6 ms·

Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11

84 points by todsacerdoti 9mo ago

bigyabai 9mo ago
> However, there are some programs I use daily (like Scrivener) and are essential to me 2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012. We're making good progress, folks!
- endemic 9mo ago
  The author was _so_ close!
- jasode 9mo ago
  >2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012. Your comment is a little confusing since the author already mentioned Wine with the following sentence that's after the one you quoted: >"Using Wine is an option... well. Buggy option." Were you trying to disagree with the author and say it's not actually buggy?
  - cogman10 9mo ago
    Wine has gotten very good over the years. But I think we have to recognize that it has had a pretty large usability issue. There are several programs, like winetricks, that have existed because of how hard it can be to get things setup to work well with random bits of software. It's been a far cry from the windows or mac experience of double clicking on an installer and having everything just work. Though it's pretty close to that now.
stronglikedan 9mo ago
hate is the perfect word. you can't even drag anything onto the taskbar icons yet, and maybe never will be able to. just one small example of many, of why hate is the perfect word
- Rohansi 9mo ago
  You can drag files etc. onto taskbar icons and it will bring that window to the foreground for you to choose where to drop it. What else do you expect dragging things onto the taskbar icons to do?
  - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
    not OP, but in macOS, you can drag a file onto a dock icon and that program will open the file if possible. very handy - i use it with Xld, an audio transcoding app. it runs quietly in the background and whenever i need to convert a bunch of FLACs to MP3 (or whatever) i can just drag the folder to the icon and 10 seconds later everything is good to go, without ever really directly interacting with Xld.
- snailmailman 9mo ago
  The removal of several features from windows 10 is infuriating. Why can’t the taskbar be moved to the side? Why can’t the taskbar be made smaller? Why can I pick the smaller icons, but the taskbar remains the same size, with massive margins and blank space? At least they finally added back the “don’t combine taskbar icons” but it’s still lacking basic functionality that was previously there.
mips_avatar 9mo ago
Hate might be a strong word, but it's natural to feel that way towards a product designed with the primary purpose of increasing LTV per customer per PC.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
lousken 9mo ago
Hate is a weak word, basic stuff like notepad, snipping tool or terminal don't even work today https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-apps-like-notepad-arent-loading-what-is-error-code-0x803f8001-and-how-d https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...
- anonymars 9mo ago
  My most recent astonishment was they've shoved copilot into notepad. Why did they get rid of Wordpad and ruin notepad again? It's like they've forgotten the entire purpose of Task Manager, Notepad, etc. Then again (gestures at World Economic Forum today)...feels like I'm mainlining crazy pills these days.
  - deltoidmaximus 9mo ago
    Telemetry said a lot of people were using notepad so if they shove AI into it the AI usage number goes up.
  - p_ing 9mo ago
    The purpose of Notepad, for Microsoft, is that it is an experimental playground, and always has been. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...
    - einr 9mo ago
      I know who runs that blog, but that's a really exaggerated take. Notepad has had nearly identical UX from Windows 1.0 until 10. Sure, there's a search feature that appeared at some point, ditto with the status bar, at some point they made it able to open files larger than 64K, and apparently you can open files from URLs directly? Five or so noticable changes in an extremely lightweight and utilitarian application in thirty years is not at all like completely redesigning it into an AI slop machine.
      - RajT88 9mo ago
svrtknst 9mo ago
I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos? Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_. Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works. My experience with the distros and desktops Ive tried in Linux have felt like windows 98 with a janky web interface on top, or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source. Often feels like a thin veil on top of a technically-inclined terminal OS. Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?
- esseph 9mo ago
