5 ms·

What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. What Microsoft wants: Windows as their str

What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. What Microsoft wants: Windows as their straightjacket into the Microsoft services as that is where the revenue is. Why Windows got this bad: incentives and coercion placed on the teams to show uptake on the services no matter what leading to perversion in tactics and complete alienation of the user base. The incentives are alomost perpendicularly misaligned. Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. People are looking for the exit, finding there is indeed a door, and stopping them will take far more than just some reassurance from the DJ boot.

cineticdaffodil 6mo ago
Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows.
- cwillu 6mo ago
  “Linux” needs to do nothing of the sort. People who want to save their work by moving to a platform without those issues need to be willing to either do the work or pay for it.
  - snerc 6mo ago
    I've never read a more archpilled comment
    - redeeman 6mo ago
      "i hate how the current system is, i see some other guys have something that doesnt have these issues, what the other system needs to do is make their system exactly like my current, so that I dont need to spend ANY effort myself" few moments later "i hate how the current system is"
      - cineticdaffodil 6mo ago
        "We should throw away the gdp of the us for a year or two so people can then have the same productivity" year of the le nukes desktop
    - engeljohnb 6mo ago
      Linux is doing just fine without normies.
      - lpcvoid 6mo ago
        The normies are what makes Microslop money, though. We need to get the normies onboard in order to fight MS' stranglehold on computing. Gatekeeping isn't the right move here.
        engeljohnb 6mo ago
        I can't delete my comment now, but I think you're right. I don't consider "take it or leave it" to be gatekeeping, but when the world's biggest corporations pose a threat to software liberty, distros becoming more palatable to average users is strictly a good thing. Not that I'm even involved with distro development anyway. Probably would've been better to let the real OS engineers have the discussion on that one.
        lpcvoid 6mo ago
        [flagged]
- mcswell 6mo ago
  Libre Office (and a couple others) is pretty close to MsOffice. Not exact, but close.
  - pndy 6mo ago
    It even got ribbon interface not so long ago - it's pretty pretty close, at least by UI
  - machomaster 6mo ago
    Not for people who use Excel professionally, not even close. Excel is undefeated.
- ninjagoo 6mo ago
  > Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows. It's a fair point. Organizational and personal inertia is a real thing. Maybe think of it as going through a divorce and entering a new relationship. You do it mostly because you want to, and sometimes you do it because you have to. OS as a digital spouse analogy? too far-fetched? think of how much time you spend with it in a day :-)
neya 6mo ago
It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500. The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.
- Keyframe 6mo ago
  Which company would you say is the example(s) of the latter? Sounds like utopia I'd like to be a part of.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Different sector, but I'd say Blackmagic Design seems to be run by people who actually use their own products and care about both product experience and engineering. In the creative industry there is a bunch of these "boutique" companies that places great care on the final experience. Probably Blackmagic Design is no longer "boutique" to be fair, but seems they still got the culture right.
  - Traubenfuchs 6mo ago
    Valve and the few sane startups / small/mid sized companies you can be lucky enough to end up in. I was part of the transformation of a healthy mid size engineering led startup company that got taken over by MBAs and Indian employees and saw the whole lifecycle.
  - dartharva 6mo ago
    I don't use its products myself but Apple fits this definition perhaps; its current CEO is a former engineering head, the previous CEO was a former operations head and the one before him was Steve Jobs.
globalnode 6mo ago
been on linux for a month now, i found the exit and stepped through it. the pain points change from getting shafted by m$ to doing research and learning how to make the system work. at least the second option gives me some agency, and now its all set up i wish i had of switched sooner! ive got to say valve is doing the lords work, along with all the other linux enthusiasts.
- gosub100 6mo ago
  as a long time linux user, my advice is : make backups , and don't mess with your system too much. Definitely take OS updates every few months, but don't chase the perfect utopia of UX. at least, buy another computer that you tweak and test on. If you break your main PC, it's very unpleasant and frustrating to fix.
