14 ms·

This "make Windows better" push is far more political than technological. It's a fight with other divisions about using Windows as a marketing and sales channel

• riversflow 6mo ago
  > I use all the shortcuts subconsciously. I realize you probably are referencing visual studio, but at the OS level KDE plasma seems to have copped Windows hot keys wholesale. I was giving it a go recently and was delighted that even meta+arrow keys for monitor switching fullscreen apps works. My only gripe, and what got me booting back into windows, was that even the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky to reliably play multiplayer online games.
  • TimTheTinker 6mo ago
    > the latest wifi drivers for my brand new wifi 7 motherboard were too flaky A GL.iNet travel router in WiFi to ethernet bridge mode is an excellent stopgap until Linux support arrives. It also has the benefits of (a) taking with you on trips for safer/easier internet use (use your home SSID, even auto-VPN traffic if you want) and (b) letting you plug in other wired-only devices adjacent to the computer. Here are their travel routers filtered to just those that support WiFi 6 and 7: https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filter.p.m.custom.protocol=IEEE+802.11a%2Fb%2Fg%2Fn%2Fac%2Fax&filter.p.m.custom.protocol=IEEE+802.11a%2Fb%2Fg%2Fn%2Fac%2Fax%2Fbe https://store-us.gl-inet.com/collections/travel-routers?filt...
• drewda 6mo ago
  FWIW I've been on a OS X for many years now, but I still miss keyboard shortcuts in Windows. So much more consistent across the operating system and applications...
  • kstrauser 6mo ago
    This may be the first time that sentiment's ever been expressed.
    • malfist 6mo ago
      Why do you say that? A lot of shortcuts are shared between windows and linux and fairly consistent across applications. Mac is the one that takes a decided "we're different" approach to shortcuts. I.e., Alt+L for address bar instead of Alt+D, Command swapping with Control, Q instead of W for closing tabs, Command+Control+Q for locking a computer instead of Super+L, etc
      • kstrauser 6mo ago
        They didn't mention cross-OS shortcuts, though. I interpreted "across the operating systems" as meaning "across the various versions of Windows". Yes, Windows is more consistent with their own common shortcuts. But Macs have exceedingly consistent shortcuts across Mac applications, compared to my experience with Windows and especially Linux. I might also point out that Mac had keyboard shortcuts before Windows existed, so it's not really fair to describe them as the "different" one when MS chose their own, different shortcuts for Windows.
        • larusso 6mo ago
          Apple also invented their own key “Apple” now “CMD” for operation like copy / paste to explicitly not have the issue to overload the already know escape sequences. Windows being on a system without a normalized keyboard had to reuse keys that are common to keyboards used back then. Vertical integration played into apples cards even back then.
• intrasight 6mo ago
  Isn't part of this Microsoft preparing for the requirement to do age verification in the OS?
  • GeekyBear 6mo ago
    It has more to do with Microsoft deciding to emulate Google and Facebook's surveillance capitalism business model. If you combine mandatory online user accounts with telemetry and Windows Recall, you have a system for building out advertising profiles linked to known individuals.
    • intrasight 6mo ago
      I get that. But it's also the case that they can justify this by claiming that they have to do it for each verification.
• shevy-java 6mo ago
  > I'm still a Windows power user I used to be, but in 2004 I switched to Linux. I still use windows as a secondary operating system on another computer, though only Win10. I decided I will not transition to anything after Win10 as Microslop declared war on the users with Win11. Which was the case already before Win11, of course, but I feel the qualitative difference is too much now.
• oliwarner 6mo ago
  > far more political than technological I don't know. A company worth trillions of dollars does a pretty fine job of making Windows incrementally worse in new and interesting ways, each release. There's some truth; the bloated company structure has contributed to these unforced errors, but just at an engineering level, people are releasing this tripe without the skill or training or backbone to know what is bad, and push back on toxic management decisions. Engineers collaborating with oppressive management is a technical failure. Google is riddled with the same problem. I'm sure all the FAANG-a-likes do. Paying billions in salaries to sycophant devs. They have the market share to keep failing upwards. They don't deserve it.
