I wish people would engage with the content a bit. It's a huge claim (and scary).
This trend is not even limited to Windows.
We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
Corporations don't run Windows. They run Outlook, Excel, and Teams. Windows and generic PCs (or thin clients and VDIs) is just the cheapest way to achieve that goal.
This myopia in tech is so baffling to me. Windows has been around over 40 years and tech people still act like it will go away “any day now” just because they don’t like it.
I've got to disagree. Macs are a fantastic option as long as the software needed to do actual work is available. That's the real bottleneck and it's not something Dell, Lenovo, or HP have any power over.
If windows were a building, they need to stop tacking on more rooms like it’s a gaudy McMansion. If they really wanna keep working on it, work to make what’s already there more beautiful. Optimise. Reduce the install size. Clean up some of the decades of tech debt. Unify the different generations of UI toolkits. Write documentation. Port security critical parts to rust, where appropriate. Refine, don’t reinvent.
Certainly not; not by a long shot. Besides, most users don't even understand the potential of software. But why bother improving it if you still make money shipping crap?
With these new age laws, these systems can legally ask for personal information, and I am sure as time goes, information required will expand.
As for Linux, seems systemd is all in on this, as for the BSDs, I doubt they will enforce these new laws.
I always identify myself as "Conan, The Barbarian" when creating account.
Why would they want to do that (serious question, think about it)
That's an issue I would like to see legislated! In fact, in my country there is a law that prohibits bundled purchases: it's just that the authorities are not tech savvy enough to see it when it pertains to computers and Windows.
Everyone here slinging mud, while getting paid out of the SaaS pot. Would windows be a better product if it was user focused but cost $40/mo? From Microsoft's POV it would probably kill numbers.
Things improved slightly for a while and maybe the generation of Mac/linux using tech workers never suffered through the worst of it, but Microsoft seems to be back on track with their old ways.
If they installed Linux, we would still have our 12 yo PC until now. The year of Linux desktop will never come due to this reason.
Linux is a joy to use. Self hosting is easy as hell, with an abundance of tools and applications available. You can buy old refurbished machines that are still pretty amazing home servers for cheap.
Hell, even AI help with that. It's pretty good at making scripts and detailing step-by-step what you need to to get things running.
It's a genuine pleasure to use.
I'm only very slightly less reluctant to get an Apple machine (though the M* chips tempt me) and there will probably be incompatibilities between the versions of Quicken.
I think I should probably rip off the band-aid and migrate to:
+ spreadsheets (more control/future proof) + gnucash or similar (and risk that going unmaintained) + Wine + something I've not considered
The principal limitation of qbe is lack of multi-location support. The main advantage of cloud is the ability to provide direct access (though the role/permission models I’ve experienced have other downsides).
It’s a mixed bag, but the advantages of qbe outweigh the aggravations of windows—for now.
Can I play Kingdom Come II on Mint now? If not, are we moving there?
- work is still ongoing to get performance of direct x 12 games on NVIDIA closer to that of windows.
Honestly those people can buy an Apple device. Got my mother one- just email and a web browser.
(But I have to give MS credit: you can still disable BitLocker and their ridiculous smart screen. I am using my PC the same way I've always used it).
So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smartphones and think: We must do as they do. And thus S3 suspend gets replaced by "modern suspend" - just like a smartphone, not really suspended, just in a low power, always online, always ready to act mode. And local storage gets replaced by cloud, and local accounts get replaced by cloud accounts, and the cloud reaches in and modifies features and apps. Does this really make sense? Does it matter? Smartphones blazed the way and are successful. Must copy the formula, of your device just being an extension to the cloud, nothing more.
I sit here in front of my old school Linux machine, with terabytes of local storage and as little cloud dependency as possible. Heck it's part of the cloud itself, hosting an ancient cobwebsite right here from the basement. But I feel increasingly like an anachronism. Want to pass a photo dump to computer-neurotypicals? Not even a USB stick will do. Not even a USB-C stick that will plug right into their smartphone and allow the pix to be copied off easily from its UI. The whole concept of non-cloud stuff has become alien to most people.
Don't even get me started about getting photos from them! Anyway if that's how the world works now, why would anyone bother making a traditional operating system any more?
- Windows Terminal is actually pretty dang good
- There's actually a package manager built in now with WinGet
- Hyper-V comes with pro and is incredibly powerful
- While WSL2 isn't great at times, it does fill in a lot of gaps and working with Docker is pretty seamless
- Ever since Windows Defender became standard, cleaning up relative's machines has basically turned into disabling some startup apps and removing spyware-like browser extensions
- With 11 the UI actually feels reasonably consistent for the first time in a long while. There's still some core applications that need a rewrite (Disk Management, Format, RegEdit, Device Manager, Event Viewer), but it feels like real progression when compared to 8/8.1 or 10
- Backwards compatibility is quite simply unmatched
There's some areas that have regressed or have been omitted for _some reason_:
- If you're going to push Microsoft 365 family subscriptions, I never want to have to download TeamViewer, AnyDesk, etc. Give me some capable remote assistance tool. It's obvious this is ignored so they don't piss off partners.
