Misbehaving Microsoft Teams ad brings down the entire Windows 11 desktop (opens in new tab)

> but in reality Windows 10 has been incredibly reliable

True, but it depends on which component. For a year it couldn't sort and move symbols on the desktop without bugs.

On some systems there is a "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" process that will take all your CPU. Don't know, MS could farm bitcoins for all we know.

There are a lot of small issues, but yes, overall it got more dependent, although I think Win7 was stable as well.

Still, overall it doesn't really improve, it mostly gets worse. The infestation with ads shouldn't be allowed in any operating system. These are ideas from guys Steve Jobs warned us about.

You mean the same windows 10 that I never bother to boot into because every time I do various services decide to do so many indexing and updating tasks that it pegs the hard drive at 100% for hours?

I should be able to launch windows every couple of months without having to wait so long to do anything that I forget why I even booted into windows in the first place.

I, on the other hand, would need to sacrifice a lot of convenience to be included in this "we"

A computer is a tool. You buy it to perform what it is advertised to do, just like a socket wrench set. But unlike a socket wrench set, the manufacturer could break into your home in the night and replace your rachet and make it incompatible with your old sockets that still work.

Getting rid of my laptop and internet for a few weeks and I expect to make a living how?

So your advice is to throw up your hands, back off from technology entirely, cede all territory to bigcos, and just sit back and watch them run rampant right over everyone else too. Stepping away is not stepping "out", there is no "out" anymore.

I'm gonna come camp out on your front porch, it's fine ok? Not to be glib but if this bothers you have you considered just moving out of your house? Maybe house living is just not for you man, just walk away.

I have spent many a summer at a cabin with no internet, potable water or plumbing. I love it, it's a beautiful time. It's one of my favorite places to be in the whole wide world.

That being said I also love technology. It's fucking magic and I'm a mage. I have immense power over one of the most effective forces in the world and I spend a depressing amount of it to circumvent annoyances forced upon me by people trying to part me from my money. It's so frustrating because I love what technology is and what it can enable for people, and I hate how trash the baseline is, and I especially hate most people don't even know how good things could be if we y'know had open standards and shit. I know that there isn't an easy fix, but my frustration is none the less valid. So much of humanity's effort in tech is spent on bullshit that doesn't add value at best, and is actively detrimental to all but a few humans on average.

Um, oh how I've dreamt of this reality... despite all the problems they have caused, computers are just too damn useful to give up on. We just need to learn to control the larger system that produces them better.

I sometimes like to joke that seeing a company push for Windows / Teams, and, more generally, software that fights against you instead of helping you do your job must be some kind of signaling. "Look how well-off we are, we can afford to pay our employees full-time while they only work half the time".

I installed OpenBSD about 10 years ago and have used nothing else on my personal computers since then. It does occasionally have breaking changes in its updates, but they never happen without you taking action to initiate them.

The idea that we're OK with random popups, feature promotions, nags to use this or that or enable some setting, and outright advertising on our computers is just mind-boggling.

I've been on insider edition beta versions of windows for years and while I don't mind occasional hiccups stuff like this made me get rid of it. It was fine for a while but ever since the 20202H update it's been one major issue after another.

Even more than that, your OS should not be showing you ads at all, let alone downloading them. The problem here isn't that the facility went wrong, it's that the facility exists.

I had to use the registry key as well because MS broke the GPO (I would say on purpose but anyone who is in a position to mess with GPOs knows how to edit registry keys with it as well) but it really does get rid of it for good.

From a command prompt (you shouldn't need admin rights), run "REG ADD HKCU\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer /v DisableSearchBoxSuggestions /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f", which disables the web search suggestions in the registry. After restarting Windows Explorer (or logging off and back on), you should have search work how you'd expect.

The search function in Windows 10 is pathetic. It almost seems like an April fool's joke that was left in place for too long. What is double stupid is that MS already had a working search built into the shell in Windows 7. It's like they don't understand that no one ever woke up one day and thought to themselves, "I hope I could search the web using the start menu in Windows".

Old school people use Win + R -> calc -> enter

> Haven't happened to me on my desktop. Maybe try updating? File a bug report?

You funny. Have you ever encounted a Win 10 bug ? Did you find any fix ? For example: mouse clicks extra when the mouse button is pressed (drag) or double clicks when you single click. Or Title bar and menubar/ribbon dissapears in multimonitor environment.

I really wish people would stop using the word "modern" in marketing rhetoric as if it was a good thing, because more often than not they're using it and other buzzwords because they don't have any better compelling reasons to convince you to use their product.

No, I do not care that the newer version is more "modern", "stylish", "sleek", "clean", or any other number of useless buzzwordy adjectives. Tell me concretely what's actually better about it and how it will improve my (my, not your!) "experience". An OS should not be a fashion statement nor an advertising platform. It's a tool people use to get real work done.

Is Windows 10 really that good?

