8 ms·

With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it

With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.

rafram 8mo ago
This isn't supposed to replace Windows, and it isn't a GUI desktop operating system at all. I doubt anyone working on this has anything to do with the modern Windows desktop UX.
- dspillett 8mo ago
  > This isn't supposed to replace Windows, OP wasn't suggesting it was, just that the lack of quality in one significant area of the company's output leads to a lack of confidence in other products that they release.
  - viraptor 8mo ago
    Given anything the size of Microsoft, it's not a good assumption. MS has large research teams that produce really interesting things. Their output is unrelated to released products.
    - dspillett 8mo ago
      Companies want us to trust their things based on positive experiences with their other things, and that works both ways.
- Reddit_MLP2 8mo ago
  but if the host OS is already comprised, what is the point of sandbox inside of it?
  - necovek 8mo ago
    Maybe we need secure attestation for sandbox to be protected against compromised host :) It does sound hard, and might need to employ homomorphic encryption with hw help for any memory access after code has been also verifiably unaltered through (uncompromised) hw attestation.
hudo 8mo ago
UI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
- joe_mamba 8mo ago
  >Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good. This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users. You can get something similar yourself at home running all the debloat tools out there but since they're not officially supported, either you'll break future windows updates, or the future windows updates will break your setup, so it's not worth it.
  - TkTech 8mo ago
    Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.
    - joe_mamba 8mo ago
      Maybe, could also be that for a 9 figure government contract they'll provide a custom LTSC branch just for you with only the features you want.
  - RajT88 8mo ago
    Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11. I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.
    - joe_mamba 8mo ago
      >Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD. >but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11 They're not artificial. POPCNT / SSE4.2 became a hard requirement starting with Windows 11 24H2 (2024) (but that's for older CPUs), and only intel 8th gen and up have well functioning support for Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), HVCI (Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity), and MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control). That's besides the TPM 2.0 which isn't actually a hard requirement or feature used by everyone, the other ones are way more important. So at which point do we consider HW-based security a necessity instead of an artificial limit? With the ever increase in vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you gotta rip the bandaid at some point.
autoexec 8mo ago
Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy. Maybe it works, but yeah you'll probably get screwed over at some point. Still, the fact that it's open source is a good thing. People can now take that code and make something better (ripping out the AI for example) or just use bits and pieces for their own totally unrelated projects. I can't see that as anything but a win. I have no problem giving shitty companies credit where its due and they've done a good thing here.
- MatejKafka 8mo ago
  > Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy. That's a very unfair assessment. In many areas, Microsoft services and Windows are better protected than most alternatives (e.g., disk encryption, virtualization-based isolation,...), and security is taken pretty seriously for new products.
simonw 8mo ago
Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.
- lysace 8mo ago
  This is also still small/unimportant enough not to be poisoned by their broken corporate culture.
- replooda 8mo ago
  The criticism was directed at the company's product, not the employees...
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - trimethylpurine 8mo ago
    The response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.
    - mcmcmc 8mo ago
      And yet they still work for a company that has shown it isn’t overly concerned about quality or reliability in its products.
      - 1f60c 8mo ago
        Thaaat's capitalism
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
      - trimethylpurine 8mo ago
        I don't think people typically have so much choice about it. Everyone is just trying to feed their families and enjoy their life. The job market is a little tough right now, I think, for software engineers. No? I know a few personally that left their stable job to be hired and fired in the same month and remain unemployed six months later. Very sad.
necovek 8mo ago
Windows is ultimately a lot more complex, and not open source. This also builds on the Linux ecosystem, so even if it comes from Microsoft, I imagine engineering culture is different from that on Windows and especially their online platforms (that's even worse than Windows if you ask me!).
dooglius 8mo ago
MSR is a somewhat independent org; you should be making predictions based on other MSR projects
BrouteMinou 8mo ago
Microsoft US a massive corporation with so many people, business units, departments. A comment like yours is just like saying: "I know a buggy open-source software, why would I trust that other open-source project? The open-source community burned all possible goodwill".
- CodeMage 8mo ago
  Except that a company, no matter how heterogenous, has an overarching organization, whereas the open-source community doesn't. There is no CEO of open source, there are no open-source shareholders, there are no open-source quarterly earnings reports, there are no open-source P&G policies (with or without stack ranking), and so on.
b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago
I'm not defending MS in any capacity, but this library is open for viewing if you were so inclined.
lemonish97 8mo ago
I know windows 11 is super buggy and riddled with issues (and the copilot mess), but I'm starting to feel there's a weird echo chamber around these forums that don't even bother looking at what the product or repository is, and automatically assume it's bad 'cause it's from Microsoft.
- zelphirkalt 8mo ago
  Once the amount of bad software coming out of a shop rises over 50% this becomes a sane assumption, since it is more likely than not, that it is trash coming out of that shop. So in case of MS it does seem a reasonable assumption to make.
- Peanuts99 8mo ago
  I use Windows 11 all day and can't agree it's buggy at all, compared to Windows of the past it's very reliable. The worst I can say is they've made some poor decisions about the defaults around ads in the UI. But all of that is easy to turn off.