- ivell 6mo ago
  To be frank, I have always thought of "Now I switched to Linux and am happy" to be some kind of meme that appears on every Windows discussion. Until it happened to me last month. The ads in Windows somehow popped up during important Zoom calls and I couldn't find a way to skip or switch off immediately. In addition to that, my paid version of Minecraft stopped working. Using Windows home edition has now become rage inducing. I had a lot of patience for incompetence, but the intentional disruption of my work for making a few bucks is really something different.
  - pndy 6mo ago
    Nah, not anymore - Linux is usable for ordinary daily tasks for more than 10 years now. And even gaming is in good shape thanks to Proton - that is, unless you have some particular choices which are known to not work.
Someone 6mo ago
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. Citation needed. “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc. Even interpreting that as “all the functionality, but limit applications to utilities for managing the hardware”, I think there people who want that, but I doubt that’s what people, in general, want. Having to choose (and, likely, pay for) a photo manager, a simple word processor, etc. is just too much of a hassle for many. Also, why would any commercial entity develop such an OS? The margin is in the
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- PeterStuer 6mo ago
  There is a huge difference between having a text editor included and running it by default on startup to pretend fast launches. And then there is the whole world of nearly impossible to avoid 'services' you realy do not want but will keep popping up regardless of your wishes ('Telemetry', Onedrive, Copilot, Edge, Recall, Bing adds in the start menu ffs...). Let us also not forget being forced into a Microsoft account against your wishes ... does it still feel like it's your computer?
- 3form 6mo ago
  The margin is in the exact place where players on the market left it. With macOS being free but paid by expensive hardware, and Windows having practiced hiding in OEM to be popular rather than to bring money, expectations have been set. It's entirely these companies' doing, not an immutable reality that's impossible to overcome. I will not stop using a demanding tone for my expectations towards companies which can't deliver on them, because they shat their bed years ago and have to now deal with that. The fact that your uncompetitive practices caught up with you does not constitute a reason for me to shed a tear for you and to tap over your shoulder in sympathy.
- dartharva 6mo ago
  Hacker News Guidelines #19: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
snorremd 6mo ago
Regularly being presented with a "Set up Windows" after boot forcing you to click "no thanks" on a bunch of Microsoft services is exactly the kind of thing that irritates me. I've politely declined their services about 10 times already, make it stop! When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work either directly on Linux or at least via things like Proton (courtesy Valve Software).
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  I got one of those external drive enclosures for an NVMe drive after I upgraded. The only reason I still have Windows is the little screw securing the drive into the enclosure is in the wind and I can't be bothered to find it (for backup of all of my things so I can delete windows and install linux)
- p_ing 6mo ago
  You can disable that behavior in the settings app.
  - zombot 6mo ago
    And then Windoze decides it knows better and optimizes your settings right back.
theandrewbailey 6mo ago
> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night. Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.
  - zombot 6mo ago
    Have you tried using a program that regularly simulates keypresses or mouse movements so the computer thinks the user is still active? The `SCROLL` key for instance can be pressed without causing unwanted side effects, but it stops my Windoze VM from going to sleep.
    - embedding-shape 6mo ago
      I have not, interesting idea and I'll definitively try it out. Thanks!
      - ethbr1 6mo ago
        There are some well-known scripts. All variants of the same pattern. E.g. https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c66ac https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c... or https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/blob/master/CapsLockPreventSleepScript.ps1 https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/... Scroll lock and F13 are commonly used
djyde 6mo ago
But I really wonder, is wanting a "little OS" just a hacker thing? For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS. I don't have a solid take on this yet.
