varispeed 2y ago
Desktop PC maybe, but for something more mobile there is currently no capable hardware that could be a match to any Apple Mx processor.

LeoPanthera 2y ago

It's shocking how often other companies just outright clone what Apple does. That new start menu grid isn't just similar to the iPhone App Library, it's identical.

bayindirh 2y ago
And the iPhone is just a copy and evolution of the PalmOS paradigm. I'm not mad at Apple, because when they put up that UI, the PalmOS was basically dead. Then (what remains of) Palm had cloned the UI of Apple Watch for their "small" phone.
- GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
  I had a Palm Pre way back in the day, it was easily 5 years ahead of other phones. It's very clear that a lot of the iPhone's initial design language was inspired by PalmOS
kypro 2y ago
To be fair to MS I remember almost everyone was copying aspects of the Metro UI in the early 2010s.
- smjburton 2y ago
  Yeah, it wasn't always the best experience on desktop, but on tablet and mobile, it helped small screens feel bigger and made apps feel more dynamic and organic with live tiles. The emphasis on typography was a nice touch as well. Although it's harder to tell now, a lot of the current UI design for apps draws from the Metro UI style with big, bold fonts for navigational elements, fluid, dynamic, animated content experiences, etc.
princevegeta89 2y ago
Actually, Apple copied a ton of things and features from Android 8 and above.
jpalawaga 2y ago

ItsBob 2y ago

I'm genuinely curious why anyone would download a beta of Windows... can someone enlighten me? I can think of one scenario only - You have a desktop app or drivers that you want to ensure will work in the upcoming non-beta, so getting a head start would be good I suppose. But for anyone else, why would you test software for free from a trillion dollar company that have a bit of a track record now of hostility towards users. This isn't a troll, I'm a Windows 11 user myself. I am genuinely at a loss. Edit: I'm being a dumbass (on first coffee as I write this), there's plenty of reasons why people would download a beta... I was thinking from my perspective only!

Strom 2y ago
The beta versions contain lots of bug fixes. Some of those bugs are bad enough to want the fix fast.
- ItsBob 2y ago
  True, I never thought of that one. I know that Windows gets a hard (justified?) time for stability and whatnot these days but it's been pretty solid for me so I forget sometimes.
AndrewDucker 2y ago
That's exactly the reason, so you can test in advance. (Unless there's some new feature you're really looking forward to. But I'm not aware of many of them.)
- ItsBob 2y ago
  I'd usually bow out at this point but if you've ever been on any Windows/Microsoft-related subreddit, there are many many people that download these betas. I did it once, many years ago, for Windows 10 and my printer started printing out garbage in multiple pages no matter what you printed. At that time I used the printer quite frequently. I'd had no issues until then. I remember checking to see if printer issues were a thing in that build and they weren't listed. That was it for me.
- 2y ago

nicman23 2y ago

fucking bring the folder menu back for start. win 7 had it perfect. everything else is stupid. it is not even nostalgia, it just worked.

aquir 2y ago
Back then, when I was using Windows my Start Menu was empty, I just used Search all the time. Of course, you have to disable all the other search features like web search and suggestions etc.
kypro 2y ago
Win 98 was basically perfect imo... Everything about that UI was simple and predictable. Menus were descriptive and information dense. No unnecessary widgets and fancy UI. If you're looking for pure productivity then Win 98 was great. XP and 7 were great too, but they had more unnecessary UI junk while becoming overly minimalistic where it matters. I strongly disagreed with removing the "Start" button and replacing it with the four squares button for example. And presumably they only did that because some UI dude thought it looked better... It's not like modern screens don't have room for the text.
- reginald78 2y ago
  To me 2000 was the peak since it combined stability of NT with 98 UI and plug and play (which had gotten over its ugly early period). Also 98/2000 had a file search that actually worked, even if it was slow. XP added an animated dog to it.
- nicman23 2y ago
  nah i like the search it had
princevegeta89 2y ago
Kind of insane that the right-click menu took about 2 seconds to show up after right-clicking on the desktop. I don't know if it was ever fixed, but that was my impression after trying to understand Windows 10.
2y ago

out_sider 2y ago

Last December I bought a Asus Zenbook S14 with the Core 7 Ultra (lunar lake) and to be honest I'm loving windows + wsl, being able to have a premade ubuntu image configured with my building tools and just import and work on my balcuny for 9h is amazing. On top of that , although it's not the best gaming machine (far from that) I can still run a cs2 and Halo inifinity prety well :).