  It's a GUI designed to run from a CLI, not a GUI with a CLI bolted on. I think you'll always pay the tax on Linux, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing from certain perspectives. As far as app installations, system things come in from dnf on fedora 43. Everything else I install is usually a flatpak from flathub.
- baby_souffle 9mo ago
  > Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels? That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc. > or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source. To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.
  - greenavocado 9mo ago
    AppImage is the clear winner on the Linux desktop for things that aren't in the repos or for users that are unwilling to engage with apt too much. AppImage provides a macOS like Application experience. Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
branon 9mo ago
> At this very moment of writing this post, I don’t care about the lack of Microsoft support. [...] [U]sing Win10 as a regular desktop OS on a machine connected to the Internet past the last security update, I'm aware that the risk of a compromise only increases as time goes on... Do they know about LTSC? There is no reason to run Windows 10 without security updates: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol (pirate site but you don't have to use their tools, all the information here about update tracks for Windows is still valid)
clickety_clack 9mo ago
In addition to the title’s “hate is a strong word”, in the comments we have “hate is a weak word”, “hate might be a strong word”, and “hate is the perfect word”, averaging out to something like hate being ever-so-slightly on the strong side of perfect.
sergiotapia 9mo ago
Windows 11 is so bad that I finally made the permanent jump to Linux. At the end of my time with Windows, it would HARD freeze about twice a week. I thought I was having hardware failures and got really scared. When I switched to Omarchy, I've had zero crashes. Omarchy gave me a great OS that I spend no time tweaking and fiddling with. Steam works out of the box, and all the games I play work out of the box. Control, Duke Nukem 3D, Blade Chimera, Elden Ring, Ender Lilies, Lorn's Lure, Pragamata, RE 4 Remake, it just works. If you're a gamer don't be scared and give it a try, you will not want to go back to windows.
Eric_WVGG 9mo ago
> Since I already committed to ditching my partner in favor of a more attractive ex… This was a funny sentence to read, as my first thought as I started the article was “Windows users are starting to remind me of people stuck in cycles of abusive relationships.” Windows has been in a cycle of abusively bad releases followed by sheepish "sorry, we learned our lesson" releases for nearly thirty years. What is the author’s plan for five years from now, just hope that Windows 12 isn't garbage? All I can figure is that every generation spawns a new set of users who never knew any better, a segment of them reaching the breaking point, but can't be bothered to influence the next generation. regardless: this is always who Windows was. Get out and get help.
- volkercraig 9mo ago
  Don't get me wrong, If hating Microslop was an Olympic sport I'd be on the podium every 4 years, but Win 95, XP, and 7 were functional, usable and stable OS's. 8 got a lot of flak for it's horrible UI changes, but under the hood it was actually a big improvement to 7. It's been steadily downhill since 7 though. Integration of spyware got it's foothold in 8 and now that we are at 11, you've got a completely spyware ridden OS, and then on top of that, basic things like context menus, audio drivers, screenshot tools, and connecting monitors to laptops is broken. Many of these issues were ironically the same issues that stopped me from running Ubuntu Dapper Drake when I first installed it. It's just an unacceptably bad product from Microsoft, and if businesses weren't vendor locked (specifically the business I work for) I'd never even look at it, much like I don't look at Lotus or Corel products.
  - cogman10 9mo ago
    Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of. The biggest problem with Vista is you had a lot of Windows XP computers running happily on 256 and 512MB of ram. That made updating to Vista REALLY painful to a lot of people. I think people forget about how little resources 95, 98, and XP needed to run. XP was also criticized for being a hog when it first came out. People viewed Windows 2000 as being the good windows right up until memory became more abundant. You couldn't run XP on a machine with 64MB of ram, but you could run windows ME and 98 on that same machine.
mongol 9mo ago
One thing that is pretty impressive with Windows 11 however is WSL. I can just run a X program and it pops up as its own Window. So for example, I can run Chrome on Ubuntu on Windows, out of the box. On Windows 10, WSL is good for the command line, but Windows 11 takes it much further.