- bradley13 6mo ago
  "For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS." I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is. The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc. For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.
  - keyringlight 6mo ago
    I think the challenge is where do you draw the line between the OS and the set of baseline applications it comes with, and then further questions on what is included in that (default?) set or how full featured they are. What is a feature of the OS? That's before considering how users discover and manage other software for activities not covered by whatever is OS provided.
- widowlark 6mo ago
  serious question: What does "full featured" mean?
cfiggers 6mo ago
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it. I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me. Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case. What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else. Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process. Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.
- cosmic_cheese 6mo ago
  From my point of view, the ideal here is something like pre-OS-X Mac OS, where the OS itself was barely even an OS and more just a substrate just complete enough to run the desktop and third party applications on. The majority of bells and whistles (which Windows Hello falls under) were not baked into the OS, but instead implemented as system extensions that the user could disable and prevent from loading into memory at will. This meant that even with the last release of Classic Mac OS (9.2.x), if you disabled all extensions you got a desktop reminiscent of the 1985 System 1 except with color and modern resolution support. I think it should be more of a goal for desktop OSes to try to emulate this. If a Windows user wants a quiet no-frills Win2000 like experience except with choice exceptions like Hello, they should be able to have that without having to resort to messy hacks that impact stability and undo themselves if you update.
AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
The problem is that "to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run" changes when they want it to run something new. They don't care about cloud backup for their data? One hard drive failure, and suddenly they do. And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later. But there needs to be a way to turn something off that you don't want, and to not get nagged about it repeatedly thereafter. But for that to work, there has to be a clear, easily findable way to turn it back on later.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
  > And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later. The answer is: make the OS extremely modular so that the user can have configure whether he wants an absolutely minimalistic OS or something with "batteries included".
  - AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
    And can change their mind later. And it's clear how to change their mind later, and easy to do it.
  - sigseg1v 6mo ago
    They think they know better than what the user wants. If someone who is not a power user Googles "how to turn off updates" they do not want that user to be able to find an option on how to do it, because the user won't understand the dangers. They won't read any warnings. They will follow the steps, turn it off and be part of a botnet soon. If there is ANY possible way to turn it off, someone will make a video and the people who should not find it will find it. What if you are ACTUALLY someone who knows what they are doing and need to run a perf test over a multiple day period and need it running and uninterrupted? You can't. You are not a part of their target customer base, and at this point their actions have made it clear that they want such users to leave.
adjejmxbdjdn 6mo ago
Windows has been “this bad” for a long time. You had Windows ME which was a terrible, buggy OS. I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose all their data on Windows ME. Shifting personal windows to the Windows NT foundation provided a massive relative boost, but even that took until XP SP2 to reallt settle in, which was followed by the disaster that was Vista. Then Windows 7 came along and it was genuinely really good. Probably peak Windows. And then you came to an actual straitjacketing of windows in Windows 8, where the entire desktop Windows ecosystem was relegated to being a single app no better than calculator in the mobile first, completely undeveloped Windows 8 interface. Windows 10 got us back to sanity, and barring a few minor UI mishaps Windows 11 was originally a nice refinement. This was the longest stretch of Windows being decent as a personal computer. The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop. That was nearly a decade of enjoyable and productive Windows. Unfortunately, now we have AI, and Windows is once again being destroyed to serve the its AI master.