  • marssaxman 6mo ago
    Who says the engineers have any leverage they can push with? I sure didn't, when I worked there.
    • oliwarner 6mo ago
      Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem that's played out in construction, automotive and software engineering dozens of times over. The penalty for Microsoft ignoring their devs might just be a slow decline into irrelevance, not a bridge collapsing, or an autonomous vehicle hitting the lane barrier because the boss refuses to use LiDAR, but it's all bad management causing an engineering problem.
      • bigstrat2003 6mo ago
        > Not listening to engineers is a serious engineering problem. No, that's the very archetype of a political problem. It is a political problem that impacts the engineering output, yes, but still a political problem.
• Rapzid 6mo ago
  As someone with a sizeable background in Linux system engineering.. I prefer Windows to MacOS. It's IMHO a better desktop now with the edge snap tile layout and etc. Excellent device compatibility. And I get my linux environment needs satisfied via WSL2 these days. But damn if they don't get in their own way. I have my own Pro licenses, and even with Pro turning off ads and features is text book whack-a-mole: * Frequent "Let's finish setting up your PC" after updates * Killing OneDrive is a like night of the living dead * Edge popping up "ads" asking you if you want to pin apps when it closes(a lot of windows apps wrap edge, like streaming apps, and show this too on close!) * Scary Power Automate crap getting injected on updates(haven't seen this in a while) * Internet search results in the "Home" search * Random popups and product recommendations * Registry disabled "features" randomly resurrecting after Windows update Holy. Hell. Edit: I recall now; Windows was installing a power automate extension into Chrome during Windows Update un-prompted last year. Caused a minor panic.
  • guilamu 6mo ago
    Use LTSC. It'll fix all the issues you are mentioning here.
    • pomian 6mo ago
      Second ltsc -look into it once you try you will never go back. Available from various resellers nowadays. It is, what windows should be sold as.
    • Krssst 6mo ago
      LTSC cannot be bought as a regular customer unfortunately. Legally, regular customers are only allowed to use the enshittified version.
      • cyberax 6mo ago
        You can get access to it, but it's a quest. You need to buy a volume license, and this requires at least 5 licenses (about $300). Then you'll be eligible to buy an LTSC version. It doesn't require a corporation or anything, you can do that as a private person. But it IS annoying.
• john_strinlai 6mo ago
  >I hope they realize that Windows is in significant danger, the majority market share for Desktop OS is not guaranteed anymore. i agree with most of what you said, but this is borderline fantasy. the majority of home market share is not guaranteed, sure. with how good gaming is on non-windows machines now, there isnt much for a home user to get locked-in with (except games that require windows-only malware i.e. anticheat) but government, institution (hospitals, universities, etc.) and large non-tech enterprise? that will be windows for at least 20 more years even if they started to change everything now (which they arent). and the number of machines in those places absolutely dwarfs the number of home installs.
  • sidkshatriya 6mo ago
    Decline often happens slowly, gradually and then suddenly. Could anybody imagine Intel where it is now ? This could happen to Microsoft and is probably already happening as we speak.
    • john_strinlai 6mo ago
      >gradually and then suddenly. governments, institutions, and large enterprises (like, thousands of people) do not have the power to do anything "suddenly". they have contracts, and cash flow concerns. you cannot suddenly replaces tens to hundreds of thousands of machines. 20-50 years down the road? maybe! they (microsoft) surely arent doing themselves many favors. but they are certainly not in "significant danger" today.
      • homarp 6mo ago
        and then something like COVID happens and they change fast.
        • john_strinlai 6mo ago
          expanding your vpn to support more employees working from home is much easier than replacing hundreds of thousands of machines, all of the windows-only software that runs on those machines, training all of your employees on a new operating system, cancelling all of your existing contracts... you get the point.
