Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11 (opens in new tab)

> I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line.

I think consumers have little power here. Our economic system fundamentally chooses to reward such behaviour. Until we change that, the power will always be with these kind of companies.

Perhaps governments could levy punative fines in such situations. But that seems like a bandaid (and ripe for corruption). Ideally we'd have structural change that prevents this behaviour in the first place. Perhaps worker representation on company boards. Or progressive corporation taxation that more strongly encourages smaller companies and more competition.

The only way this get better is if the user gets to choose between an OS with ads, lock-in, telemetry etc. and then one with none of that.

As it is now, buying a laptop in a store is a "pick your poison" situation.

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.

this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).

lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.

Speaking only for myself, this sort of behavior is a great way to break the Trust Thermocline [1]. The point where I am so frustrated, so fed up, so expectant that said company will abuse me again, that I refuse to do business with them at all, under any circumstances, no matter if it is inconvenient to avoid them or not.

1. https://x.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904

I think about how a successful and robust ecosystem is one in which there are many parasites at every level of the food chain. If your ecosystem doesn’t have parasites then it’s not operating with nearly the amount of interconnectedness or efficiency that it could be otherwise.

It’s similar to that idea that floats around where $0 lost to fraud is not the optimal amount. If you over index on removing fraud from your system eventually you will spend more on monitoring and removing it than you save on the fraud itself. That is time you could have spent building more things that make money.

The ecosystem is a beast of its own and the optimal state of the ecosystem is /not/the optimal state for any actor within it

This wasn't even the first time for MS .. Win98SE was a similar disaster stuffed full of junk, most people don't remember Vista fondly either. In each case they redeemed themselves temporarily .. XP following 89SE and Windows 7/8 after Vista. History repeats I guess.

That's how the world works for everything: software, politics, social stuff (good or bad), war, etc. People are bad at judging gradual/slow changes but when you push a bit too far, you have already gained so much that you can usually just say sorry and move on

I've noticed recently that my Windows 11 start menu isn't a 50% gray empty blob anymore. I always disable "recommended apps" (eg. ad supported app suggestions), so 50% of the space in my start menu was unused, yet it was still there of course. Kind of refreshing to have a somewhat normal looking start menu again with something as revolutionary as a list of apps right when you open it. Let's see how long it takes before they mess it up again.

The answer to all of this has traditionally been robust competition.

A framework of just and fair laws and regulations should support this, backed up by open enforcement.

but, yeah.

Like that windows recall feature which they keep pushing

The rollback only ever applies to the thing people noticed. Everything else quietly becomes the new normal.

The underlying philosophy for these companies seem to be "ask for forgiveness, not permission". Some of us are done forgiving, but I am not sure there are enough of us to reverse this cultural trend.

A view from my small corner on the inside: taste isn't merely not incentivized, it's actively disincentivized. It's not selected for during the interview process, if you demonstrate a little of it nobody cares, if you demonstrate too much of it you clash with everyone else's priorities which quickly becomes career limiting. So people willing to fight for taste never advance.

This isn't some nefarious plot to screw over users. Taste is not prioritized because nobody has it and thus can't recognize it. Can't value something you don't even recognize. This is orthogonal to talent btw. Lots of people there who are insanely good at what they do, who produce the most hideous API specs you've ever seen, as one example.

A much more mundane (and almost certainly true) explanation is that people who put all that crap in legitimately thought it's a good idea. Taste is its own thing and it's just not in Microsoft's DNA.

Too late now. Multiple people having anything to say when choosing hardware and software, including me, will no longer advise or approve buying windows machine or using windows in general.

I think managers were promoted for infecting their features with Copilot, and developers for infecting them with React, and here we are.

OneDrive managers on the other hand are one step away from inventing some way of adding a gacha mechanic.

>It’s quite common for companies

It's quite common for megacorps, FAANG and friends, NASDAQ bigwigs.

It's rare for small companies, and extremely rare for independent developers.

You'll note that those are both B2B fumbles. The savvy end user usually doesn't have the needed weight.