hnlmorg 6mo ago
This has been Microsoft’s playbook since the 90s. You talk about this as if it’s something new and people should have trusted them before.
- gosub100 6mo ago
  90s microsoft was awesome for the user. what are you talking about? NT4, MSDN, DirectX. they weren't perfect, but the UX was amazing.
  - hnlmorg 6mo ago
    DirectX fragmented the market (it really is a pity they couldn’t work with OpenGL). But I will concede at least the API was nice from a developer perspective. Internet Explorer did everything it could to fragment the market place with non-standard HTML tags, VBScript, ActiveX and so on and so forth. Microsoft released their own JVM that was incompatible with Sun Java code and caused headaches for millions of people. Win95 used shady tactics to break compatibility with Dr-DOS. MS Chat (or whatever it was called) was the bane of public IRC servers. Win98 locked people into IE4. WinMe was a clusterfuck. MS refused to allow retail stores to sell Windows if the store also sold PCs with competitors OSs. Killing any chance for BeOS and others to Compete. Steve Ballmer referred to Linux as “communism”. I could go on but you get the idea. Microsoft have always been a shitty company.
loloquwowndueo 6mo ago
> perpendicularly misaligned Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point. Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy. Of course, for most people things that are “parallel” would seem to be in close agreement.
- ninjagoo 6mo ago
  > Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy. I do believe the OP meant to say that the incentives are orthogonal (i.e., misaligned, or 90deg to each other), and perpendicularly misaligned is a close fit. Not sure why folks felt you should be downvoted for an heartfelt comment, an explanation is a much better feedback. Downvotes are counterproductive, IMO, if you're trying to have a debate or come to a meeting of minds, so I almost never use them anymore, except for where I detect ill-intentions.
- sigseg1v 6mo ago
  > Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point. Unless you are trying to screw your loyal users in 3 or more dimensions which seems to be the case here
  - loloquwowndueo 6mo ago
    Right - sorry, my pattern suggests 2-dimensional thinking.
  - ninjagoo 6mo ago
    > Unless you are trying to screw your loyal users in 3 or more dimensions which seems to be the case here That made me chuckle ... good one
will4274 6mo ago
> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. The truth is - it's more complicated than that. People want three contradictory things: 1. To not be nagged for things like setting up cloud backups. 2. To not have data sent to the cloud without consent. 3. To be able to get their data back, if their hard drive dies. Microsoft picks 2 and 3.
analogpixel 6mo ago
> as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. The perfect OS/Desktop is one you don't even notice, or know is there; it just works. Macos used to be invisible, but then then some ego-driven developer decided to push Apple Glass on to everyone. HEY LOOK HOW COOL I AM! Although at the rate of LLM improvement, I'm thinking the Next big os, will just be a really good API (gui/sound/graphics...) , you boot to a prompt screen, and then you just tell it what you want to do with the computer and it builds the apps you need from scratch.
- cseleborg 6mo ago
  No, thank you. LLMs are great for fuzzy things. But there are still a lot of things I do on my computer that are just a few mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts away, achievable in less than 3 seconds. It'd be a disaster if that got removed.
  - analogpixel 6mo ago
    I'm not saying the LLM would run or find apps for you, I was saying the LLM would write the application that you use every day. If you wanted something like Alfred to quickly run applications, you would just tell the LLM to build something like that specific to your use cases and without all the bloat you don't need. Most application are done after the first or second version, and then companies keep adding features because they need to justify their jobs/product. Wouldn't it be nice to have apps that just do what you need them to do without all the bloat, maybe say, a notepad that doesn't have copilot built into it?
    - analogpixel 6mo ago
      https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html
- MiddleEndian 6mo ago
  Mac OS used to have the benefit of a more native application philosophy. So even though the OS got out of your way, all the applications felt unified and consistent with each other.
duxup 6mo ago
Yup. I loved working in Windows for a long time. I could get what I wanted done and move on. Now Windows feels pointed AT ME by someone who wants to decide what I’m going to do….doesn’t care that I want to do other things.

