6 ms·
State of Windows? It's so out of touch, people hate it. People want a simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except
by wewewedxfgdf 9mo ago
State of Windows?
It's so out of touch, people hate it.
People want a simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user. Windows 11 is a very, very long way from this.
Honestly Windows 95 is closer to ideal than Windows 11.
The state of Windows is: disaster.
- timpera 9mo agoI wouldn't be so certain of this. People on HN hate it for sure, but this is a bit of an echo chamber.
- galleywest200 9mo agoAt least in the comment sections on tech/PC gaming YouTube people are frustrated with it there too. On the other hand YouTube tries to serve me content I want so maybe thats just the algo talking.
- keithnz 9mo agopeople tend to complain more than comment on being content. A fraction of a percent of windows user base is a lot of people. ( given around 500 million.... 1 percent is 5 million people ish, it would seem to me much much less than 5 million people are generally complaining)
- graemep 9mo agoNo,lots of people hate it. The biggest haters I know in real life are non technical users. However, they will continue to use it so MS does not need to worry about them.
- wewewedxfgdf 9mo agoHN users are the global thought leaders and (hate the term) influencers in technology and what they think has massively outsized impact on the way the tech world works.
- FpUser 9mo ago>"HN users are the global thought leaders and (hate the term) influencers" I've no idea about leaders as those do not write here much. As for "influencers" - my golden rule is to research subject I am having doubts about and pay zero attention to what so called "influencers" say.
- navigate8310 9mo agoYou'll never know if the person you abuse on HN is Sam or Cook, since they use alts to plant ideas or assess damage their misdeeds are causing.
- FpUser 9mo agoI was talking about getting "influenced". I do not base my research on what's on HN. Prefer to find and read articles on specific subjects.
- tester756 9mo agoand other hilarious jokes we can tell ourselves :P
- schmookeeg 9mo agoThere's a fast-follow "You're absolutely right!" from Claude pending here. :)
- debo_ 9mo agoIf this is a joke, it was a very good one.
- tstrimple 9mo agoIf that were the case, every single project would be hosted on Hetzner with a Postgres database and everyone would be running Linux desktops everywhere. It's not happening.
- Telaneo 9mo agoNon-technical users aren't fans of random UI changes either. On the contrary, they hate having to re-learn shit every whatever-the-fuck years.
- Majromax 9mo agoWelcome to Hacker News 26! I know you're trying to read a comment now, but would you like to take a tour of new features? [ ] — Yes, I'd welcome a half-hour distraction from the thing I need to use the computer for right now! [ ] — No, I want to get my thing done now but then be confused about missing or new buttons at random intervals for the next six to eighteen months!
- NoPicklez 9mo agoI don't have an issue with it and I started with 98. There are somethings I'd change, but I do feel like I read a lot of hyperbole. Provided I only largely use my PC for gaming.
- caycep 9mo agoOP is certainly a metaphorical as well as a technical question
- lateforwork 9mo agoFortunately for Microsoft, macOS 26 (Tahoe) is an even bigger disaster. Even John Gruber won't upgrade. So Microsoft is under no pressure at the moment.
- raincole 9mo agoYou said that as if Linux desktop weren't a thing. ...and you're mostly right.
- gylterud 9mo agoWell, with the help of Microsoft and Apple, who knows? This might just be the years of the Linux desktop! Valve has made Linux gaming a thing. So, even normies are trying it…
- _carbyau_ 9mo agoI support your notion but my take is it will be a "slowly and then suddenly" thing. Do you declare "Year of the Linux Desktop" when market share is more than 50% or when the rate of conversion is 2%/month due to some market mechanism?
- pjmlp 9mo agoI declare it will never go beyond WSL and Apple Virtualization Framework for normies, unless we have a second netbooks like wave with OEMs selling their pre-installed GNU/Linux distros on shops.
- _carbyau_ 9mo agoYeah, I agree with your "unless" statement. Something has to change for the conversion rate to increase significantly. "Gaming is good on linux now.(except for kernel anticheats)" isn't it. In the gaming sense, that only puts it close to with Windows and with the extra hassles otherwise Linux is still behind. You have to recognise and value privacy to look to Linux.
- Telaneo 9mo agoThe amount of research that went into making Windows 95 a user friendly OS is actually quite impressive. They didn't have all the kinks ironed out, and they couldn't foresee everything, but it's was a pretty solid effort. I wonder how much research went into Windows 11, or 10 or 8 for that matter, and to what ends that research was made.
- pentagrama 9mo agoThere actually is a concrete reference for the Windows 95 era research. Microsoft published detailed results from their usability work in the mid-90s, including task based testing with real users, error analysis, and iterative design changes. Article title: The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996) Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611
- itronitron 9mo agoI've heard that MS took a different path (than previously) for the Windows 8 Metro design and wonder if a big source of the initial UI issues was a result of shoehorning the new design into the existing Windows UI.