> It’s quite common for companies

This is not general. This is true only on markets which are full regarding available customers, and there is no foreseeable growth.

What we can see in IT in the past 10-15 years (especially after around 2015) is the slow progress towards this state from a rich and competitive (and personally I think a way more fun) one.

I worked for dying companies (e.g. Ericsson), for slowly moving ones (e.g. Santander), and for several now dead startups, and what happened with Google, Microsoft, etc is that they slowly moving from the "startup" market - there is still available non conquered market segments - to the dying, slowly moving one - where there are a few large players, and it's not possible to grow in any meaningful way with your own skills. The only difference now compared to the decades until the 90s is that antitrust checks and balances are dead, and they can artificially inflate their own power, which haven't happened in this scale for at least 100 years. And it caused world shattering problems back then, and it will now too.

I would leave this field happily, even when I'm exceptionally good in it, because it's more and more disgusting. Only if there would be any good alternatives, which wouldn't require me to loose at least a decade of my life. But unfortunately, the balance is way more fucked up to easily change my lifestyle at this point. And it will be just worse than this.

I think private interests should not run what is effectively public infrastructure, like Windows. Or, put another way, infrastructure of national importance should be publicly controlled and governed with transparency and public interests in mind. Either that, or true capitalist competition has to be reenabled aggressively: forbid walled gardens, split up the Googles, etc. This centralization of public utility and power in the hands of private individuals, coupled with an uncompetitive market, is nonsensical. Competition or nationalization.

The other thing is availability of alternatives.

Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.

>"It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate."

developer delusion. devs who barely use their own apps. who dont understand the day-to-day user experience.

The old “two steps backward, one step forward” routine.

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.

Yes, when there isn’t real competition. And that’s in part due to a long history of anti competitive practices but also simply because Microsoft is too big and should be broken up.

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.

It's called "enshittification": https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/

I call this odious practice "profit maximization titration" and almost all companies do it now. They continually enshittify the product a little at a time until they notice a dip in profits and then they dial back the shittiness a bit. Or if they're really sophisticated they will enshittify the product by a large amount and then do a binary search to restore product functionality in logarithmically smaller steps until the balance between profits and customer dissatisfaction re-stabilizes. They 'git bisect' the product's shittiness, as it were.

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate

I get the impression that many companies are working through this with AI-assisted coding. How bad can the product get before the revenue loss is greater than money saved by firing programmers and deploying AI slop? For products like Windows and Office, the subscription model and enterprise account revenue provides a huge cushion for decreasing quality before they even have to apologize and roll back.

I remember being excited about Edge, I even started using it because it was fast and had a couple of built-in features I liked. It was a big improvement over the old IE, it felt like Microsoft was going the right direction, but then they kept using dark patterns to change my default search engine to Bing.

Unfortunately that’s not unique to Microsoft. It’s a fundamental tug of war between the pushback from consumers and the worst ideas and misaligned incentives in an organization

MacOS has had the same ping-pong between good and bad releases, with the latest being particularly poor. Same with video games: one patch brings great fixes, the next introduces absurd cosmetics or a P2W mechanic.

Every third version, as the saying goes.

That wasn't an up cycle, was it? Wasn't Microsoft was doing that at the same time as adding ads and stuff to the os. Silicon Valley people were just wowed by the open source initiatives and money. Everyone worshipped the ceo for it while windows for users swirled down the toilet, while new analytics couldn't be disabled, etc etc etc

We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory.

Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.

Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.

It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files in the 90s via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products).

Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.

I find Teams is often simply picked because of cost reasons.

A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?

Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks.

We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.

Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.

Even if gov adoption dropped, I suspect the incentives wouldn't change much unless there were genuinely viable, low-friction alternatives.

Windows has historically oscillated between pretty awful and pretty decent.

XP was good, Vista was bad, Win7 was good, Win8 was a disaster, Win10 was decent again. Now we're in a low part of the cycle with Win11.

Maybe there's another 'good Windows' on the way. But I'm sceptical this time, being in the era of enshittification and the AI slop bubble, where everything is user-hostile by design, where if something seems like a good deal, you know it's a bait+switch.