cineticdaffodil 6mo ago

Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows.

cwillu 6mo ago
“Linux” needs to do nothing of the sort. People who want to save their work by moving to a platform without those issues need to be willing to either do the work or pay for it.
- snerc 6mo ago
  I've never read a more archpilled comment
  - redeeman 6mo ago
    "i hate how the current system is, i see some other guys have something that doesnt have these issues, what the other system needs to do is make their system exactly like my current, so that I dont need to spend ANY effort myself" few moments later "i hate how the current system is"
    - cineticdaffodil 6mo ago
      "We should throw away the gdp of the us for a year or two so people can then have the same productivity" year of the le nukes desktop
  - engeljohnb 6mo ago
    Linux is doing just fine without normies.
    - lpcvoid 6mo ago
      The normies are what makes Microslop money, though. We need to get the normies onboard in order to fight MS' stranglehold on computing. Gatekeeping isn't the right move here.
      - engeljohnb 6mo ago
        I can't delete my comment now, but I think you're right. I don't consider "take it or leave it" to be gatekeeping, but when the world's biggest corporations pose a threat to software liberty, distros becoming more palatable to average users is strictly a good thing. Not that I'm even involved with distro development anyway. Probably would've been better to let the real OS engineers have the discussion on that one.
        lpcvoid 6mo ago
        [flagged]
mcswell 6mo ago
Libre Office (and a couple others) is pretty close to MsOffice. Not exact, but close.
- pndy 6mo ago
  It even got ribbon interface not so long ago - it's pretty pretty close, at least by UI
- machomaster 6mo ago
  Not for people who use Excel professionally, not even close. Excel is undefeated.
ninjagoo 6mo ago
> Linux would need to be willing to safe the work millions of people put into memorizing excel, word and windows workflows. It's a fair point. Organizational and personal inertia is a real thing. Maybe think of it as going through a divorce and entering a new relationship. You do it mostly because you want to, and sometimes you do it because you have to. OS as a digital spouse analogy? too far-fetched? think of how much time you spend with it in a day :-)

neya 6mo ago

It's always the MBAs. The organizational structure incentivises them on the wrong metrics. So they adapt and optimize for that. In real life, after a while, you hit a plateau with features and market demand. What these MBA clowns love to do is take what's already perfectly fine and mess it up and create a road map for it to fix something to being it the way it was, so they can justify to their higher ups they are "adding value" to the company. And half way through this, they leave the company. Now some other new employee comes in, has no idea why this had to be reworked and messes it up even more. You have this loop enough times, you end up with how software engineering works in the fortune 500. The moment you hear "let's circle back" enough in meetings, that's your tell tale sign to quit the workplace infested with MBAs. A good organization is always run by engineers at the top level and engineers don't incentivise engineers simply for working on roadmaps of perfectly fine existing features. That's the difference.

Keyframe 6mo ago
Which company would you say is the example(s) of the latter? Sounds like utopia I'd like to be a part of.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Different sector, but I'd say Blackmagic Design seems to be run by people who actually use their own products and care about both product experience and engineering. In the creative industry there is a bunch of these "boutique" companies that places great care on the final experience. Probably Blackmagic Design is no longer "boutique" to be fair, but seems they still got the culture right.
- Traubenfuchs 6mo ago
  Valve and the few sane startups / small/mid sized companies you can be lucky enough to end up in. I was part of the transformation of a healthy mid size engineering led startup company that got taken over by MBAs and Indian employees and saw the whole lifecycle.
- dartharva 6mo ago
  I don't use its products myself but Apple fits this definition perhaps; its current CEO is a former engineering head, the previous CEO was a former operations head and the one before him was Steve Jobs.

globalnode 6mo ago

been on linux for a month now, i found the exit and stepped through it. the pain points change from getting shafted by m$ to doing research and learning how to make the system work. at least the second option gives me some agency, and now its all set up i wish i had of switched sooner! ive got to say valve is doing the lords work, along with all the other linux enthusiasts.

gosub100 6mo ago
as a long time linux user, my advice is : make backups , and don't mess with your system too much. Definitely take OS updates every few months, but don't chase the perfect utopia of UX. at least, buy another computer that you tweak and test on. If you break your main PC, it's very unpleasant and frustrating to fix.
ivell 6mo ago
To be frank, I have always thought of "Now I switched to Linux and am happy" to be some kind of meme that appears on every Windows discussion. Until it happened to me last month. The ads in Windows somehow popped up during important Zoom calls and I couldn't find a way to skip or switch off immediately. In addition to that, my paid version of Minecraft stopped working. Using Windows home edition has now become rage inducing. I had a lot of patience for incompetence, but the intentional disruption of my work for making a few bucks is really something different.
- pndy 6mo ago
  Nah, not anymore - Linux is usable for ordinary daily tasks for more than 10 years now. And even gaming is in good shape thanks to Proton - that is, unless you have some particular choices which are known to not work.