rafram 8mo ago

This isn't supposed to replace Windows, and it isn't a GUI desktop operating system at all. I doubt anyone working on this has anything to do with the modern Windows desktop UX.

dspillett 8mo ago
> This isn't supposed to replace Windows, OP wasn't suggesting it was, just that the lack of quality in one significant area of the company's output leads to a lack of confidence in other products that they release.
- viraptor 8mo ago
  Given anything the size of Microsoft, it's not a good assumption. MS has large research teams that produce really interesting things. Their output is unrelated to released products.
  - dspillett 8mo ago
    Companies want us to trust their things based on positive experiences with their other things, and that works both ways.
Reddit_MLP2 8mo ago
but if the host OS is already comprised, what is the point of sandbox inside of it?
- necovek 8mo ago
  Maybe we need secure attestation for sandbox to be protected against compromised host :) It does sound hard, and might need to employ homomorphic encryption with hw help for any memory access after code has been also verifiably unaltered through (uncompromised) hw attestation.

hudo 8mo ago

UI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.

joe_mamba 8mo ago
>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good. This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users. You can get something similar yourself at home running all the debloat tools out there but since they're not officially supported, either you'll break future windows updates, or the future windows updates will break your setup, so it's not worth it.
- TkTech 8mo ago
  Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
    Maybe, could also be that for a 9 figure government contract they'll provide a custom LTSC branch just for you with only the features you want.
- RajT88 8mo ago
  Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11. I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
    >Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing. Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD. >but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11 They're not artificial. POPCNT / SSE4.2 became a hard requirement starting with Windows 11 24H2 (2024) (but that's for older CPUs), and only intel 8th gen and up have well functioning support for Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), HVCI (Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity), and MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control). That's besides the TPM 2.0 which isn't actually a hard requirement or feature used by everyone, the other ones are way more important. So at which point do we consider HW-based security a necessity instead of an artificial limit? With the ever increase in vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you gotta rip the bandaid at some point.

autoexec 8mo ago

Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy. Maybe it works, but yeah you'll probably get screwed over at some point. Still, the fact that it's open source is a good thing. People can now take that code and make something better (ripping out the AI for example) or just use bits and pieces for their own totally unrelated projects. I can't see that as anything but a win. I have no problem giving shitty companies credit where its due and they've done a good thing here.

MatejKafka 8mo ago
> Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy. That's a very unfair assessment. In many areas, Microsoft services and Windows are better protected than most alternatives (e.g., disk encryption, virtualization-based isolation,...), and security is taken pretty seriously for new products.

simonw 8mo ago

Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.

lysace 8mo ago
This is also still small/unimportant enough not to be poisoned by their broken corporate culture.
replooda 8mo ago
The criticism was directed at the company's product, not the employees...
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- trimethylpurine 8mo ago
  The response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.
  - mcmcmc 8mo ago
    And yet they still work for a company that has shown it isn’t overly concerned about quality or reliability in its products.
    - 1f60c 8mo ago
      Thaaat's capitalism
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - trimethylpurine 8mo ago
      I don't think people typically have so much choice about it. Everyone is just trying to feed their families and enjoy their life. The job market is a little tough right now, I think, for software engineers. No? I know a few personally that left their stable job to be hired and fired in the same month and remain unemployed six months later. Very sad.

necovek 8mo ago

Windows is ultimately a lot more complex, and not open source. This also builds on the Linux ecosystem, so even if it comes from Microsoft, I imagine engineering culture is different from that on Windows and especially their online platforms (that's even worse than Windows if you ask me!).

dooglius 8mo ago

MSR is a somewhat independent org; you should be making predictions based on other MSR projects

BrouteMinou 8mo ago

Microsoft US a massive corporation with so many people, business units, departments. A comment like yours is just like saying: "I know a buggy open-source software, why would I trust that other open-source project? The open-source community burned all possible goodwill".

CodeMage 8mo ago
Except that a company, no matter how heterogenous, has an overarching organization, whereas the open-source community doesn't. There is no CEO of open source, there are no open-source shareholders, there are no open-source quarterly earnings reports, there are no open-source P&G policies (with or without stack ranking), and so on.

b00ty4breakfast 8mo ago

I'm not defending MS in any capacity, but this library is open for viewing if you were so inclined.

lemonish97 8mo ago

I know windows 11 is super buggy and riddled with issues (and the copilot mess), but I'm starting to feel there's a weird echo chamber around these forums that don't even bother looking at what the product or repository is, and automatically assume it's bad 'cause it's from Microsoft.

zelphirkalt 8mo ago
Once the amount of bad software coming out of a shop rises over 50% this becomes a sane assumption, since it is more likely than not, that it is trash coming out of that shop. So in case of MS it does seem a reasonable assumption to make.
Peanuts99 8mo ago
I use Windows 11 all day and can't agree it's buggy at all, compared to Windows of the past it's very reliable. The worst I can say is they've made some poor decisions about the defaults around ads in the UI. But all of that is easy to turn off.