- Zardoz84 9mo ago
  Why the pain of working with W11, when you can run Ubuntu or, better, any other distro in your machine.
  - floxy 9mo ago
    So you can continue to work with MS Office, etc. on your at-work machine, maintained by the IT department.
  - mongol 9mo ago
    No I can't. I have Windows 11 on my work computer, and it is what I have to use.
- ankurdhama 9mo ago
  WSLg also works on Windows 10.
grouchomarx 9mo ago
win11 is the product of a legion of middle managers. It's embarrassing
jimnotgym 9mo ago
I used Ubuntu at home for years, but went back to Windows when my last Thinkpad died, around the time WSL became a thing. Then I stopped coding and just became a Windows user. But it just got worse every week. Slower and more annoying. I think I'm going to ditch my family Office subscription and install Ubuntu again.
tonymet 9mo ago
> why is the UI so slow / explorer slow / bluetooth slow this is a legitimate complaint, but I see latency absolutely everywhere. my iPhone 17 Pro dropped frames out of the box . now 3/4 unlocks drops frames. I'm not defending Windows, it's obviously in decline -- but trying to identify root cause. There used to be curmudgeon engineers on staff who would berate team members over blocked UIs, dropped frames, input latency over 30ms . Dave Cutler made a rubber stamp that rejected (then paper) code reviews with "Size is the Goal". That culture has retired. Web-dev's design interactions targeting 500-2000ms, so to them everything on the OS looks fast . Adding 150ms to right-click is unnoticeable . Like 15kHz audio to a boomer or purple to the color blind . It's easy to beat up on MS, because most open-source devs have despised them. But Microsoft had a very high bar for engineering until about 10 years ago ( you may laugh, but remember they were writing OS's that last 40+ years) . Apple had an extremely high bar until about 5 years ago. This isn't just one bad product, but an entire industry lowering its standards.
- daemin 9mo ago
  It's because these things aren't priorities for management so they aren't for the engineers, the latest fads like AI are priorities and therefore they get integrated everywhere.
  - tonymet 9mo ago
    that's a copout in my opinion. Most of the quality decisions are established by team culture and experience. If a team is full of webdevs, no amount of management investment in performance will make a good app. conversely, a team of high performance members will be able to deliver quality apps despite management's input.
    - daemin 9mo ago
      It still depends on management to determine the culture and what requirements and limitations are most important. I mean take a look at what happened to Boeing, there were people that cared about quality down in the trenches but they were overridden by the people that didn't care about quality, just about shoving items out the door.
pbohun 9mo ago
It feels like everything is falling apart and getting worse. Yet somehow people are racing to produce AI slop faster. If software eventually collapses under its own weight, things might be so borked we have to bootstrap everything from scratch, staring with assembly.
- tim333 9mo ago
  I know it's not fashionable to be positive about macos but since ditching Windows a decade ago it's pretty much just worked, and I can run Excel and the like. I'm sticking with Sequoia and avoiding 26 though, for now.
m463 9mo ago
> Disable AI - Disables search engines’ AI features (they don't even run in the background) I don't mind duck duck go's search assistant.
g8oz 9mo ago
Why indeed is Windows 11 Explorer so slow? Why is file copying so slow? I started using Double Commander over Explorer and Terracopy for moving files around. Double Commander isn't the prettiest but it works quite well. The responsiveness of both these apps shows that the problem isn't necessarily the Windows 11 operating system itself.
starkeeper 9mo ago
What they have done with 25H2 should be ILLEGAL. - Forcing AI - Reversing Anti-Adware settings by default RemoveWindowsAI https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI ProtonDB The list of AI crap is jaw gobbin massive. ProtonDB checks known linux game compatibility && login with Steam to check your library! https://www.protondb.com/dashboard https://www.protondb.com/dashboard RemoveWindowsAI shows a massive amount of AI crap they are trying to force on us. It removes EVERYTHING and is updated regularly. I DO HATE Windows 11 and don't trust Microsoft with my data one bit. Every prompt you make lives in their logs no matter what they say - they flat out lie about it. "Oh we made it anonyomous". Sure. Yeah. RIGHT. With AI any data can be made Not-Anonymous. Hopefully the