What % of Microsoft's revenue comes from government contracts? I'd be very surprised if it's more than 2-3%

Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack and Zoom?

The ability to write in the meeting chat before and after a meeting for example. That is some serious quality of life function that all others are lacking.

> Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams?

People seem to forget Teams is the unloved child of a forced marriage between acquisitions, it was never going to turn out successful.

I strongly disagree, and not because of the "Microsoft is associated with bad things and that's a form of violence" points other people mentioned.

The end result of treating domestic and sexual abuse like Serious Important Subjects that people should only talk about in a Serious Respectful Tone isn't that people become more mindful of abuse dynamics, it's that they avoid bringing up the subject at all.

In practice, yes, abusive practices of corporations echo abusive practices of violent partners, and the parallel is worth highlighting. Bringing up the fact that both of them will use grand gestures to stop you from questioning their pattern of behavior isn't disrespectful, it's useful information.

If anything, abuse victims should hear that message more often.

The underlying point about power imbalance and gradual normalization of bad behavior is fair, but that analogy carries a lot of real-world weight that doesn't map cleanly to software decisions

I disagree. Microsoft's actions have real world consequences, increasingly including violence. They're building a surveillance machine that is already being used like organizations such as ICE, and that's not even the worst of it. Look at how they are trying to tip the balance of power from employees to employers with telemetry in Windows 11, Office 365, LinkedIn and GitHub.

Like domestic abusers, things only expand and escalate from here.

The title is supposed to be provocative and hyperbolic. Much of what is provocative and hyperbolic could be considered to be in poor taste, that is the entire point.

The guy is an ex-Darknet Vendor and regularly interacts still with people that build ransomware, hack the US government, sell online drugs and he is quite pleasant compared to these people.

Not too surprising in a society where we use the language of homicide and violence for trivial things like describing a good comedian.

I agree and appreciate you calling this out.

It’s easy to not understand the impact or meaning of referring to violence in a flip way when one has never had to have experienced it.

Thank you for saying this. Some journos don’t mind crossing the line for a click bait headline.

I felt the exact same way. Put a bad taste in my mouth and I just stopped reading.

Yeah, fully agree. The idea domestic abusers care about flowers is ludicrous. They’re violent and mostly remorseless about it. Anyone who dealt with it personally would chuck the flowers in the bin.

Yes, it seems like UI designers only solve the basic use case: beginner user with 3 apps open on a 14" laptop, each full screen, or tiled side-by-side.

I imagine them presenting their design on a static PowerPoint slide, and upper-management says "beautiful", and they move on to CoPilot features, never looking back.

I am particularly needy when it comes to the taskbar. I installed a few mods:

* Windhawk - can tweak taskbar with extensions similiar to gnome tweaks imo (free)

* DisplayFusion - qol for multi monitor setups (paid)

I would give it a try if these two applications help you, honestly there's just so many settings to explore -- but afaik static width was something I needed and got done through Windhawk.

It's so mind-boggling that they have control over the default browser home page and the news feed on everyone's taskbar and they choose to show gossip and one weird trick that doctors hate. Don't they feel embarrassed that they pollute their brand like this? Is the revenue from the clicks really worth it, or do they just not care?

No worries, this is just how manipulative relationships work: they always aim for unidirectional communication.

You're obliged to consume the most important news from the most important entity on the planet Earth (Microsoft/Facebook/X/...), eat piles of informational crap that get dumped onto you, waste you emotional energy on processing the whole thing, participate in drama and show your admiration. Why? Because you're very convenient when in this state, you're mendable and coercible for whatever action the entity wants you to do without saying it directly.

But when it's time to listen to you and your concerns - surprise-surprise, nobody's home. It's one way only, see you next time, maybe.

P.S. Forcefully installing an attention-pollutve app like News in the Start Menu is nothing less than a way to control you. And for an insatiable ego, the sense of control is everything. This is why it keeps coming back, again and again, as if it's a lucky reoccurring coincidence. A Windows Update repairs the system? Yes, plus it repairs the system of control. Security patches are very convenient vehicle for that - once you eat it, you'll be served special dishes you never asked for.