It's been some time now, but I still remember the first time I upgraded away from Windows 7 and feeling disappointed.

Since then my hardware is massively more powerful, but I'm still to be convinced my current Windows 10 setup is better than that older Windows 7 setup.

> Windows 10 is a great modern OS that everyone expected to last and be built upon

Possibly related to Microsoft explicitly saying "there will be no further versions of Windows after Windows 10".

> Windows 10 is a great modern OS

I’m an infrequent user of it but have a starkly different opinion. It feels like a layer on top archeology and the number of places you have to go to find settings and controls is unhelpful.

Perhaps there's a version of Moore's Law concerning the amount of innovation left at the OS level, and we're only starting to run out of it just now.

What legitimately useful features can we expect out of the release of iOS five major versions down the line? Will there be any new features that change the status quo, and that we'd be practically unable to live without? The significant features like the app store and multitasking have already been done long ago. As for macOS, it seems that the new security controls and notifications are significantly impacting some people's user experience, but they're still "improvements" from Apple's standpoint.

And yet Apple and Microsoft are still somehow compelled to keep releasing new versions of their operating systems on a fairly regular basis. It's hard to imagine there will be a "final" or even long-term-support version of iOS. But those companies aren't going to market their new OS versions as changing nothing, so something has to change.

I'm honestly very curious to see what will happen ten years from now when the vendors will struggle to meet their own arbitrary standards for innovation with each new OS version when, by nature, there are not many more significant breakthroughs left to be had.

How is it a "great modern OS?" Internally?

Because its UI and user experience are a shitshow. Settings are scattered everywhere. Windows have no toolbars, title bars, or borders to distinguish them from the one they're overlapping. Menu bars are missing. There are access-prohibited shadows of user directories all over the place in Explorer. The color-scheme editor is simply gone. It's still full of peek-a-boo and Easter-egg UI, with controls disguised as text or simply invisible unless you accidentally roll over them.

And my favorite: Microsoft has disabled remote desktop access except in its "pro" version. Gee, Microsoft: Your contention is that a PROFESSIONAL is the most likely customer to need someone else to log in and help him remotely? Retarded.

When my parents have an issue that I could log in and solve, guess what? I can't. And no, Microsoft, I'm not "upgrading" them to a "pro" version of your broken shit. I'm going to buy them a Mac, and that's the end of Windows in any of my family's homes. And this is coming from a former Windows enthusiast / professional developer / Mac scorner.

You don't realize how unusable Windows has become until you try to set someone up on it. Its E-mail program is absymal, defective in design and function. Outlook isn't included anymore. If you do make the mistake of installing another glorified spam conduit, Office 365, you'll be treated to defects that literally render it unusable to some people: I increased the system-wide font size for my parents, but Outlook didn't honor it. E-mail subjects in the In box remained microscopic and illegible.

And of course there's the endless goddamned harangue to log in with your Microsoft account. A huge portion of the population is laden with an ever-growing pile of accounts and passwords. An account to log into your computer. Another for E-mail. Another for Apple products. Another for your cable provider. ENOUGH. They have no idea which one I'm asking for when I need to get their password to help them with something.

It's easy for the Hacker News demographic to forget that PEOPLE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THIS MESS. And so they are writing down their IDs and passwords on Post-Its and putting them on their computers. They are using the same password on every site that demands that they use an E-mail address as a user ID, because they think that this is required.

Then the users feel dumb and blame themselves for problems, which pisses me off even more. They're being TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF BY MICROSOFT and others, rendering their computers essentially unusable and their security at risk. It's disgraceful.

>> but Windows 10, OneDrive, Teams, Edge...

My company issued laptop came with all that. After installing some important software (embedded compiler and IDE, wsl, etc) my one drive complained it was full, which needs to be addressed or it will keep complaining. The recommended solution is to upgrade to a paid onedrive with more then 5GB. I didnt know I was using onedrive, so I turned it off. All my important files created over that last few months disappeared. I could buy more onedrive space to restore them or they did show them all in some folder so dragged them back to various places. This was 100 percent wasted time since the machine came with something on the order of 100 times the 5GB onedrive freebie limit.

Now months after having turned off onedrive, it's full again. Must have got turned on again, but not by me.

Teams is another one I dont even want to get started on. And edge is just chrome with MS corruption and starting at Bing.

Teams is a strong contender for most aggravating software ever written.

> I may have misgivings about certain things in modern desktops but Windows 10, OneDrive, Teams, Edge absolutely deliver a better experience for an average user compared to XP, Microsoft Briefcase, Windows Messenger and IE6 - and XP was one of the good ones!

I'm not familiar with Briefcase (never knew what it did) and I'll give you Edge vs IE6.

But Teams vs Windows Messenger? No way. I'm running Teams on a computer orders of magnitute more powerful than what I had at the time of XP, and it STILL lags. I'm not a particularly fast typer, but it STILL can't keep up with me. This is, hands down, the worst piece of software I have to use today.