EU will smash! I'm trying bazzite (https://bazzite.gg https://bazzite.gg) which is made for gaming. My official reasons to hate Windows 11 go on and on. Here are a few Windows 11 REMOVED vertical task bars - the most screen space efficient way to Task! Windows 11 ARBITRARILY limits the number of Apps you can have pinned to your task bar, Windows 11 WASTES a massive number of pixels and forces you to have a blank task bar. Just typing this is letting the rage flow and I'm embracing the DARK SIDE. I love AI when it's my choice to give them my data, and I love developing with it, and I love building it into Apps for users who need it as a tool. Plus 1000% NSA scooping up everything including with moles on site at every major tech company.
celsoazevedo 9mo ago
I don't use Windows a lot, but still have a desktop for gaming. With Windows 10, I started using "O&O ShutUp10"[0], which lets me easily disable (and revert the changes if needed) most of the crap enabled by default. There's no OneDrive, CoPilot, weather, "news", etc, annoying me, which makes my Windows experience bearable. I just have to open the app once after each major update because Microsoft loves to re-enable features. My upgrade to Windows 11 was smooth. I didn't have the issues reported in the article. But man, it sometimes feels like they forgot to optimized it. Opening/closing the start menu, viewing all apps, isn't that smooth for me. I have a powerful computer, with a fast GPU and one of the more recent AMD CPUs... and at times it's like it's running at 24fps. I mainly use a Mac, which is better, but after seeing the "Liquid Glass" UI lag on M1 machines, I decided to stay on MacOS Sequoia. Is everyone ignoring performance now? [0] https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
- pc86 9mo ago
  They're not ignoring performance, they're ignoring experience on old machines or hardware outside of top tier. Part of it is laziness for sure but part of it is, I believe, intentional to push the refresh cycle as short as possible. I know people who count down the days to their 2 year phone upgrade just on the off chance the next update might slow their phone down a bit. Not even that they upgrade as soon as the phone gets slow - they proactively upgrade to prevent it from ever happening in the first place, even for a day or two. This is what these companies want.
cadamsdotcom 9mo ago
We have crossed into a fascinating time in computing: market power lets incumbents make “whatever”, shove it in a forced update with no going back, and still be valued in the trillions. Can’t wait til this phase is done.
- 9rx 9mo ago
  It is feeling quite reminiscent of the IE6 era, minus the updates part.
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  I honestly think that the ability to shove updates out live is one of the worst things about software these days. Well, the ability to do so isn't bad, but the way companies actually do it makes it bad.
storus 9mo ago
Just today when trying to run Forza Horizon 5 from a new laptop I got an Xbox login popup with some QR code I was supposed to scan but the window was super small and I wasn't able to resize it to actually see the full QR code. One has to wonder what is going on with Microsoft if things like these pass they "quality" checks.
greazy 9mo ago
Yesterday I discovered that Windows 11 has two right click menues that appear depending on where you click on a file??? I despise W11.
cmxch 9mo ago
With as much telemetry and unwanted features, one would be forgiven to find the actual OS under it all.
pickpuck 9mo ago
ExplorerPatcher fixes everything I hate about Win11
kmfrk 9mo ago
Undo Close Tab - A very handy add-on, adds a button to quickly undo a closed tab. There is probably a shortcut for that, but I cannot bother remembering it. It's Ctrl+Shift+T for those wondering. Works similarly if the last thing you closed was a window.
grigio 9mo ago
There is MacOS and Linux, nobody forces you to stay on Windows
tim-tday 9mo ago
What’s wrong with strong words?
egeres 9mo ago
This Christmas I bought my mom a new computer because her old one (W10) was falling apart. It took some time but I managed to convince her to give ubuntu a try instead of moving to W11. After a week of complaints and stubbornness, she got really surprised about the lack of annoying prompts asking for updates, dark patterns to switch to edge, promotions etc. Now she has fully adapted and for her basic needs (browsing, reading pdfs, editing spreadsheets) she's basically set for life It's shocking to read the headlines about the latest direction windows is taking and how user unfriendly is becoming
- lousken 9mo ago
  Keep in mind ubuntu does not ask for updates - snap just updates apps as it wants. So sometimes firefox just breaks because of it.