I turned it off exactly once through the settings and it's never appeared again over years of updates. How did you "turn it off"?

Use this https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 or something similar, unfortunately without this level of tweaking it will be a shit show, not deeply modified windows feels like browsing the internet without an ad blocker.

No no you don't understand. "Here's a picture of some gross toenails" is the sincere best most valuable advertisement that the fourth most valuable company in the united states is capable of delivering. If anything better existed, they would be using it.

do you really expect us to believe ms is pushing 'far right news'?

perhaps youre just so far left that anything slightly in the center feels 'far right'?

when bing / edge recommends me stories it's never ever 'far right'. it's almost always something pro-left or that makes the (R) look negative.

I don't really see that happening here.

Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be gaining any by this move.

That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their public image is as bad as it can get.

Microslop is saying “I’m sorry that you’re offended” and will continue to abuse their users. All of this is a PR campaign to fix their image so that they can raise more money.

I think this "emergency break" is just going to get eye rolls from most people

The reason, i opine, that so few people switch from Windows to any Unix flavor is that Windows users are waiting for the two productivity suites which make Windows at least marginally usable (cygwin and msys) to be ported to any of the Unix flavors.

;)

This sucks. Sometimes they even disguise the update to Tahoe notification as "Pending updates to install later tonight".

I haven't upgraded, and the notifications are fairly rare and unintrusive.

Yup this is the sneakiest they've ever been in trying to trick people to upgrade. They try to trick you when installing Sequoia updates - they preselect Tahoe instead of the Sequoia updates

Don't forget general familiarity. I don't know about today, but Apple was once very big on giving large discounts to education specifically for the purpose of getting students familiar with their machines.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html#kids

My point is it's harder to switch from the system you know.

Excel is the biggest blocker for my dad, and why I keep losing the argument to get my parents to move to Linux or Mac.

Pretty much all their other stuff is stuff that either works fine on Linux or is just in the browser anyway, but the only thing that I don't really have a rebuttal to is when my dad points out that he uses the full-fat excel and a lot of the more modern features.

I would so rather they move to Linux, and just put Excel inside Winboat or something, but they won't have it. Annoying since I'm still expected to play tech support for them and Microsoft's recovery tools do not work, and as far as I can tell have literally never worked for anyone in human history, and I'm not entirely convinced that the people at Microsoft have ever tested them.

Out of those I think Gaming might be the biggest, and some games like League of Legends (all Riot games) need Vanguard, their anti-cheat which only works on Windows. So it's not easy for Valve but hopefully it will get there sometime.

The biggest reason I don't just migrate is because gaming. Most steam games could work on Linux but then if you want to play one that doesn't you have a problem. I'd rather just use Windows and never have a problem, because the game was designed for my platform.

That being said, for work I use macOS.

You can run Photoshop and small Excel (fine for 90%) on Mac without an issue.

The real problem is more specific industry software - Revit, Solidworks and probably a thousand smaller ones.

Another thing that I consider hard tonreplace from microsoft is Active directory. This thing is universal. And after tring alternatives its easy to see why. Is its probably the most complete tool I used for humans and device managers. But linix and mac had done a good job adapting to it in the last decade.

>Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.

I was thinking about this compatibility problem the other day. Usually someone moving between office suites (MSFT Office, Google Drive, LibreOffice) complains stuff broke, then they give up / drop it / work around it. I was imagining an ideal path would be to document these cases of incompatibility as bugs/issues in LibreOffice. Describe the difference and how it should work, then LibreOffice fixes their software to better match. I don't know if this already happens. Personally I avoid all office software like the plague and try to work with plain text files and vim. I just hear about these issues enough that I'm mildly invested in the situation by now.