And I bet if it wasn't pushed "free" by MS to companies already using their stuff, no one would know about it.

Say what you will about the walled garden, at least there is one working way to do the thing.

It's sort of amazing to me that most people through word of mouth don't already know this. Your work or university has probably already paid for a license dozens of times over.

I completed Fallout 3 a few months ago on Ubuntu 20 under Proton (and Fallout: New Vegas). Try using Lutris's implementation of wine ± proton -- my GOG copy "just worked", much to my surprise. Including the mods, and mod managers!

If you continue to have trouble, drop me an email and I'll give you my configuration.

I very much second your sentiment about proton being "good enough". It's amazing! I have a less than stellar GPU -- a Radeon 570 -- and haven't found a single game that I can't play on 'ultra' settings at 1080p, including the in-development BG3.

After Apple's CSAM awfulness, my next laptop will be linux, ideally with a Zen processor, quite possibly running Manjaro and either KDE or i3.

Don't feel bad - Fallout 3 (atleast from Steam) no longer works on Windows 10 either! Installed it the other day, googled after it failed to launch, and saw there's a few community efforts and hacks you can try to get it up and running. I gave up.

Yes I am aware. Even before Proton I was one of those geeks with one Radeon for a Windows VM and one cheap GPU for the host system.

But it's just too much hassle. I'd rather just boot up my big Windows gaming rig. I view it as a modular Xbox that I build myself.

So no matter how far we come in Linux, most people will still have a "Wintendo" PC console for gaming.

I would like to but the performance is a dealbreaker. If I'm on windows, I can expect to run latest titles at 60 fps on my 4 year old rig. That isn't possible on wine/proton.

Something like half of the top 10 games on Steam can't even start due to anti cheat and Steam is what's pushing gaming on Linux. To be fair to them if they weren't that number would be a lot worse, many of their own games are in that list. Of the ones that can they generally work alright but a few have intermittent crashes or things you have to workaround.

If you play older/smaller single player games though it generally does the job pretty darn well.

Almost any online game will not work because of anticheat software designed specifically for windows.

I personally just decided to give up on the online games instead.

It’s not a solved issue to be certain, but sites that use a service like CleanCreative rarely have issues, as do any publishers that whitelist ads and advertisers.

It's not just defects, it's ridiculous design choices. Why does almost every single Windows user on the planet have their attention occasionally taken by something utterly pointless to them like "3D Objects" or "Onedrive" when they look for a file, or choosing between "Edit with Photos", "Edit with Paint 3D", and "Edit"? And choose between "Settings" and "Control Panel" which seem like different skins of the same thing, except one has slightly more icons in it than the other, so does that mean it's more functional? Who knows? User has to decide. And why is it that with multiple monitors, if one goes to sleep, the windows all move around, so for anything you keep open, you're regularly manually re-positioning the window every day?

You do realize that this isn’t about this one ad bringing down Windows 11 but rather the very architecture that allowed for an ad to integrate itself into the system to such an extent? That is not something you can fix before RTM release, only patch around.

It is not any unreleased OS though. It is a major release of the most widely used desktop OS in the world, that presumably got through many layers of testing and was released to a small set of outside users before the final rollout less than 1 month away. One would expect a pretty solid state by then.

I think it was back in 2018, there was a bugged mandatory Windows Update package that was corrupted for weeks.

The system would ask you to reboot the computer, at which point it would try to install the update. That failed with a bluescreen, requiring an automatic restore. This process took around 30 minutes on an SSD.

So far seems innocuous, but the thing is, as this was a mandatory update, after one or two days it would display an un-dismissable popup over the entire screen demanding a restart, which would repeat the process above.

This caused data loss in applications if the user didn't have the opportunity to save whatever data was in memory. Remember, the popup is undismissable, there were no ahead of time warnings, and the timing varied (so you couldn't even rely on "the computer will fuck up at 16:03" or whatever).

The existence of ads as a "core" part of the Windows experience speaks otherwise.

Why are there ads in paid software? Why is Microsoft content having a separation of "serious" Windows and consumer Windows, delineated by ads and spyware?

Yeah, but I'm thinking this is a repeat of Windows Vista and I'll be able to stay on 10 for a while before they create Windows 12 which will be a much better release.

Some years ago I went to the dentist and had to get x-rays done on my teeth. After a fair bit of time going through all of the different angles, the technician apologized to me and said that we have to do it all again.

The computer tied to the x-ray machine did a forced restart for Windows update, this is back in the days of Windows 7, and I had to get my teeth x-rayed all over again after we sat and waited for 20 minutes.

This is such an incredibly pedantic HN answer.

Let's just say they're both insanely important to our continued functioning digital existence. Without working Linux or Windows we are quite fucked.

I don’t see how the GUI makes Windows less important. Windows is everywhere.

Sometimes I feel like microsoft bribes people in free desktop project.