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
globnomulous 2y ago
Did you post this comment in the wrong thread?
pjmlp 2y ago
That has been my experience since Windows 7, back then I used a mix of VirtualBox and VMWare Workstation, WSL makes it one less thing to install. Windows 7 was my turning point, moving away from dual boot, something I have been doing since installing Slackware 2.0 on that 1995's summer.
diggan 2y ago
Some year ago I bought a Surface Pro 8 thinking it was the best hardware to run Windows on and holy hell was I wrong. Overheats in two seconds, performance is probably worse than my Steam Deck purchased years ago and the only way I can have it run relatively well is a barebones Linux install. Before that, I gave WSL(2) a try and besides giving me half the performance compared to running Linux the normal way and introducing various compatibility issues (although it's just a VM?!), a recent Windows update broke the WSL image on disk leading to a corrupted install, never managed to recover from that and gave up. I can't wait for Ableton to (eventually) get their thumbs out of their asses and make Ableton work on Linux so I can dump Windows fully. Written from my Linux X1 Carbon which also somehow magically works on my patio, don't ask me how.
- in_a_hole 2y ago
  You may have already heard this but Bitwig runs on Linux and has an Ableton-like workflow, as well as a richer effects system, I'm told.

staticelf 2y ago

Windows is spyware, every time you update it asks if it can use a keylogger on you and track you. It doesn't matter if you've said no before. There is not a single windows application that doesn't include a lot of telemetry. It's sad what Windows has become.

tartoran 2y ago
> It's sad what Windows has become. It's sad users aren't running away.

abcd_f 2y ago

Yeah. This thing outright crashes in SystemParametersInfo() when trying to query if the system supports "full-window dragging". Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA.

ChocolateGod 2y ago
> Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA. You are their QA!
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  That would be nice, if they truly listened to their users.
tehbeard 2y ago
John Q. Public is the QA for Microsoft these days.
roskelld 2y ago
> Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA. They got laid off in 2014. MS relies more on insiders, early update roll outs, automated testing. I'm still on Windows 10 so can't comment on the state of 11, but I feel like I see a good number of headlines about botched updates. The recent 24h2 screwed up users that had Ubisoft software installed and caused them to pause roll out. In October an update caused systems to get into a bluescreen loop requiring a rollback. The fact that they're pushing people to 11 this year and stopping 10, when 11 is still having "teething" issues is not good.

pjmlp 2y ago

When I was a WinRT/UWP believer, I used to follow the preview builds regularly, always looking forward to Windows evolution, what cool features would take us one step further from hungarian notation into healthy mix of .NET and C++ new world. After the disaster management has made out of UWP and related developer experience, and the follow-up Project Reunion efforts, I couldn't care less. They come when they come.

jimbob45 2y ago
Why do you feel WinRT/UWP (and probably MAUI) were such failures?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  It starts by Microsoft not following the "Developers, Developers, Developers" meme they became famous for. While, from my point of view, UWP is what .NET 1.0 should have been (see [0]), the way it was introduced, requiring a complete rewrite from Win32/.NET applications, with limited capabilities, already required some adoption love. Then while trying to achieve feature parity with Win32/.NET, this was done at the expense of breaking compatibilty across WinRT generations (8 => 8.1. => 10 => WinAppSDK), and if that wasn't enough, also breaking the .NET and C++ tooling experience in the process. I think it was a mix of issues, management naturally, lack of empathy for the Windows developer community, whatever internal KPIs they had/have to meet, and most likely also quite relevant, it appears new employees don't have much experience with Windows development or its culture, were raised in a world without Windows. People like myself have been PC users since the early days of MS-DOS 3.3, naturally new employees now have other backgrounds. [0] - https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
  - fifticon 2y ago
    basically MS has dropped the ball on UI since the time of WPF (I maintain apps stuck in WPF at work). It looks like the crayon electron browser kids are running the ship now adays :-/ I find WPF incredibly unsexy; unfortunately everything they have tried afterwards is even more amateurish. As others have mentioned, they have probably doomed themselves to eternal KPI hell, so with zero management vision, zero management talent, zero management strategy and zero management commitment, they are incapable of delivering anything to rise above Q3 mediocrity (Ie, they cannot deliver on any meaningful multiyear strategy, because they all have their heads up Q4 asses). They are the Intel of UI, at this point.