- NTP synchronization shouldn't be behind the location access permission. I understand why it is, but then make location access more granular.
- Disk performance could be much better
- NTFS is so antiquated. It's time for another filesystem. I want native overlay support, checksumming, not-ass permissions (though tbf nobody gets this right)
- Windows + D is just a key shift to the right from ctrl C so I hit it all the time. It would be less infuriating if hitting it again actually put all of the windows in their previous state / stacking order.
- I usually sign in with my Microsoft account when I setup my PC, but ffs let me create a local user. If you want to put signing into my Microsoft account in my face, do it at first login not at first setup.
I like that list, and appreciate those items. I run Windows... begrudgingly 11.
But why can't I have the above without...
- full screen ads for Microsoft 365 / Copilot
- inserting Copilot everywhere
- changing the UI and removing user choice, such as where you pin your task bar, how you like your start menu to work / look
- forcing your documents and desktop into OneDrive without asking and making it hard to separate them back out
Windows didn't necessarily go backwards with some of their moves, but they confidently went anti-consumer and pro-adware in quite a few of them.
EDIT: Like this... https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
I'm not saying Windows is infallible, but it's actually getting quite insufferable to hear nothing but the Windows hate train day in and day out as if it has no redeeming qualities and the only reason we aren't on Linux is because some game developers want nasty anti cheat/DRM measures. I think the proliferation of this is largely due in part to "Windows sucks" being an actual valid avenue of revenue for creators.
The only problem I’ve had was with a family member who refused to restart the computer. Eventually, something got corrupted. Fixing it was simple—I just reinstalled the current version of Windows. It was so much easier than in the past, when it meant reinstalling everything from scratch or reverting to a saved snapshot.
Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.
TBH, Windows 3.1 was reasonably nice compared to macOS 7, and much faster than OS/2 or Solaris 2.1 on the same hardware.
The two operating systems were trying to solve different problems, and had different system requirements because of that. Windows 3.1 was fine for running multiple interactive applications since neither application would be doing real work in the background. When Windows 95 entered the picture, that changed and its system requirements weren't all that different from OS/2.
And that is just one example. Windows 3.1 didn't provide much in the way of memory protection. (From my recollections, it could detect a memory access violation. At that point it would blue screen.) One of OS/2's most noteworthy features was memory protection. All of a sudden you could use your computer for an entire day without losing work from crashing. Yeah, OS/2 would happily terminate an application (rather than the OS) when there was a memory access violation. On the other hand, it made it much easier for developers to detect and address such bugs.
On that last point: I have fond memories of bringing OS/2 boot disks to my high school programming classes after the upgrade to Windows 95 (and, when they started refusing to let me boot OS/2, they let me use the NT server). There was a world of difference between programming under OS/2 or NT verses Windows 95. No one bothered to try programming under Windows 3.1!
I can't say much about Solaris, I used it - much later - on sparc and amd64.
I can say that I was writing 16 bit windows apps in '95, including drivers and VxDs, and Win 3.1 was a piece of garbage inside and out.
With the rise of Linux and ChromeOS the operating system is becoming a free commodity. Applications with real revenue are becoming web bound, google here as shown the way. Google's productivity software is a major threat to Microsoft. Here there is monthly recurring revenue.
There is no significant profit left in producing the operating systems. It is a necessity, sure, but it's not offering a USP. It just is.
So, the corporate thinking goes, switch investment into monthly paying applications, like Office 365. Reduce the investment in the OS, while using the established user base as a way to push new customers toward the online services Microsoft provides. Sure, MS can extend it to ARM, but this is because they are chasing the Chrome OS users.
Of course, Windows, like MacOS can still host "native" applications like desktop versions of office, or adobe products. But the real revenue is in the online monthly subscriptions. Games will fall into this section too.
In the end to the user, Windows becomes just like Chrome OS, a launch pad into online services.
Valve seeks the direction of travel and creates it's own OS designed to launch games and drive users to its store... it's the same story, and play book.
For developers, and creatives, the only home left is Linux (and maybe *BSD). This is acknowledged, as both Windows and MacOS can now run Linux applications via WSL and Apple Containers. Why? = because this helps developers create applications that can be hosted in the cloud... something that has recurring revenue.
AI? - Well, it's a possible accelerator down this path, as the hardware needed to host the inference is huge.
So what's going to happen in the future? - Well, the cost of AI is a limiting factor. Add in the political moves between China, the US and the EU are going to limit the growth of US owned cloud. Digital sovereignty is key, and the US government can get access to anything held on US owned servers. China is moving forward with plans to remove US technology from its ecosystem.
The result, well, AI does offer great productivity gains with costs so high, and latency of online services, tasks specific small models will be pushed to the desktop. Laptop and hardware manufacturers will add accelerators for this. In the EU there will be new opportunities for competitors to Microsoft / Google to stand up solutions, open source will be key to this, so NextCloud, will be popular. But overall there will be a pull away from the very thin client toward a slightly thicker client. The EU will probably want to sponsor, or help create a version of an AI agent similar to DeepSeek in China, they've shown what's possible with a smaller budget.
This won't run on Windows, or MacOS, it's all going to end up running on Linux. A Linux disto from China, and one for the EU.