84 points by todsacerdoti 9mo ago

> However, there are some programs I use daily (like Scrivener) and are essential to me 2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012. We're making good progress, folks!

endemic 9mo ago
The author was _so_ close!
jasode 9mo ago
>2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012. Your comment is a little confusing since the author already mentioned Wine with the following sentence that's after the one you quoted: >"Using Wine is an option... well. Buggy option." Were you trying to disagree with the author and say it's not actually buggy?
- cogman10 9mo ago
  Wine has gotten very good over the years. But I think we have to recognize that it has had a pretty large usability issue. There are several programs, like winetricks, that have existed because of how hard it can be to get things setup to work well with random bits of software. It's been a far cry from the windows or mac experience of double clicking on an installer and having everything just work. Though it's pretty close to that now.

stronglikedan 9mo ago

hate is the perfect word. you can't even drag anything onto the taskbar icons yet, and maybe never will be able to. just one small example of many, of why hate is the perfect word

Rohansi 9mo ago
You can drag files etc. onto taskbar icons and it will bring that window to the foreground for you to choose where to drop it. What else do you expect dragging things onto the taskbar icons to do?
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
  not OP, but in macOS, you can drag a file onto a dock icon and that program will open the file if possible. very handy - i use it with Xld, an audio transcoding app. it runs quietly in the background and whenever i need to convert a bunch of FLACs to MP3 (or whatever) i can just drag the folder to the icon and 10 seconds later everything is good to go, without ever really directly interacting with Xld.
snailmailman 9mo ago
The removal of several features from windows 10 is infuriating. Why can’t the taskbar be moved to the side? Why can’t the taskbar be made smaller? Why can I pick the smaller icons, but the taskbar remains the same size, with massive margins and blank space? At least they finally added back the “don’t combine taskbar icons” but it’s still lacking basic functionality that was previously there.

mips_avatar 9mo ago

Hate might be a strong word, but it's natural to feel that way towards a product designed with the primary purpose of increasing LTV per customer per PC.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

lousken 9mo ago

Hate is a weak word, basic stuff like notepad, snipping tool or terminal don't even work today https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-11-apps-like-notepad-arent-loading-what-is-error-code-0x803f8001-and-how-d https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...

anonymars 9mo ago
My most recent astonishment was they've shoved copilot into notepad. Why did they get rid of Wordpad and ruin notepad again? It's like they've forgotten the entire purpose of Task Manager, Notepad, etc. Then again (gestures at World Economic Forum today)...feels like I'm mainlining crazy pills these days.
- deltoidmaximus 9mo ago
  Telemetry said a lot of people were using notepad so if they shove AI into it the AI usage number goes up.
- p_ing 9mo ago
  The purpose of Notepad, for Microsoft, is that it is an experimental playground, and always has been. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98795 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...
  - einr 9mo ago
    I know who runs that blog, but that's a really exaggerated take. Notepad has had nearly identical UX from Windows 1.0 until 10. Sure, there's a search feature that appeared at some point, ditto with the status bar, at some point they made it able to open files larger than 64K, and apparently you can open files from URLs directly? Five or so noticable changes in an extremely lightweight and utilitarian application in thirty years is not at all like completely redesigning it into an AI slop machine.
    - RajT88 9mo ago

svrtknst 9mo ago

I'm not being factious, but is there any Linux distro with a desktop experience that matches Windows and macos? Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_. Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works. My experience with the distros and desktops Ive tried in Linux have felt like windows 98 with a janky web interface on top, or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source. Often feels like a thin veil on top of a technically-inclined terminal OS. Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?