nbzso 2y ago

For all that have circumstances which require using Win 11 I have advice. Buy a Win Explorer replacement. I tested this one and the experience is tenfold. Customization is immense, and you will not wait it to load at all. Directory Opus https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ https://www.gpsoft.com.au/

francislavoie 2y ago
I use xplorer2, works pretty well. I don't do anything fancy with it, but I like the two-panel layout and the "scrap" panel for quick links
varun_ch 2y ago
The biggest shock for me when moving to macOS from Windows was discovering how much better Finder is compared to Explorer. It’s night and day in speed, usability, design, etc. And yet, I still see people complaining about macOS Finder… which just goes to show how far behind Explorer is.
- nbzso 2y ago
  On a Mac I use PathFinder. https://cocoatech.io/ https://cocoatech.io/:)
- ndiddy 2y ago
  Finder is fast until you need to use a network share. Your choices are NFS (wait on a loading screen for 10-30 seconds every time you change directories) and SMB (changing directories is fast, but Finder does a bunch of blocking calls or something so when you scroll it beachballs every few seconds). I don't have any problems using the same shares on Explorer, Dolphin, or Nautilus, it's Finder specific.
  - madjam002 2y ago
    I had a good experience with an app called Owlfiles for network shares
- p_ing 2y ago

xunil2ycom 2y ago

All I want from Microsoft with respect to Windows 11 is the ability to put my task bar on the left side of my screen again.

Semaphor 2y ago
It's not a 100% solution, and paid (dirt cheap though), closed source, but as I also have my monitor in landscape mode, I use https://startallback.com https://startallback.com
fifticon 2y ago
erh you can do this somehow,I did it to mine? now what _I_ want, is to be able to resize the taskbar again. also, I would prefer win11 didn't disable just about everything I had configured, particularly preview for file types. and - I dont know how they did it, but basic file explorer view feels much slower than win10,on the same machine. given that file explorer is basically all windows boils down to, i am not happy that they tske efforts to make it crappier. and given that win95 was able to show a file grid in 1995, I wonder how they are able to screw that up, 30 years later?
billfor 2y ago
Does windows classic (open) shell not work on Windows 11? I use it all the time on 10 and have the task bar on the right side.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mihaaly 2y ago
You are a dreamer. I'd settle for having the real taskbar shown in Teams screen sharing instead of having the time rolled back to the time Teams started, or something. When I dare I dream of proper renaming experience inside of a OneDrive folder, without overriding me while typing. But that must be too much for the developers nowadays, unbearable difficulty! Me the humble servant of MS might must shut up.
- 2y ago

jmward01 2y ago

My first MS OS was DOS 2.x (forgot the exact point release...). I remember going to Costco as a kid and getting excited whenever a new version of DOS, and later Windows came out because each and every one of them was a true upgrade in every sense of the word. They built things for the users and it showed. I even got to beta test Windows 95 and was blown away when it came out. The last good OS MS released was Windows XP. After that the trend was clear. They were no-longer building stuff for users and instead were building for companies to take advantage of users. MS has completely lost my trust and I doubt they will ever get it back.