I tried to tell a friend about WYGIWYM stuff like LaTeX, groff, and Typst the other day. He seemed more interested in "figuring out" why stuff broke when changing between office software. I tried to tell him that MSFT doesn't follow their own spec and everyone else has to reverse engineer it, resulting in implementation differences. Plus MSFT's own implementation being proprietary so it can't be easily copied. I'm not sure the weight of the situation got across to him.

Hilariously, the MacBook neo has the same taskbar issues since it was what Microsoft copied. No one is getting replaced so I’ll guess they’ll just add some customizations to make it more Mac-like to win users back.

The Macbook Neo seems likely to be a a huge seller. It's got the price of entry down to where it's now the obvious recommendation for less-technical friends/family wanting an affordable-but-nice laptop for light home/office/student use.

I suspect it's going to hurt iPad sales though, as a real Mac running MacOS is vastly more capable than any iPad.

You state: "My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac."

And as a Linux user since the the MCC Interim distro[0] was made available through the floppy-distribution network in 1992, my advice is for most normal users to begin the process of migrating to Linux.

Why? Because even if the Mac has some current advantages over Linux for some normal users today, in the long run, Apple cannot ever be trusted any more than Microsoft can. If you believe that they can be, you're delusional. Whatever enshitifaction process Windows has undergone, whatever further reductions in user rights and freedoms Microsoft has introduced since it became platform hegemon, Apple will do the same. This is almost a law of nature.

Here's an example of this:

https://www.wired.com/story/bytedance-apps-are-no-longer-ava...

No, it is time for everyone to understand that in the long run, if we want a free and open society, the only way that that can be achieved is through free and open software. And as software comes to dominate the operation of society, then this becomes critical.

So, the sooner most every normal user bites the bullet and begins the migration to Linux, the less painless it will be for them in the long run, and the safer for humanity.

Cheers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCC_Interim_Linux

[EDIT: Typo.]

> for normal people is to buy a Mac

Thus, the MacBook Neo. For the average user who only occasionally needs a general-purpose computer, it's powerful enough. As the geek in my friends-and-family circle, it's what I will be recommending to most of them if they ask.

Most of them only use phones or tablets anyway.

If they have a budget of ~ $1000, then I'd recommend an AMD Linux laptop. For folks here, I'd recommend similar, but pave it + put Devuan or similar on it.

For low end laptops, if you can tolerate Apple's terrible window manager, rapidly declining stability, and creeping ads (they leaked expansion plans that are coming soon), then the Neo probably wins.

Typed on a macbook pro.

Mac’s are way more expensive than most people need. If anyone asked me today, I’d say buy a cheap laptop and I’ll install Linux on it for you. Ask ChatGPT on your phone if ever any bugs come up. Problem solved, hundreds of dollars saved over the Mac.

Is there a full equivalent of Total Commander there? I don't mean just something with 2 panes, I mean full equivalent. Those I have seen were clunky, slow and lacked features thus completely breaking the flow. When I see folks doing something more complex in File explorer or similar stuff I rather walk away, make a tea/coffee, have a chat or two, come back to watch them hopefully progress a bit, when it would take few quick operations in TC. Its like doing java development in Notepad vs Idea, both work but man I always thought engineers craved efficiency...

That program is so powerful when used in skilled hands, it saves me tons of time every day, easily 30-60 mins compared to other colleagues doing similar tasks. Editing files directly in archives (or archives in archives), quick file comparison, tabbed panes, dir sync, ftp client, etc.... and tons of customizations of behavior and visuals, plugins ecosystem, and its freakin' fast and stable.

Another one could be Notepad++, ie mass edit of lines as cells in spreadsheet is a powerful feature.

Yes the price hike is almost 2x

If anyone knows how to revert to non-AI version of the subscription let me know

Funny thing: I wanted to try out Copilot to help with creating a starting point for a diagram in Visio.

Copilot isn't in Visio (at least in the subscription my work pays for).

I used Copilot's chat interface instead, and it is unable to generate a diagram in the Visio .vsdx format; it tried, failed, tried to fix it, failed.

Sigh.

