5 ms·

Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past f

by xvxvx 12d ago

Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.

baal80spam 12d ago
> in QA No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026
ainar-g 12d ago
> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option. Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.
- xvxvx 12d ago
  I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.
  - pbhjpbhj 11d ago
    Installing Pop_OS! or Ubuntu takes about an hour to 90 minutes (including setting up eg Steam, your preffered browser, etc). You'll want to run it as a live USB for a bit first to make sure there's driver support. IME much faster to install and update than MS Windows. If the hardware you buy doesn't support Linux use then it can be a crap shoot (down to luck). Why people blame their Linux distro for that I don't really understand.
  - DANmode 11d ago
    Fair enough, Dell can be pretty spotty when it comes to Linux support.
- kenhwang 12d ago
  For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software. Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance. WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work. Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
  - alphager 12d ago
    Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).
    - kenhwang 12d ago
      One of my machines is always Linux desktop; I've been using it to see if it's ready enough for my main desktop to switch over and so far my verdict has been it's not. Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
      - a-priori 12d ago
        If you're talking about compiling WiFi drivers, then you're not using Linux the way most people do.
        dcrazy 12d ago
        Ah yes, they’re just holding it wrong.
        a-priori 12d ago
        All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.
- noisem4ker 12d ago
  Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion. </meta>
- hacker_homie 12d ago
  I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase. The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault. At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
  - nickjj 12d ago
    What kind of research did you do? I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues. Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it. I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM. It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
    - dylan604 12d ago
      > Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues. That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon
      - nickjj 12d ago
- Yizahi 12d ago
  It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that. Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years. The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words. Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
  - worik 12d ago
    I have had these problems on Windows too. Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
    - Yizahi 12d ago
      In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable" compared to a home desktop Linux (among all sorts of distro plus DE combinations). And I was using Win 98 ME, early Vista builds and so on too. It is really hard to bork Windows install to become fully inoperable. It will be screeching and throttling under fifty different viruses and malware installed by a naive aunty in the accounting but it will just somehow work. And GPU driver crashes in my case were self recovering. Linux on the other hand allows way more manual intervention, but it also kinda expects way more manual intervention too. In my experience.
      - prmoustache 12d ago
- adamc 12d ago
  Been a couple years, but discord on linux was... much less stable than it was on Windows, and I was using it to play a lot of D&D at the time, so, I ended up reverting to Windows.
  - simoncion 12d ago
    I've been using the Discord "thick client" on Linux for many years now and it works just fine. I've never seen any sort of crashes, nor have I seen any instability that couldn't be explained by shitty Internet "weather". Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.
gib444 12d ago
> issues should have been discovered in QA Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!
- xvxvx 12d ago
  That’s my bigger fear in this scenario: that they did limited testing with the internal agreement that any small issues that arise can be carried by the customers. As long as it didn’t fully break, it can be released.
moepstar 12d ago
> remote access and pasting issues And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...
deleted 12d ago
[deleted]
mikestew 12d ago
it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move. (FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
- SSLy 12d ago
  that rotting lack of QA is now spreading through their Xbox subsidiaries too. WoW is much buggier than ~4 years ago.
  - the_solenoid 12d ago
    To be fair, WoW is a 20+ year old game that to my knowledge never really got the ground up rewrite it has needed.... so I feel issues keep compounding faster and faster. Also - and not trying to defend MS here - I am pretty sure MS has been fairly hands-off about how blizz is run - so far. Just the general enshitification going on in parallel everywhere.
    - SSLy 12d ago
      Midnight's war on addons, won by addons btw, is rumoured to be a push from top up. It has been cause of such borkage that stock, no addons UI shart LUA errors upon release.
- ThrowawayB7 11d ago
  Lay the blame where it belongs: it was one of Satya Nadella's early decisions to eliminate the SDET role at Microsoft. Everybody praised him at the time as some kind of wunderkind for juicing the stock but now Microsoft and users are facing the consequences. Hopefully history will correctly attach responsibility to Nadella for it.
EvanAnderson 12d ago
> ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. They were. QA is paying Customers now. Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
xlayn 12d ago
Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff. Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works. Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571.... don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that (and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
- mejutoco 12d ago
  I agree with your sentiment, but I dont see linux as windows with some compromises. I simply see windows as unusable (only wsl is imo), so anything will be an improvement.
doron 12d ago
but...but... AI was supposed to make this all better!
Yizahi 12d ago
Haven't you heard? QAs are unnecessary ballast now, devs and managers can test product just as well in their spare time ;) . Also, people are buying bug ridden products anyway, so why bother.
this_user 12d ago
No need for QA if you just tell Claude to "make no mistakes".
trashface 12d ago
Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble with suspend, I _basically_ have to shut down my session every day, just like in the bad 'ol Win 9x days - my machine will sleep, but only after I shut down the entire GUI and make sure nothing is using NVIDIA, oh and turn off the intel wifi driver. GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok. I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability. Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
- dziulius 12d ago
  Try linux mint. Gnome 3.x is cancer. Also, linux mint still uses xserver and for some reason suspend works properly on nvidia
  - prmoustache 12d ago
    > Gnome 3.x is cancer. No it is not. It is just not to your taste. Thanksfully no linux user is forced to use it and there are plenty of alternatives.
- qu4z-2 12d ago
  > "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part... Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.
shevy-java 12d ago
Or MS could have used AI to find all these issues months ago already. But obviously they did not, which is strange. These big corporations promote AI but then don't use it to improve their own software code base systematically.