esseph 9mo ago
It's a GUI designed to run from a CLI, not a GUI with a CLI bolted on. I think you'll always pay the tax on Linux, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing from certain perspectives. As far as app installations, system things come in from dnf on fedora 43. Everything else I install is usually a flatpak from flathub.
baby_souffle 9mo ago
> Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels? That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc. > or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source. To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.
- greenavocado 9mo ago
  AppImage is the clear winner on the Linux desktop for things that aren't in the repos or for users that are unwilling to engage with apt too much. AppImage provides a macOS like Application experience. Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

branon 9mo ago

> At this very moment of writing this post, I don’t care about the lack of Microsoft support. [...] [U]sing Win10 as a regular desktop OS on a machine connected to the Internet past the last security update, I'm aware that the risk of a compromise only increases as time goes on... Do they know about LTSC? There is no reason to run Windows 10 without security updates: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol (pirate site but you don't have to use their tools, all the information here about update tracks for Windows is still valid)

clickety_clack 9mo ago

In addition to the title’s “hate is a strong word”, in the comments we have “hate is a weak word”, “hate might be a strong word”, and “hate is the perfect word”, averaging out to something like hate being ever-so-slightly on the strong side of perfect.

sergiotapia 9mo ago

Windows 11 is so bad that I finally made the permanent jump to Linux. At the end of my time with Windows, it would HARD freeze about twice a week. I thought I was having hardware failures and got really scared. When I switched to Omarchy, I've had zero crashes. Omarchy gave me a great OS that I spend no time tweaking and fiddling with. Steam works out of the box, and all the games I play work out of the box. Control, Duke Nukem 3D, Blade Chimera, Elden Ring, Ender Lilies, Lorn's Lure, Pragamata, RE 4 Remake, it just works. If you're a gamer don't be scared and give it a try, you will not want to go back to windows.

Eric_WVGG 9mo ago

> Since I already committed to ditching my partner in favor of a more attractive ex… This was a funny sentence to read, as my first thought as I started the article was “Windows users are starting to remind me of people stuck in cycles of abusive relationships.” Windows has been in a cycle of abusively bad releases followed by sheepish "sorry, we learned our lesson" releases for nearly thirty years. What is the author’s plan for five years from now, just hope that Windows 12 isn't garbage? All I can figure is that every generation spawns a new set of users who never knew any better, a segment of them reaching the breaking point, but can't be bothered to influence the next generation. regardless: this is always who Windows was. Get out and get help.

volkercraig 9mo ago
Don't get me wrong, If hating Microslop was an Olympic sport I'd be on the podium every 4 years, but Win 95, XP, and 7 were functional, usable and stable OS's. 8 got a lot of flak for it's horrible UI changes, but under the hood it was actually a big improvement to 7. It's been steadily downhill since 7 though. Integration of spyware got it's foothold in 8 and now that we are at 11, you've got a completely spyware ridden OS, and then on top of that, basic things like context menus, audio drivers, screenshot tools, and connecting monitors to laptops is broken. Many of these issues were ironically the same issues that stopped me from running Ubuntu Dapper Drake when I first installed it. It's just an unacceptably bad product from Microsoft, and if businesses weren't vendor locked (specifically the business I work for) I'd never even look at it, much like I don't look at Lotus or Corel products.
- cogman10 9mo ago
  Windows 7 was effectively just vista but enough time had passed that the required hardware to run it was easy to get a hold of. The biggest problem with Vista is you had a lot of Windows XP computers running happily on 256 and 512MB of ram. That made updating to Vista REALLY painful to a lot of people. I think people forget about how little resources 95, 98, and XP needed to run. XP was also criticized for being a hog when it first came out. People viewed Windows 2000 as being the good windows right up until memory became more abundant. You couldn't run XP on a machine with 64MB of ram, but you could run windows ME and 98 on that same machine.

mongol 9mo ago

One thing that is pretty impressive with Windows 11 however is WSL. I can just run a X program and it pops up as its own Window. So for example, I can run Chrome on Ubuntu on Windows, out of the box. On Windows 10, WSL is good for the command line, but Windows 11 takes it much further.