estebank 2y ago
> The last good OS MS released was Windows XP. I'm reminded of how much people hated it when it came out. Post Vista it was widely liked. A lot of people are also nostalgic of 7 now. I wonder if we'll have a batch of people nostalgic for 10 or 11 in a decade in the same vein. I doubt it, but who knows. The old rule was "every other release is loved/hated", which held until at least 10 (8 was hated, 10 was somewhat accepted). I also remember that 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows".
- codezero 2y ago
  Yeah a lot of people stayed on 98 SE2 until the XP service packs were out and XP was solid.
- isk517 2y ago
  Don't think I've ever encounter someone that didn't become nostalgic for 10 after having to switch to 11. So many pointless UI changes, and just like with 8 none of them are necessary to force the user to use beyond some incessant need to dictate how users do things on the part of Microsoft.
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  I really have not seen anything material since windows 7 that would meet the bar of major improvement. Windows 7 with bug & security fixes, adding support for new hardware standards and SW developments, and feature evolution would be superior to what we have today IMO. Prior to win7 all the revolutionary "coming next" things either became impractical or were dropped. I have a desktop that still runs all tripe-A games and is my main development machine running win10 that MS says is a boat anchor come the fall; this will be my last windows machine. Microsoft has been pretty good to me as a developer (despite some of the technologies intentionally designed to do nothing but distract and consume attention) but the consumer side is a pathological shit-show and appears to really hate people (or at least love money more). MS looks a lot like the White House these days.

haunter 2y ago

Daily reminded that LTSC exists

_fat_santa 2y ago
The problem I have with LTSC is that it's specifically for Enterprise customers. Sure you can download a copy of Win10 LTSC but you're never going to be running it as a "legit customer".
- hollandheese 2y ago
  Not even Microsoft cares about that anymore. MAS would've been shutdown years upon years ago if they did.
- vitorsr 2y ago
  You can buy legitimate licenses from legitimate bulk license resellers. Thank the Court of Justice of the European Union.

edude03 2y ago

First time I've seen a windows update on the front page of HN. What's particularly interesting or news worthy about this update?

lr0 2y ago
Nothing. As you can see almost 99% of the comments are not about it but about Windows itself and unrelated questions. This is a very common phenomenon in HN.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago
  [dead]
- wkat4242 2y ago
  True, I do wonder how it got upvoted then though
  - _fat_santa 2y ago
    IMHO It's better to think about these posts as "proxy discussions posts". I think many HN users yearn for a post where they can argue about a particular topic but straight up posting "Hey lets discuss and argue about Windows" would be seen as a low quality post, even though everyone secretly wants to dive into the comments on those kinds of posts. I find that the HN community has many unique and charming aspects to it compared to other communities on the internet.
  - hnuser123456 2y ago
    Drag and dropping files from PC to phone as an officially supported first-party feature is nice.
throwaway888abc 2y ago
It serve as reminder that Windows (my laptop) will be potentially broken again ? Alert message ? Upvoted the news, appreciate. Will stay vigilant

jpalawaga 2y ago

The new file sharing menu looks great. Honestly it looks like something I'd expect to see in macOS.

dheatov 2y ago

And yet it still can't reliably stay up for more than a few days without being forcefully rebooted.

layer8 2y ago

> When you start dragging a local file with mouse (or touch) from File Explorer or your desktop, a handy tray appears at the very top of your screen allowing you to drop the file into one of the displayed apps or choose “More…” to open the Windows share window. Great, that way we now get an animation at the top of the screen every time we start dragging a file, whether we want to “share” the file or not. Who is coming up with stuff like this and thinks it’s a good idea? Especially since you could drag objects to apps on the task bar since forever, and also the context menu is arguably a more practical way to share a file? At least integrate the drag targets into the Explorer window somehow, or hover them next to the mouse pointer (like the mini-toolbars upon selection in Word), instead of showing them maximally far away at the top of the screen. Geez.

akomtu 2y ago

"Windows Insider" sounds like an AI feature that watches your work, creates a daily intelligence report and uploads it to Microsoft, thus giving it the insider info on your work.

zamadatix 2y ago

Ironically with Insider Preview it's been harder to track what all is coming in the next version of Windows. On one hand it's all there in the blog posts, on the other hand it's not clear "between stable and current preview + announced road map, what's the total list". Prior to rolling Insider Preview program builds news sites used to publish regular articles with the list. Maybe some still do but my difficulty has been sorting through the ones just rehashing each blog post vs summarizing the upcoming versions differences. What's everyone's go to place for keeping up with that kind of thing these days, if any?