Someone 6mo ago

> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. Citation needed. “As little OS as possible” would mean not having a standard clipboard, not having a standard way to install fonts, etc. Even interpreting that as “all the functionality, but limit applications to utilities for managing the hardware”, I think there people who want that, but I doubt that’s what people, in general, want. Having to choose (and, likely, pay for) a photo manager, a simple word processor, etc. is just too much of a hassle for many. Also, why would any commercial entity develop such an OS? The margin is in the

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
PeterStuer 6mo ago
There is a huge difference between having a text editor included and running it by default on startup to pretend fast launches. And then there is the whole world of nearly impossible to avoid 'services' you realy do not want but will keep popping up regardless of your wishes ('Telemetry', Onedrive, Copilot, Edge, Recall, Bing adds in the start menu ffs...). Let us also not forget being forced into a Microsoft account against your wishes ... does it still feel like it's your computer?
3form 6mo ago
The margin is in the exact place where players on the market left it. With macOS being free but paid by expensive hardware, and Windows having practiced hiding in OEM to be popular rather than to bring money, expectations have been set. It's entirely these companies' doing, not an immutable reality that's impossible to overcome. I will not stop using a demanding tone for my expectations towards companies which can't deliver on them, because they shat their bed years ago and have to now deal with that. The fact that your uncompetitive practices caught up with you does not constitute a reason for me to shed a tear for you and to tap over your shoulder in sympathy.
dartharva 6mo ago
Hacker News Guidelines #19: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

snorremd 6mo ago

Regularly being presented with a "Set up Windows" after boot forcing you to click "no thanks" on a bunch of Microsoft services is exactly the kind of thing that irritates me. I've politely declined their services about 10 times already, make it stop! When I get tired of Battlefield 6 I'm likely going full Linux. It is simply not worth putting up with Microsoft Windows for gaming. More and more games seem to work either directly on Linux or at least via things like Proton (courtesy Valve Software).

colechristensen 6mo ago
I got one of those external drive enclosures for an NVMe drive after I upgraded. The only reason I still have Windows is the little screw securing the drive into the enclosure is in the wind and I can't be bothered to find it (for backup of all of my things so I can delete windows and install linux)
p_ing 6mo ago
You can disable that behavior in the settings app.
- zombot 6mo ago
  And then Windoze decides it knows better and optimizes your settings right back.

theandrewbailey 6mo ago

> Regaining trust is extremely hard after you've crossed an edge. Microsoft needs to learn consent. Everywhere there's a Yes and "Remind me later", there has to be a No. And the No has to work and be remembered forever, not forgotten after the next update. Using Windows has to stop feeling like you're being roofied all the time.

embedding-shape 6mo ago
Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night. Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.
- zombot 6mo ago
  Have you tried using a program that regularly simulates keypresses or mouse movements so the computer thinks the user is still active? The `SCROLL` key for instance can be pressed without causing unwanted side effects, but it stops my Windoze VM from going to sleep.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    I have not, interesting idea and I'll definitively try it out. Thanks!
    - ethbr1 6mo ago
      There are some well-known scripts. All variants of the same pattern. E.g. https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c66ac https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c... or https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/blob/master/CapsLockPreventSleepScript.ps1 https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/... Scroll lock and F13 are commonly used

djyde 6mo ago

But I really wonder, is wanting a "little OS" just a hacker thing? For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS. I don't have a solid take on this yet.