Zardoz84 9mo ago
Why the pain of working with W11, when you can run Ubuntu or, better, any other distro in your machine.
- floxy 9mo ago
  So you can continue to work with MS Office, etc. on your at-work machine, maintained by the IT department.
- mongol 9mo ago
  No I can't. I have Windows 11 on my work computer, and it is what I have to use.
ankurdhama 9mo ago
WSLg also works on Windows 10.

grouchomarx 9mo ago

win11 is the product of a legion of middle managers. It's embarrassing

jimnotgym 9mo ago

I used Ubuntu at home for years, but went back to Windows when my last Thinkpad died, around the time WSL became a thing. Then I stopped coding and just became a Windows user. But it just got worse every week. Slower and more annoying. I think I'm going to ditch my family Office subscription and install Ubuntu again.

tonymet 9mo ago

> why is the UI so slow / explorer slow / bluetooth slow this is a legitimate complaint, but I see latency absolutely everywhere. my iPhone 17 Pro dropped frames out of the box . now 3/4 unlocks drops frames. I'm not defending Windows, it's obviously in decline -- but trying to identify root cause. There used to be curmudgeon engineers on staff who would berate team members over blocked UIs, dropped frames, input latency over 30ms . Dave Cutler made a rubber stamp that rejected (then paper) code reviews with "Size is the Goal". That culture has retired. Web-dev's design interactions targeting 500-2000ms, so to them everything on the OS looks fast . Adding 150ms to right-click is unnoticeable . Like 15kHz audio to a boomer or purple to the color blind . It's easy to beat up on MS, because most open-source devs have despised them. But Microsoft had a very high bar for engineering until about 10 years ago ( you may laugh, but remember they were writing OS's that last 40+ years) . Apple had an extremely high bar until about 5 years ago. This isn't just one bad product, but an entire industry lowering its standards.

daemin 9mo ago
It's because these things aren't priorities for management so they aren't for the engineers, the latest fads like AI are priorities and therefore they get integrated everywhere.
- tonymet 9mo ago
  that's a copout in my opinion. Most of the quality decisions are established by team culture and experience. If a team is full of webdevs, no amount of management investment in performance will make a good app. conversely, a team of high performance members will be able to deliver quality apps despite management's input.
  - daemin 9mo ago
    It still depends on management to determine the culture and what requirements and limitations are most important. I mean take a look at what happened to Boeing, there were people that cared about quality down in the trenches but they were overridden by the people that didn't care about quality, just about shoving items out the door.

pbohun 9mo ago

It feels like everything is falling apart and getting worse. Yet somehow people are racing to produce AI slop faster. If software eventually collapses under its own weight, things might be so borked we have to bootstrap everything from scratch, staring with assembly.

tim333 9mo ago
I know it's not fashionable to be positive about macos but since ditching Windows a decade ago it's pretty much just worked, and I can run Excel and the like. I'm sticking with Sequoia and avoiding 26 though, for now.

m463 9mo ago

> Disable AI - Disables search engines’ AI features (they don't even run in the background) I don't mind duck duck go's search assistant.

g8oz 9mo ago

Why indeed is Windows 11 Explorer so slow? Why is file copying so slow? I started using Double Commander over Explorer and Terracopy for moving files around. Double Commander isn't the prettiest but it works quite well. The responsiveness of both these apps shows that the problem isn't necessarily the Windows 11 operating system itself.

starkeeper 9mo ago

What they have done with 25H2 should be ILLEGAL. - Forcing AI - Reversing Anti-Adware settings by default RemoveWindowsAI https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI ProtonDB The list of AI crap is jaw gobbin massive. ProtonDB checks known linux game compatibility && login with Steam to check your library! https://www.protondb.com/dashboard https://www.protondb.com/dashboard RemoveWindowsAI shows a massive amount of AI crap they are trying to force on us. It removes EVERYTHING and is updated regularly. I DO HATE Windows 11 and don't trust Microsoft with my data one bit. Every prompt you make lives in their logs no matter what they say - they flat out lie about it. "Oh we made it anonyomous". Sure. Yeah. RIGHT. With AI any data can be made Not-Anonymous. Hopefully the EU will smash! I'm trying bazzite (https://bazzite.gg https://bazzite.gg) which is made for gaming. My official reasons to hate Windows 11 go on and on. Here are a few Windows 11 REMOVED vertical task bars - the most screen space efficient way to Task! Windows 11 ARBITRARILY limits the number of Apps you can have pinned to your task bar, Windows 11 WASTES a massive number of pixels and forces you to have a blank task bar. Just typing this is letting the rage flow and I'm embracing the DARK SIDE. I love AI when it's my choice to give them my data, and I love developing with it, and I love building it into Apps for users who need it as a tool. Plus 1000% NSA scooping up everything including with moles on site at every major tech company.