- ASalazarMX 9mo agoWindows 95 Plug and Play (now called Legacy Plug and Play, which brings a tear to my eye) was a marvelous engineering feat. If operating systems had kept improving at that pace, who knows what they'd be capable of today? These days Operating Systems (desktop and mobile) have mostly stagnated; even open source Unix derivatives are strongly committed to backwards compatibility, and have reached an island of mostly stability. I hope to see in the future something like Plan 9, who was an effort to reimagine what an OS could be. BeOS brought innovations, but those have become commonplace while Haiku still has growing pains. I yearn for weird again, but I don't have the skill set and resources to design/build a weird OS. Then again, standardization is good for progress, and I much prefer that the de facto standard is something free like Linux, and not proprietary Windows or MacOS. Standards should be public.
- btown 9mo agomacOS (not iOS) used to be this. POSIX underpinnings. Iconography and visual language designed for clarity and simplicity. Balances between customizability and system stability with deactivatable gatekeepers. Now, the same way Windows serves Microsoft’s AI investments, Apple serves a nebulous corporate goal for inimitable (read: too unpredictable/unreliable for competitors to copy) Liquid [Gl]ass user interfaces at the expense of clarity, and launch speed at the expense of stability. I’m not sure if Steve Jobs would have complained about the market capitalization - but he certainly would have executed product improvements more cleanly. It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.
- setopt 9mo ago> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year. For me it is. I was already considering going back to Linux for a while, and MacOS Tahoe pushed me over the fence. Got a Thinkpad with Linux as a replacement for my MacBook some months ago and don’t regret it yet.
- loloquwowndueo 9mo ago> It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year. It is if you want it to be. For me it was 1996 - been doing great on Linux since then.
- xcf_seetan 9mo agoWow, i thought it was just me, glad to to see i am not alone. I ditch windows in 1996 for Linux, never look back!
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoYeah, the regressions in Mac OS are particularly ill-timed and infuriating because there is no real competition now. I consider Windows unusable. It's not even worth talking about anymore; and I was a big Windows fan (and developer) into the 2000s. Now I don't have a single instance of Windows running in my house. If Apple's slide continues, computing will recede back to its hobbyist/academic roots, I guess.
- robertwt7 9mo agoI always find some things that doesn't work with my PC on windows 11. Sometimes things as simple as moving files in explorer makes it hangs where I had to restart explorer.exe. This is embarrassing really that windows can't get this right. There are so many times where I was frustrated and wished that I can just use my macbook pro as my only workstation. I just wish that steam on linux has full support for most games that are it supports in windows then i'll make the switch my pc is not even that old, its ryzen 9 5900x with rtx 3080 and 32gb ram. however it is sluggish compared to my m1 pro macbook pro
- bigyabai 9mo agoSteam on Linux is great. I'm playing Deadlock and Arc Raiders on my 3070 Ti without issue, highly recommend it if you're not playing FaceIts or Valorant.
- Telaneo 9mo ago> I just wish that steam on linux has full support for most games that are it supports in windows then i'll make the switch That day is today (assuming you don't play games with kernel anti-cheat).
- subscribed 9mo agoI'm anxiously waiting for a slightly better Nvidia support. It'll either be Bazzite or CachyOS, it seems. Id rather have something mainstream, like Fedora i dislike but know its daemons better, but tough luck, it seem. Still, it's so fragmented. If I want a server, I have two families to chose from and two exactly solid choices. I'd I want a desktop for work - 2-4 solid choices. But desktop for gaming? Well, it's where "well, it depends" starts.
- Telaneo 9mo agoThe fragmentation ain't great, but it's mostly just a hump at the start. Once you pick something, it's usually fine, and if it isn't, you learn that fairly quickly and switch to something else that is fine. After having tried one thing, you will have learned what needs you have and can rule out alternatives a lot more easily. Still, it would be nice to have one obvious solid choice, and then alternatives if you have specific needs. I'd imagine most people are waiting for SteamOS to become that one obvious solid choice, but Valve probably don't want to do that without Nvidia support not being the way it is today (and they probably don't want to do support either way, so they might never do it either way).
- zeroonetwothree 9mo agoHave you actually used Windows 95? It was awful. Crashed every four hours, driver hell, etc
- Telaneo 9mo agoI have. Blame the drivers, not the OS. Vista wasn't great for the same reasons. Sure, Windows 11 mostly doesn't have driver problems, but that doesn't mean the OS is great. It's largely irrelevant to the point being made.
- jimjimjim 9mo agoIt was unstable but it was nice to use. It introduced a lot of UI elements that are now taken for granted. I remember starting to build a window manager that replicated the win95 look.