bradley13 6mo ago
"For most people, they probably just want a full-featured OS." I don't think so. Most people just want to get to their websites or email. They don't care about the OS, and may not even know what an OS is. The problem is that they may just click "yes" on any popups, to make them go away - which is probably what Microsoft wants. "Yes" track me, "yes" show me ads, etc. For your average user, Xubuntu or Mint are both great choices: simple, understandable desktops, and otherwise they stay out of the way. I set up Xubuntu for my elderly BIL a few months ago. He's a smart guy, but completely non-technical. One support call since, otherwise he has reported no problems.
- keyringlight 6mo ago
  I think the challenge is where do you draw the line between the OS and the set of baseline applications it comes with, and then further questions on what is included in that (default?) set or how full featured they are. What is a feature of the OS? That's before considering how users discover and manage other software for activities not covered by whatever is OS provided.
widowlark 6mo ago
serious question: What does "full featured" mean?

cfiggers 6mo ago

> What people realy want: as little OS as possible I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it. I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me. Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case. What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else. Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process. Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.

cosmic_cheese 6mo ago
From my point of view, the ideal here is something like pre-OS-X Mac OS, where the OS itself was barely even an OS and more just a substrate just complete enough to run the desktop and third party applications on. The majority of bells and whistles (which Windows Hello falls under) were not baked into the OS, but instead implemented as system extensions that the user could disable and prevent from loading into memory at will. This meant that even with the last release of Classic Mac OS (9.2.x), if you disabled all extensions you got a desktop reminiscent of the 1985 System 1 except with color and modern resolution support. I think it should be more of a goal for desktop OSes to try to emulate this. If a Windows user wants a quiet no-frills Win2000 like experience except with choice exceptions like Hello, they should be able to have that without having to resort to messy hacks that impact stability and undo themselves if you update.

AnimalMuppet 6mo ago

The problem is that "to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run" changes when they want it to run something new. They don't care about cloud backup for their data? One hard drive failure, and suddenly they do. And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later. But there needs to be a way to turn something off that you don't want, and to not get nagged about it repeatedly thereafter. But for that to work, there has to be a clear, easily findable way to turn it back on later.

aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
> And if you want to sell the same version of the OS to different people, you need the union of what everybody wants and what everybody is going to want later. The answer is: make the OS extremely modular so that the user can have configure whether he wants an absolutely minimalistic OS or something with "batteries included".
- AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
  And can change their mind later. And it's clear how to change their mind later, and easy to do it.
- sigseg1v 6mo ago
  They think they know better than what the user wants. If someone who is not a power user Googles "how to turn off updates" they do not want that user to be able to find an option on how to do it, because the user won't understand the dangers. They won't read any warnings. They will follow the steps, turn it off and be part of a botnet soon. If there is ANY possible way to turn it off, someone will make a video and the people who should not find it will find it. What if you are ACTUALLY someone who knows what they are doing and need to run a perf test over a multiple day period and need it running and uninterrupted? You can't. You are not a part of their target customer base, and at this point their actions have made it clear that they want such users to leave.

adjejmxbdjdn 6mo ago

Windows has been “this bad” for a long time. You had Windows ME which was a terrible, buggy OS. I don’t know a single person who didn’t lose all their data on Windows ME. Shifting personal windows to the Windows NT foundation provided a massive relative boost, but even that took until XP SP2 to reallt settle in, which was followed by the disaster that was Vista. Then Windows 7 came along and it was genuinely really good. Probably peak Windows. And then you came to an actual straitjacketing of windows in Windows 8, where the entire desktop Windows ecosystem was relegated to being a single app no better than calculator in the mobile first, completely undeveloped Windows 8 interface. Windows 10 got us back to sanity, and barring a few minor UI mishaps Windows 11 was originally a nice refinement. This was the longest stretch of Windows being decent as a personal computer. The addition of WSL (well actually it took until WSL2) made Windows competitive with Mac as a developer desktop. That was nearly a decade of enjoyable and productive Windows. Unfortunately, now we have AI, and Windows is once again being destroyed to serve the its AI master.

hnlmorg 6mo ago

This has been Microsoft’s playbook since the 90s. You talk about this as if it’s something new and people should have trusted them before.