celsoazevedo 9mo ago

I don't use Windows a lot, but still have a desktop for gaming. With Windows 10, I started using "O&O ShutUp10"[0], which lets me easily disable (and revert the changes if needed) most of the crap enabled by default. There's no OneDrive, CoPilot, weather, "news", etc, annoying me, which makes my Windows experience bearable. I just have to open the app once after each major update because Microsoft loves to re-enable features. My upgrade to Windows 11 was smooth. I didn't have the issues reported in the article. But man, it sometimes feels like they forgot to optimized it. Opening/closing the start menu, viewing all apps, isn't that smooth for me. I have a powerful computer, with a fast GPU and one of the more recent AMD CPUs... and at times it's like it's running at 24fps. I mainly use a Mac, which is better, but after seeing the "Liquid Glass" UI lag on M1 machines, I decided to stay on MacOS Sequoia. Is everyone ignoring performance now? [0] https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

pc86 9mo ago
They're not ignoring performance, they're ignoring experience on old machines or hardware outside of top tier. Part of it is laziness for sure but part of it is, I believe, intentional to push the refresh cycle as short as possible. I know people who count down the days to their 2 year phone upgrade just on the off chance the next update might slow their phone down a bit. Not even that they upgrade as soon as the phone gets slow - they proactively upgrade to prevent it from ever happening in the first place, even for a day or two. This is what these companies want.

cadamsdotcom 9mo ago

We have crossed into a fascinating time in computing: market power lets incumbents make “whatever”, shove it in a forced update with no going back, and still be valued in the trillions. Can’t wait til this phase is done.

9rx 9mo ago
It is feeling quite reminiscent of the IE6 era, minus the updates part.
JohnFen 9mo ago
I honestly think that the ability to shove updates out live is one of the worst things about software these days. Well, the ability to do so isn't bad, but the way companies actually do it makes it bad.

storus 9mo ago

Just today when trying to run Forza Horizon 5 from a new laptop I got an Xbox login popup with some QR code I was supposed to scan but the window was super small and I wasn't able to resize it to actually see the full QR code. One has to wonder what is going on with Microsoft if things like these pass they "quality" checks.

greazy 9mo ago

Yesterday I discovered that Windows 11 has two right click menues that appear depending on where you click on a file??? I despise W11.

cmxch 9mo ago

With as much telemetry and unwanted features, one would be forgiven to find the actual OS under it all.

pickpuck 9mo ago

ExplorerPatcher fixes everything I hate about Win11

kmfrk 9mo ago

Undo Close Tab - A very handy add-on, adds a button to quickly undo a closed tab. There is probably a shortcut for that, but I cannot bother remembering it. It's Ctrl+Shift+T for those wondering. Works similarly if the last thing you closed was a window.

grigio 9mo ago

There is MacOS and Linux, nobody forces you to stay on Windows

tim-tday 9mo ago

What’s wrong with strong words?

egeres 9mo ago

This Christmas I bought my mom a new computer because her old one (W10) was falling apart. It took some time but I managed to convince her to give ubuntu a try instead of moving to W11. After a week of complaints and stubbornness, she got really surprised about the lack of annoying prompts asking for updates, dark patterns to switch to edge, promotions etc. Now she has fully adapted and for her basic needs (browsing, reading pdfs, editing spreadsheets) she's basically set for life It's shocking to read the headlines about the latest direction windows is taking and how user unfriendly is becoming

lousken 9mo ago
Keep in mind ubuntu does not ask for updates - snap just updates apps as it wants. So sometimes firefox just breaks because of it.