• anal_reactor 6mo ago
  I've been using MacBook at work for years and I still perceive UX as fundamentally broken - I'm incapable of doing basic operations in Finder or changing basic system settings, and random shit I didn't want to press pops up when I'm doing other things. I feel like my grandpa trying to adjust to new phone. I will never ever recommend anything Apple to anyone. Having said the above, I think that KDE is almost there to have a functional UX that can replace Windows. Not there yet because of random bugs, but almost almost. Once gamers actually switch to Linux, which is a viable thing, they'll teach their family members. Home users will switch to Linux, and Windows will become an exclusively enterprise and government thing. But once average person is comfortable with Linux because they have it at home, those institutions will start switching to Linux too. And that's how Microsoft will fall. Just like most other corporations - through their own greed.
  • bowsamic 6mo ago
    > I'm incapable of doing basic operations in Finder or changing basic system settings, and random shit I didn't want to press pops up when I'm doing other things Why?
    • anal_reactor 6mo ago
      Because the interface is very counter-intuitive. I don't have any other explanation. In Windows, KDE and Gnome I eventually "get there" with Gnome being my least favorite, while MacOS feels like vibecoded "my first UI". Also, the Macbook keyboard is fucked. I constantly press buttons I didn't mean to. This literally never happened to me on any other device. And that's after years of using a Macbook.
      • bowsamic 6mo ago
        I’m sure you can learn how to use it
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• smrtinsert 6mo ago
  For the AI frontier, I find my windows PC just about useless unfortunately. Too much tooling and package doesn't adapt to WSL+windows host well. I've shifted my entire dev experience to my mbp which used to be my backup. Can't imagine the new generation of vibe coder will even consider a windows box.
  • phendrenad2 6mo ago
    > Too much tooling and package doesn't adapt to WSL+windows host well Curious about this, what specifically?
• kakacik 6mo ago
  +1 for Total Commander mention, its bizarre how many otherwise smart folks completely ignore this productivity enhancer. I keep showing it to colleagues but they all anyway revert back to basic clunky File explorer and variants. Doesn't matter if I show them that I can be easily 10x faster, do stuff simply impossible otherwise, has tons of plugins etc. its just ignored.
  • antiframe 6mo ago
    I don't know about Total Commander because that appears to be Windows-only, but twin-pane "Commanders" (named after NC) do seem more popular in certain circles. They're still in wide use in Eastern Europe. Commanders have also influenced Dolphin, which has a built in twin-pane view (but it's not a commander because it lacks the typical keybinds) and there's a commander called Krusader that is a better fit.
    • z3ratul163071 6mo ago
      Double Commander. It is awesome.
  • BeetleB 6mo ago
    Also a big plug for Far: https://farmanager.com/ https://farmanager.com/
  • grujicd 6mo ago
    The only negative side of Total Commander is I'm extremly used to it - been using it since mid 90s. When I compare alternatives on Mac I'm searching for exact keyboard commands, navigation patterns, etc. I'm using Crax Commander, but it's not the same. TC is probably one of the reasons I don't care that much about problems in newer versions of Windows, I don't use Explorer, I don't use windows search, text is viewed with Lister and not Notepad...
    • jasomill 6mo ago
      I'm the same way except with command prompts. So long as I have a decent shell (bash and PowerShell are both good enough) with the ability to open files and some reasonable form of tab completion, I mostly only open up Windows File Explorer windows to use context menu items, or with Win+E to quickly check free disk space, and Mac Finder windows to drag and drop files into file picker dialog boxes in GUI apps.
• lpcvoid 6mo ago
  And then there's me, hoping they don't realize that Windows is in danger. The world needs less Microslop.
• z3ratul163071 6mo ago
  go freely on Linux. did that switch myself few years back. Double Commander is an exact copy with the same (and configurable) shortcuts.