I think nowadays the only safe and sane way is running Windows isolated as a VM (e.g. QEMU on proxmox). I did this with my gaming server. The VM sits on ZFS which I can snapshot before any Microsoft stuff happens, to revert any action. I can cut off the network card virtually and shutdown the guest whenever I get tired of it. I could even disguise the CPU/QEMU config, so that the anti-cheat from Star Citizen didn't recognize it was running in a virtualized environment. Pair this with Moonlight+Sunshine and you can game without issues on any remote client. Why I prefer Windows for gaming? It is just (still) the default and provides the least barrier and setup effort for most games.

I used to dual boot Windows to play a single game too, and every few months something drastic would change with no input on my part.

I like Ubuntu. My only regret is having an nvidia GPU and not getting an AMD one before computing components became unaffordable. Nvidia on wayland is 100% busted and juggling DEs for gaming vs productivity work is inelegant.

>sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11

It's a setting called "Get fun facts, tips, tricks, and more on your lock screen", and it's checked by default.

For some people the threshold for "ad" is an uninterruptible segment that they are forced to watch, or a typical banner ad placed on screen. For others it's the visual presence of any set of pixels that can be connected to a business entity or revenue stream.

Same for me - I find Windows 11 pretty good and I've never seen an ad in the Start menu. It might be specific to some editions or regions?

Oh I’ve definitely seen all those things… in the short minutes after a fresh install, before I wipe them out.

I have the same experience. I'm on a Windows Surfuace 7 Arm laptop right now. There's no Copilot icon next to the start menu. I press the start icon and I don't see a single ad anywhere. There are no ads on my screen. I use Edge and I don't see anything odd while I shop. Granted, I run "Pro." Maybe the home edition has more of this?

I pay for a 365/OneDrive subscription and it works well. I get the apps on desktop/laptop/phone and 1 TB storage for a decent yearly rate. I log into the PC and laptop on the same account and useful things sync.

I've done mild tweaking to turn a few things off, like the icons in the "search" bar, but nothing's been "hacked". On Macs you're pretty much have to make an Apple account too, but somehow that's not evil?

Also called the door-in-the-face method.

Beating is a normal English idiom. While I do sympathize with anyone suffering from abuse, I highly doubt anyone is actually suffering from use of the word.

I admire your effort to increase user privacy but it's very difficult to argue that allowing a piece of proprietary closed-source software to make fundamental changes to your operating system is a good idea.

For starters, it doesn't explain what exactly it does. This is all I could see on the info page:

> Privacy Enablement Center: Politely ask already installed Windows 10/11 to phone home less, or add Privacy Enhancing DNS Proxy to already installed Windows, in order to block Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and other types of potentially unwanted Windows network activity — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools can’t achieve.

That sounds an awful lot like using the hosts file or a firewall such as Portmaster[1] to block known tracking domains, no?

[1] https://safing.io/

I see people saying the opposite and saying MS should sell windows Enterprise or LTSC (Long-Term Servicing Channel) version to consumers. These have less of the bloatware and forced features that most people are complaining about.

I have 10 Linux machines and 1 Mac at home. I never use windows for anything personal. At work we have windows laptops that I really only use for email /web and to connect to a remote Linux desktop where I do all my work. The windows enterprise version we have seems to have far less of the crap that people complain about.

This already exists, but you have the markets backwards. Microsoft wants to force the cruft onto everyday users; it subsidizes the cost of the operating system license. Home users can be conned into paying for OneDrive or Copilot subscriptions much more easily than enterprises can. On the other side, Windows Server is their lightweight version, and it's made for the only customer that Microsoft respects: ones that paid in full upfront.

You don't want that dream.

It's a whole new set of unknown bugs, security issues, lack of essential features, and app compat issues.

And the internals of NT are quite good and still largely modern. There's not a lot worth replacing (my only thought would be to rip out the file system filter driver model though I don't know what would replace it).

Back in the day windows NT was serving this purpose and a lot of pro users would use it over windows 98. (At least in 3rd countries where all licenses are pirated).

It actually used to work well, and I think there are still some windows editions like this they are more strictly separated and not that good for daily en user usage.