- monkeydreams 9mo agoI was doing tech support through the Windows 95/98/ME period and it was hell. Everything either crashed the OS or required a restart if you touched it. When Windows 2000 rolled around and I saw how stable it was, I went out and bought it to put on my gaming PC. Another friend from work laughed at me and told me how terrible "Windows NT" was for running games until he saw how smooth Starcraft ran on it. Yeah, Windows 95/98/ME were terrible.
- Someone1234 9mo agoWindows 95 has some legitimate problem but one thing that was nice is that Microsoft (and Apple) were doing Skeuomorph, so training users to use it was a joy. It was designed to be easy to learn. Today they don't really care how users are trained, and just assume they'll figure it out. PS - Yes, Skeuomoric concepts age out, like Floppy Disk-Save Icons, but the concept still has merit. It can help "ground" the experience.
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoThey were not doing skeuomorphism. They were using simple visual clues, like "bevels" on buttons, to convey the existence of a control and its state. They weren't disguising controls as "paint" on "felt" on a gaming table, as Apple Game Center did at the peak of their cheesiness. The overreaction known as "flat" design (AKA no design) has fortunately started to recede. Still... some derelict "designers" are still deliver Advent calendars instead of usable applications.
- publicdebates 9mo agoWindows 2000 was peak. All improvements from XP onwards were negligible.
- nurettin 9mo agoIt was all downhill from 3.11
- touwer 9mo agoThat was the best. With sound drivers
- ahartmetz 9mo agoIt crashed a lot. It's hard to imagine these days how often it crashed. Windows 2000 was peak for me. NT kernel, inofficial but very solid compatibility with pretty much everything DOS / Windows including games, and a clean, efficient UI.
- touwer 9mo agoYes, it was a joke. 2000 was indeed good. XP, 7 and 10 also not too bad for their time
- VerifiedReports 9mo agoImprovements? Windows has suffered an ever-accelerating slide into the toilet, starting with Vista.
- keithnz 9mo agowhat evidence do you have that people hate it? keeping in mind that a fraction of a percent of their user base is going to be a LOT of people so at any given time you can find a lot of people complaining.
- Telaneo 9mo ago> Around 500 million PCs are holding off upgrading to Windows 11, says Dell. > “We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines. And that's ignoring the 500 million that can't upgrade due to TPM requirements or whatever. https://www.theverge.com/news/831364/dell-windows-11-upgrade-numbers-earnings-call-q3-2025 https://www.theverge.com/news/831364/dell-windows-11-upgrade...
- keithnz 9mo agowhat's that evidence of? it's also an estimate of all PCs that can upgrade, of 1.5 billion, 500 million still haven't upgraded. Certainly not evidence that people hate it. Many reasons why IT departments may not have upgraded things or why people haven't. In fact, the ones who haven't upgraded kind of are the people who are least likely to know about what windows 11 is like.
- cgfjtynzdrfht 9mo ago[dead]
- Telaneo 9mo agoSteam's Hardware survey still showed a 2/3 to 1/3 share of Windows 11 to Windows 10 two weeks before the support ended.[1] So about 1/3 of people who use Steam still weren't upgrading even though support was ending. It took about two and a half years for Windows 10 to overtake Windows 10 in usage (release in July 2015, overtook 7 in January 2018). It's taken more than 3 for Windows 11 (released October 2021, overtook 10 in June 2025), and it only did that with four and a bit months left until support for 10 ended (compared to 3 years for 7). And the number isn't consistently trending downwards for 10 anymore. It's a mess.[2] > Many reasons why IT departments may not have upgraded things Running an outdated OS which isn't getting security updates is against regulations in a lot of places. I'd imagine all the major corps were already done doing that by the time support actually ended. > In fact, the ones who haven't upgraded kind of are the people who are least likely to know about what windows 11 is like. And thus the most likely to be pushed to upgrade by Microslops lack of understanding of what consent is. They're just going to push the button that says 'Next' and have Windows 11 pushed onto them. [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/a-bunch-of-steam-players-just-made-the-switch-to-windows-11-as-windows-10s-death-date-is-now-less-than-two-weeks-away/ https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/a-bunch-of-steam-pl... [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-201401-202512 https://gs.statcounter.com/windows-version-market-share/desk...
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- nkrisc 9mo agoI think that I struggled much less with Window 95 as a child than I struggle with Windows 11 today, as I near 40.
- throw10920 9mo agoCan you provide a source for your claims about what users want? I think that hackers want a > simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user ...and those are things that I think are good and I want - but my interactions with normal people (which constitute the vast majority of Windows' userbase) consistently indicate that they have different priorities, such as cost, ease of use, familiarity, software compatibility, and a "modern" appearance (which often directly goes against actually good UX principles).
- tonymet 9mo agoI mostly agree, but Windows XP was probably peak windows (Win 2k is my personal favorite) Windows 95 was a terrible operating system in the classic sense ( phony multi-tasking, no memory protection, no security protections whatsoever -- any process could ready any file or any piece of memory it wanted).