• randusername 6mo ago
  The year is 2050. Desktop operating systems are a relic of the past. Windows collapsed inwards on itself in 2031 when MS realized telemetry data was 10X as profitable when sold directly to nosy exes, neighbors, priests, and so on instead of advertising agencies. This practice was highly illegal, but the MS legal team unanimously ruled that SCOTUS's ruling on it was unconstitutional. Nevertheless, society barely survived. Windows XP lives on quietly powering ATMs. We also still have Surface Tablets. They don't function anymore, but they hide the paunch of aging sports commentators well and NFL players and coaches greatly enjoy using them to bludgeon each other on the sidelines.
• lowbloodsugar 6mo ago
  I’ve got three monitors on my MacBook plus its screen; I know all the keyboard shortcuts and then have automation with various other things. It was hard at first back in 2010 when I moved from Windows. It became second nature within a year and I’ve never looked back. Windows is fucking awful.
• sieabahlpark 6mo ago
  [dead]
• torginus 6mo ago
  The weird thing about this is old Microsoft understood that ordinary users are not cash cows, companies are. Microsoft built its empire because of SMB and Active Directory, and other enterprise features, where actually these things are important. Ironically orgs hate MS Accounts just as much, as they have to give up a degree of autonomy, control and security compared to how Windows used to be.
• HoldOnAMinute 6mo ago
  >> It has to be a decision from the very top Satya is incentivized to maximize his own pay package, not whatever it is that customers whinge about
• chaosharmonic 6mo ago
  This is maybe just that I switched to Linux years ago and haven't touched Apple hardware much, but what strikes me is how little the OS matters anymore. So much of the tooling is cross-platform now, so many of the applications are web based, and so much of the native platform can know be emulated, that part of why the market share isn't guaranteed is a level of portability that didn't exist a decade or two ago. Everything from Edge as a cross-platform Chrome derivative to .NET as a cross-platform open-source toolkit to their React Native builds and experiments with Android suggest that MS itself understands this. The Linux side demonstrates it with things like Proton and the forthcoming Android desktop mode. The Web demonstrates it in general as it expands in capability and more applications skip shipping native entirely in favor of technologies like Electron. And not that I don't personally sob in system RAM, or have extreme reservations about how we got these things (see: Google and antitrust), but I can't say I hate the ease of switchover. Ecosystem lock-in didn't go away, but it feels like it's changed a lot.
  • IshKebab 6mo ago
    Yeah but it's one of those cases where even if an alternative works 99% of the time, it still isn't worth it because of that 1%. Same with web browser compatible - that's why even Microsoft switched to Blink. Same with electric car range - "it covers 99% of your journeys!" isn't as persuasive as proponents would like.
    • chaosharmonic 6mo ago
      I mean, relative to IE, everything else was the alternative. Whereas in more recent years, keeping a closed-source rendering engine that was no longer competitive in implementing the spec, wasn't being used when people had a choice, and was being used as a dependency for core components of the OS, probably wasn't winning many arguments. (Edit: yes, I know Chakra was open source. I meant Trident.)
• m463 6mo ago
  > from the very top this kind of thing happens with the founder, but follow-on CEOs very very rarely have the leadership and vision. I wonder how leadership can be the same for someone who initially folloed others when they joined.
• pjmlp 6mo ago
  Unless Apple decides to make computers for the remaining 80% of the less fortunate population (Neo isn't it), or OEMs decide to finally support GNU/Linux, Windows has many years to come, regardless of the pain points.
• ksec 6mo ago
  I know this is going to be unpopular on HN. They basically need to stop thinking Windows as a profit milking centre but as a moat to capture business and enterprise customers. In order to do that they need Windows to offer one of the best experience possible, or at least so good macOS and Linux is not much of a threat. But I never thought Apple would venture into $599 category. Other than Education I am pretty sure large enterprise customer can get Neo for $499 as well. This completely shift the dynamics. And I guess it wakes a lot of people inside Microsoft, if they don't fight, the collapse of M$ might finally be numbered.