I like your dream. I think financial incentives make it unlikely, though. The writing's been on the wall for user-friendly general computing OSes for awhile, I think. So Microsoft's incentive is to treat Windows like a loss leader (even if it's not) and use it as a funnel for services/subscription revenue from their other products.

I hate that/wish it weren't so, but I think the last ~15y of M$ decisionmaking makes a lot of sense in that context.

Introducing Windows NNT (New New Technology).

There's "MinWin", I wish this could be used as the foundation for a consumer Windows OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinWin

Yeah there is something suspicious about this site.

This is still bad, but maybe less bad.

Microsoft is effectively a malware company now.

You'd be surprised to know that though this might be a possibility, MS Office Suite or whatever it's called now will still be some of the top installed/grossing apps on the App store. Windows is just one of Microsoft's gateways to get you on the office suite.

Apple isn't capable of manufacturing the amount of volume necessary to displace x86/Windows.

Apple shipped 25.6 million Macs in 2025. Lenovo shipped 19.3 million PCs in the 4th quarter alone.

No they're not. They're going to continue making enormous amounts of money from corporate IT lock-in, Azure, and AI.

Windows' biggest competitor is iOS, and many people have stopped using Windows entirely and just rely on their phones. Microsoft has had record profits since that started happening.

But what PC user is going to be like “oh now that the NEO is out, I’m finally willing to switch to a completely different operating system”

Really highlights the plummet in quality and massive shift in user tolerance that w10 is considered "good" now

Windows 10 was not as good as Windows 7 for its time (and even now). After 8/8.1 things started to go downhill. Windows 7 was a really good polished OS with beautiful and consistent UI. Windows 10 UI looks like a Frankenstein, and MS fired a lot of QA folks, now the testing is primarily done on the insiders and regular users. Also these privacy / telemetry / ad problems started from Windows 10.

Inshallah. This is the first ‘bad’ version I’ve caved on updating to, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next ‘good’ one looks like.

This is one of the areas that annoy me due to how limp microsoft is with the requirements...

Either give a solid set of requirements that let a dev assume things about a windows 11 system (good hardware security, in particular), or fuck off entirely.

have you thought about switching to another OS?

I actually belive that is what triggered this.

There was a rumour 1-2 months ago about Lenovo and Asus meeting Microsoft execs and warning them that if win11 issues continued to cost them support hours and devicw returns they would be forced to find an alternative.

I've installed Win 11 in VMs and linux on bare metal quite a few times this years.

If you count "time to unobstructed desktop + working hardware drivers", Debian beats windows by a large margin. (10 minutes vs. 1-2 hours). Also, with windows, you need to type weird crap like this into a terminal:

   & ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://debloat.raphi.re/")))

Debian mostly lets you avoid such stuff.

Highly doubt it's good for the mass consumers and non-power users in the long term. Most consumers would prefer household OS name like Windows or MacOS over Linux as a pre-installed OS. OEMs will always prefer Windows because of the profits they make whenever there's a Windows Refresh, no matter how bad the version is.

For that matter, Linux has been better than Windows for decades.

Yes, Linux has some jankiness, I don't dispute that, but when people say that they're often smuggling in an assumption that Windows doesn't have jankiness, which is decidedly not true. People are more used to Windows and its shittiness and they forget how much bullshit they actually put up with for it.

Windows Update, for example, is awful software and if anyone who works on it is reading this, you should consider getting out of the software game because you are not good at your job and considering how consistently bad Windows Update has been for its entire existence I don't think you'd be good at other software jobs either.

Windows Update bricked my mom's laptop doing an automatic update to Windows 11, I believe because they broke some boot keys, and since Microsoft's restore and repair tools don't actually work, my parents called me in a panic because there were of course tons of irreplaceable files that they couldn't access. I had to walk them through flashing a Linux USB, walk my dad through booting off that USB, walk my dad through setting up tmate, and then I had to mount the NTFS drive and rsync the files to my personal server. Just to reiterate: I had to use Linux to save Windows because Windows' tools do not work.

