This was new in 2025, so it is still moving over.
But this is the future. Layers over layers of abstraction. The main idea is to make the attacker give up.
Everything is still harder to get set up right on Linux, but it stays right. I’ve also found the LLM’s dramatically shorten the time required to configure things I don’t have experience with.
MS have abandoned their power users, and the power users (some of them at least), are abandoning MS. I keep Windows around in a VM for work purposes; never had a better setup! I’m in complete control of my PC again.
It's ridiculous how long this is taking really.
There are other open source projects which do display in the context menu, such as TortoiseGit and Notepad++. In fact there is a fork of 7-zip called NanaZip which supports the Win 11 context menu.
[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/1...
It’s the most bizarrely unhelpful ‘helpful’ UX I’ve ever seen.
And as technology moves from tool that provides value to be paid for to cultural experience to be farmed, aesthetic changes drive a sense of currency and progress more than utility -and take a greater place of focus (and we’re a long ways from a time with a respected UX class considering utility even if the larger teleology valued it).
On a normal OS you have to change usual settings exactly once.
This is literally the shitshow that's post-Ribbon Microsoft UX in a nutshell.
In the 90s, they designed a logical ontology, then mapped every item somewhere into that.
Post-Ribbon, they pulled whatever happened to be most-commonly used in, and then everything else got stuffed in a jumbled junk drawer (because who uses that?).
What seems to have been lost in the move from one to the other is anyone at Microsoft giving a goddamn 2 seconds of thought, minimum, to EVERY item in the OS.
And because that thought was never given, you get wildly broken edge cases and odd settings, simply because it wasn't anyone's job to make sure everything had a place.
Ribbonification (aka polish the 80% and fuck the 20%) isn't bad for users: it's bad because it lets Microsoft be lazy about organizing.
Um, I am very skeptical that Microsoft's KPIs have this level of alignment with actual user workflows.
Whoopsy!
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
https://github.com/open-shell/open-shell-menu/
They bring back the context menu and the old task bar, as well as the old start menu. It's like I never left Windows 10.
And I've switched to Linux Mint for all my systems except my laptop, which still has some hardware limitations under Linux.
For all its faults I think it's strange to criticize Microsoft for maintaining backwards compatibility.
It is a combination of a vertical and orizontal menu. Something like Edge with horizontal and vertical tabs in the same window
It changes its height dynamically by state of each shell extensions. how come it is consistent from a UX perspective.
Here's a MS blog post explaining why they want to move to IExplorerCommand: https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-cont...
Frankly, this just follows all the same problems that MS has had with since after W7. Their own APIs have a lot of warts and problems, but MS has not been able or willing to follow through on the migration required to actually move to a whole new API. This has shown up in their Windows GUI frameworks, it's the exact same problem with the Control Panel vs Settings, and here it is again.
I can sympathize with many of the stated goals/benefits, and I can understand the technical difficulties with transparently porting registry craziness into their new framework, and infact I applaud that their fallback is "perfect" - it is just the old context menu. I just wish there was a setting toggle to set the default.
And also much, much slower.
The old context menu is nearly instant even when stuffed with extensions. When the new one is full of extensions, it takes full seconds to load the entire menu. You get a partial load, then the extensions pop in (and of course pushes elements down/up so now you misclick).
I don't even know how anyone could experience it in testing and allow it to go live in the state that its in. Its like no one even looked at it.
Drawing gray rectangles is a very resource intensive operation. It is a wonder how a Pentium was able to draw also a 3D border around the rectangle.
There were some sick people who, in 4 Megs of RAM were also letting you choose colors while presenting a Win10/11 interface (Apollo) but those were some heretics.
It's not, which is the point. They're trying to get people off the old way of extending the shell. If they just wanted to reskin the right click menu to look "modern" they could have done that.
https://blogs.windows.com/blog/2021/07/19/extending-the-cont...
I personally don't like the new menu and disabled it with some tweak program, but the new menu as the benefit of hiding dozens of context menu items any random app barfs into it (e.g. Google Drive adds 6! items to the root context menu). It would be better if Windows natively supported demoting/pinning items to the unexpanded context menu.
I mean, c'mon MS, after so many years in the industry, surely you must know that having text below icons is how most users use the functions.
Heck, I am a seasoned developer, live and breathe computers and software. I too was confused at times with that.
Only recently did they add the text to the icons.
Also,
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2287432/...
I used to quite like Windows, but it has gotten worse every patch day for years now. The pain of learning a new system is not so bad and at least I own my computer now.
I have been forced to use Windows 11 on a succession of work PCs, but I stayed 10 at home due to the lack of a movable task bar and the terrible right-click menu in 11.
When Microsoft started pushing hard against remaining on 10 this year, I made the switch - to MacOS. It was an easy decision, since I was finally able to get a MacBook for work, too, so no context-switching required. I run a copy of Win11 in a VM for apps that need it, but find that I rarely have to spin it up.
As a product manager, I cannot image the decision-making behind building a product update so shitty that you drive away 35-year customers.
A while back (Win XP?), I got frustrated with Windows and installed Linux on my dev machine instead. But I still had to run Windows, so I installed VMWare on Linux on that machine and ran Windows in a VM. For whatever reason, Windows was noticeably faster in the VM than running on bare metal. Super bizarre OS.
Using Linux in a VM compiled three times faster.
I don't know how people tolerate it.
Visual Studios is like Windows, each version just seems to be getting worse with more bugs.
Still on Windows for work, but would happily swap. I also use an M1 Air for my personal laptop, but that is probably my last Apple hardware.
When they threatened Windows 10 EOL last year (?), that’s when I took a day to do a clean install of Mint and port my games and LLM tinkering over.