gosub100 6mo ago
90s microsoft was awesome for the user. what are you talking about? NT4, MSDN, DirectX. they weren't perfect, but the UX was amazing.
- hnlmorg 6mo ago
  DirectX fragmented the market (it really is a pity they couldn’t work with OpenGL). But I will concede at least the API was nice from a developer perspective. Internet Explorer did everything it could to fragment the market place with non-standard HTML tags, VBScript, ActiveX and so on and so forth. Microsoft released their own JVM that was incompatible with Sun Java code and caused headaches for millions of people. Win95 used shady tactics to break compatibility with Dr-DOS. MS Chat (or whatever it was called) was the bane of public IRC servers. Win98 locked people into IE4. WinMe was a clusterfuck. MS refused to allow retail stores to sell Windows if the store also sold PCs with competitors OSs. Killing any chance for BeOS and others to Compete. Steve Ballmer referred to Linux as “communism”. I could go on but you get the idea. Microsoft have always been a shitty company.

loloquwowndueo 6mo ago

> perpendicularly misaligned Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point. Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy. Of course, for most people things that are “parallel” would seem to be in close agreement.

ninjagoo 6mo ago
> Parallel lines never touch, maybe that’s a better geometric analogy. I do believe the OP meant to say that the incentives are orthogonal (i.e., misaligned, or 90deg to each other), and perpendicularly misaligned is a close fit. Not sure why folks felt you should be downvoted for an heartfelt comment, an explanation is a much better feedback. Downvotes are counterproductive, IMO, if you're trying to have a debate or come to a meeting of minds, so I almost never use them anymore, except for where I detect ill-intentions.
sigseg1v 6mo ago
> Um. Perpendicular lines intersect at some point. Unless you are trying to screw your loyal users in 3 or more dimensions which seems to be the case here
- loloquwowndueo 6mo ago
  Right - sorry, my pattern suggests 2-dimensional thinking.
- ninjagoo 6mo ago
  > Unless you are trying to screw your loyal users in 3 or more dimensions which seems to be the case here That made me chuckle ... good one

will4274 6mo ago

> What people realy want: as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. The truth is - it's more complicated than that. People want three contradictory things: 1. To not be nagged for things like setting up cloud backups. 2. To not have data sent to the cloud without consent. 3. To be able to get their data back, if their hard drive dies. Microsoft picks 2 and 3.

analogpixel 6mo ago

> as little OS as possible to let them run just the things on their computer they want to run. The perfect OS/Desktop is one you don't even notice, or know is there; it just works. Macos used to be invisible, but then then some ego-driven developer decided to push Apple Glass on to everyone. HEY LOOK HOW COOL I AM! Although at the rate of LLM improvement, I'm thinking the Next big os, will just be a really good API (gui/sound/graphics...) , you boot to a prompt screen, and then you just tell it what you want to do with the computer and it builds the apps you need from scratch.

cseleborg 6mo ago
No, thank you. LLMs are great for fuzzy things. But there are still a lot of things I do on my computer that are just a few mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts away, achievable in less than 3 seconds. It'd be a disaster if that got removed.
- analogpixel 6mo ago
  I'm not saying the LLM would run or find apps for you, I was saying the LLM would write the application that you use every day. If you wanted something like Alfred to quickly run applications, you would just tell the LLM to build something like that specific to your use cases and without all the bloat you don't need. Most application are done after the first or second version, and then companies keep adding features because they need to justify their jobs/product. Wouldn't it be nice to have apps that just do what you need them to do without all the bloat, maybe say, a notepad that doesn't have copilot built into it?
  - analogpixel 6mo ago
    https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html https://isene.org/2026/05/Audience-of-One.html
MiddleEndian 6mo ago
Mac OS used to have the benefit of a more native application philosophy. So even though the OS got out of your way, all the applications felt unified and consistent with each other.

duxup 6mo ago

Yup. I loved working in Windows for a long time. I could get what I wanted done and move on. Now Windows feels pointed AT ME by someone who wants to decide what I’m going to do….doesn’t care that I want to do other things.