If Microsoft used a filesystem that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, I could have set them up with recurring filesystem snapshots and this could have been fixed at the filesystem level. You know, like what has been readily available on Linux since like 2010 with btrfs and other Copy on Write filesystems.

To be clear, before I get a lecture, I'm aware that updates are a hard problem when you have a diverse set of hardware, but I should point out that it's not like my mom installed the OS on some arcane custom built rig, this was an OEM install on her laptop, so they don't have that excuse. Additionally, I update every Linux computer in my house literally every day, and I have never had it so thoroughly brick the boot process as I had with my mom's computer.

My elaborate point here is that Windows has lots of jank, more than Linux, but people just act like that's part of the deal, but don't extend anywhere near that same level of courtesy to Linux.

One major thing is the mandatory MS account. And it's (or more precisely its laxing / removal) not listed in the improvement list. Optional online account is fine and I might even use it. But mandatory online account is a big NO. This is disrespectful and an invasion of my privacy and control over my computer. I bought a PC / laptop and I want to use it the way I want, without any permission from some fucking server.

> Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?

Buyers of PCs, laptops and other devices with Windows pre-installed. I guess that the cost of the Windows licence is included in the price of each device.

^--- this

It is completely impossible to comply with European privacy law if you are using up-to-date Windows for your business.

The US CLOUD Act compels companies to provide access to data on machines they have the technical ability to access.

Starting in Windows 8, Microsoft granted itself the ability to pull locally-stored documents out of (non-onedrive) folders on all machines for "debugging" purposes.

Since then, EU courts overturned the Privacy Shield deal with the US because our laws are in direct contradiction with their privacy protections, so no, there isn't some backstop that lets Microsoft be the good actor if they get a bogus warrant.

If the EU could ban Windows, I'm sure they would have done so already.

Source on "they can read your files": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/compliance/assurance/assur...

Note that this policy began in the Windows 8 days, and didn't originally have the Microsoft 365 branding attached to it. Now that Windows 11 mandates login, they changed the wording.

Yeah, but...

Did they increase profits and/or stock price or not? That's the only relevant question. Not what happend to Office.com or what you think about their products.

Also, you and me are not the customers. Govs and corporations are.

Reading the article without Firefox's reader mode is a pain. Maybe it's a secret plan of Mozilla to promote their browser.

Whenever I see stuff like that I ask myself "who is this for", like who wants to see those elements animated for no good reason?

no, the big news is that finally they have the intention to do it

I don't think the fix is released yet, except for possibly Insider builds.

I use a blend of Windows, MacOS, iOS and Linux.

Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.

I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.

I used linux on Desktop 15 years ago, tried it once in a while every few years. But there was always something. Often video driver, tearing, hardware video decoding, or a specific game that I played a lot. And now it would be that my DJ software does not run on it.

Still use it on my server though.

I might try a MacBook air at some point, but they are quite expensive when you need 1TB disk for your music files. But for now my ThinkPad T14 Gen1 still runs fine. I don't need more battery or power. No fan could be cool.

Because Windows works just fine for me.

I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.

Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your own.

macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and customizations to make it sane for basic things like window management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount of tweaking needed for power users.

And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...

And it sucks at gaming.

Linux on the other hand is great for power users!

Linux doesn't run the software I want to use, or runs it badly. MacOS... lmao.

Games

Macs are circling down the same drain.

I do use Linux at work and for programming at home, but for general office work Windows is just better, sorry.

As for MacOS, I just hate it.

Because they suck.

Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram, and Linux still can't run proper creative software.

I think it's more likely that what you consider ads and what we consider ads don't quite line up.

>I wouldn't hire or work with 'Sam Bent'

Saying something like that is far grosser and more inappropriate than a using a metaphor.

Completely agree, we can be edgy without being insensitive.

There's nothing "gross" about it. You are making a mountain out of a molehill, and honestly the kind of behavior you're displaying here would be absolutely miserable to deal with at any job. Nobody likes someone who complains about trivial non-issues like this.

Enough with the memes.