by xvxvx 12d ago

baal80spam 12d ago

> in QA No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026

ainar-g 12d ago

> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option. Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.

xvxvx 12d ago
I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.
- pbhjpbhj 11d ago
  Installing Pop_OS! or Ubuntu takes about an hour to 90 minutes (including setting up eg Steam, your preffered browser, etc). You'll want to run it as a live USB for a bit first to make sure there's driver support. IME much faster to install and update than MS Windows. If the hardware you buy doesn't support Linux use then it can be a crap shoot (down to luck). Why people blame their Linux distro for that I don't really understand.
- DANmode 11d ago
  Fair enough, Dell can be pretty spotty when it comes to Linux support.
kenhwang 12d ago
For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software. Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance. WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work. Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
- alphager 12d ago
  Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).
  - kenhwang 12d ago
    One of my machines is always Linux desktop; I've been using it to see if it's ready enough for my main desktop to switch over and so far my verdict has been it's not. Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
    - a-priori 12d ago
      If you're talking about compiling WiFi drivers, then you're not using Linux the way most people do.
      - dcrazy 12d ago
        Ah yes, they’re just holding it wrong.
        a-priori 12d ago
        All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.
noisem4ker 12d ago
Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion. </meta>
hacker_homie 12d ago
I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase. The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault. At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
- nickjj 12d ago
  What kind of research did you do? I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues. Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it. I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM. It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
  - dylan604 12d ago
    > Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues. That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon
    - nickjj 12d ago
Yizahi 12d ago
It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that. Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years. The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words. Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
- worik 12d ago
  I have had these problems on Windows too. Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
  - Yizahi 12d ago
    In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable" compared to a home desktop Linux (among all sorts of distro plus DE combinations). And I was using Win 98 ME, early Vista builds and so on too. It is really hard to bork Windows install to become fully inoperable. It will be screeching and throttling under fifty different viruses and malware installed by a naive aunty in the accounting but it will just somehow work. And GPU driver crashes in my case were self recovering. Linux on the other hand allows way more manual intervention, but it also kinda expects way more manual intervention too. In my experience.
    - prmoustache 12d ago
adamc 12d ago
Been a couple years, but discord on linux was... much less stable than it was on Windows, and I was using it to play a lot of D&D at the time, so, I ended up reverting to Windows.
- simoncion 12d ago
  I've been using the Discord "thick client" on Linux for many years now and it works just fine. I've never seen any sort of crashes, nor have I seen any instability that couldn't be explained by shitty Internet "weather". Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.

gib444 12d ago

> issues should have been discovered in QA Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!

xvxvx 12d ago
That’s my bigger fear in this scenario: that they did limited testing with the internal agreement that any small issues that arise can be carried by the customers. As long as it didn’t fully break, it can be released.

moepstar 12d ago

> remote access and pasting issues And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...

deleted 12d ago

[deleted]

mikestew 12d ago

it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move. (FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)

SSLy 12d ago
that rotting lack of QA is now spreading through their Xbox subsidiaries too. WoW is much buggier than ~4 years ago.
- the_solenoid 12d ago
  To be fair, WoW is a 20+ year old game that to my knowledge never really got the ground up rewrite it has needed.... so I feel issues keep compounding faster and faster. Also - and not trying to defend MS here - I am pretty sure MS has been fairly hands-off about how blizz is run - so far. Just the general enshitification going on in parallel everywhere.
  - SSLy 12d ago
    Midnight's war on addons, won by addons btw, is rumoured to be a push from top up. It has been cause of such borkage that stock, no addons UI shart LUA errors upon release.
ThrowawayB7 11d ago
Lay the blame where it belongs: it was one of Satya Nadella's early decisions to eliminate the SDET role at Microsoft. Everybody praised him at the time as some kind of wunderkind for juicing the stock but now Microsoft and users are facing the consequences. Hopefully history will correctly attach responsibility to Nadella for it.

EvanAnderson 12d ago

> ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. They were. QA is paying Customers now. Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.

xlayn 12d ago

Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff. Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works. Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571.... don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that (and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...

mejutoco 12d ago
I agree with your sentiment, but I dont see linux as windows with some compromises. I simply see windows as unusable (only wsl is imo), so anything will be an improvement.

doron 12d ago

but...but... AI was supposed to make this all better!

Yizahi 12d ago

Haven't you heard? QAs are unnecessary ballast now, devs and managers can test product just as well in their spare time ;) . Also, people are buying bug ridden products anyway, so why bother.

this_user 12d ago

No need for QA if you just tell Claude to "make no mistakes".

trashface 12d ago

Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble with suspend, I _basically_ have to shut down my session every day, just like in the bad 'ol Win 9x days - my machine will sleep, but only after I shut down the entire GUI and make sure nothing is using NVIDIA, oh and turn off the intel wifi driver. GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok. I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability. Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.

dziulius 12d ago
Try linux mint. Gnome 3.x is cancer. Also, linux mint still uses xserver and for some reason suspend works properly on nvidia
- prmoustache 12d ago
  > Gnome 3.x is cancer. No it is not. It is just not to your taste. Thanksfully no linux user is forced to use it and there are plenty of alternatives.
qu4z-2 12d ago
> "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part... Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.

shevy-java 12d ago

Or MS could have used AI to find all these issues months ago already. But obviously they did not, which is strange. These big corporations promote AI but then don't use it to improve their own software code base systematically.