Because I knew MS was doubling-down on the user-hostile experience.
I thought I’d miss Windows but Steam, Wine, and Radeon made it delightful.
Windows is now only on my company-issued laptop. I predict that will also go away, as Windows 11 has introduced backdoors to circumvent company controls and install their BS.
Or trying to get Steam to work, which is wildly better than it used to be thanks to proton, but still not quite a perfect experience. For example there's a menu compatibility setting you have to enable for some menus to work, and other menus don't work when you have hover-click enabled in the accessibility settings of Cinnamon. Those weren't fixed by Claude CLI like the icons example, but definitely identified through chats with Claude.
The only "fail" states I get into are when I'm doing homelab power user stuff, setting up ownCloud, configuring Caddy, proxmox, etc. I don't blame Linux for that though.
All in all, I would say Linux is absolutely in a state I would install on my parents' computer without fear like I would've had in perhaps 2010.
Example someone will want to configure something and the LLM will give them advice from the wrong distro thats 5 years out of date. If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins. Instead they go down a rabbit hole where an LLM feeds them worse and worse advice trying to fix the mountain of issues its building up.
Tried Linux around 5 years ago - took many issues, had to learn various commands.
Tried again a few months ago and used various llms to configure everything well, troubleshoot etc
Eg when waking from standby and your mouse isn't working, do you want to troubleshoot and learn various commands over an hour or ask an llm and fix it within a few minutes?
When creating an on demand voice to text app for Linux do I learn various commands and dependencies etc that may take one/many days or use an llm to make it within 30 min?
No brainer
Not minutes. In best case scenario it is hours, in worst it is years to infinity.
You are also not taking into account the survivorship bias. You only see people who couldn't fix their system with AI and need further help. But you are not seeing a huge number of beginners (recently a big influx of those), who were successful in fixing problems using AI the vast majority of time.
Nowadays, there is no good reason to use a simple Search engine to find solutions by manually browsing all the possible links. Just ask Phind/Perplexity/others to explain the problem, give the solution and provide verifiable links one can check to validate.
Also Microsoft in 2025: Record setting bugs and anti-features released.
Case study in code quantity is not equal to code quality.
They view Windows as a straw to suck users into their higher value products through, and are seemingly unaware of what "UX" is, or how their decisions affect it. Which is how Windows 11 ended up being such a clusterfuck.
Is it though? Wouldn't you expect "personification of corporate rot" to precisely jump on whatever trendy bandwagon there is to make a quick buck, regardless of consequences, then move on?
I also believe that OS-level AI features can be worthwhile if implemented right. It's just that the chances of that happening at Microsoft, under the current Microsoft leadership, are nonexistent.
https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-re...
> “It appears my post generated far more attention than I intended… with a lot of speculative reading between the lines.. Just to clarify… Windows is NOT being rewritten in Rust with AI.
> My team’s project is a research project. [...]
I did a quick search and estimates are in the 50-60 million lines range.
No way in hell are they going to rewrite all that in a few years. Even if they actually wanted to, which they don't because it would be a truly enormous expense (even for Microsoft).
Not to even mention that huge software projects have a well deserved reputation for failing, and the scope of such a rewrite would probably dwarf any previous rewrite of anything, ever, and by a very large margin.
"Rewrite all of Windows in Rust" simply does not even begin to pass the sniff test.
… Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,” Galen Hunt, who is a top-level Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, wrote in a now-edited LinkedIn post.…
But to be honest, it’s been fine. I’m not a heavy user but I switch to the Windows PC at least once a day for a few hours of CAD, gaming, and one other engineering program that is Windows only.
I don’t click any of the AI buttons. I declined the OneDrive or backup sync or whatever it was and it’s gone. I don’t use the built-in email client or the other features this article complains about and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
The centered start menu isn’t my favorite, but it’s not like it’s unusable. I didn’t find it difficult to adjust the interface and hide things I didn’t like in the first few minutes.
On the other hand, my experience with the latest macOS and iOS 26 has been incredibly frustrating. I’m almost to the point where my basic apps have worked around new macOS bugs. My iOS phone is stuttering and laggy for unclear reasons and searches show I’m not alone. I didn’t expect my Windows 11 PC, of all things, to be the smooth sailing computing experience in my house but so far that’s how it’s looking going into 2026.
At this point, if a game won't run under Proton because of an intrusive rootkit, I'd simply rather not play it.
Edit: I specifically mean the start bar vertically aligned on the left side of the screen, with the start button in the top-left corner, not at the bottom-left.
I prefer a clean system, but I’m not the kind of person who gets triggered into rage when the OS pops up a suggestion after fresh install or has something on by default. Spending some time customization the OS and desktop environment is part of the drill any time I do a clean install, whether it’s Windows, Linux, or Mac.
No issues so far, no ads, none of the complaints others are seeing. I'm a power user too: I do gaming, programming, music production, video editing, etc. All of those things are fine.
My only real problem was not being able to have two rows on the taskbar, which I solved with Windhawk's "Multirow taskbar for Windows 11" mod. Done and done.
I can't run the scripts you are talking about on my work pc.
I can sympathise with your point of view but it does feel a bit like "works for me because I know what I'm doing". Also how long before another Windows update that undoes what the scripts do.
I used to be very pro windows simply because of backwards compatibility and hardware support was ridiculously good. I can't recommend Linux to relatives as they'd be utterly confused.
Dave Plummer, ex windows kernel dev does a good job of explaining what the issues are:
Does the average home user care about any of these complaints though? In my experience, they don't really, and I'm not even sure how many use desktop operating systems these days considering everything has shifted towards mobile.
I'm not "pro" windows by the way. In fact if you look through my history, you'll see I resisted the change to Windows 10 and have tried migrating to Linux without luck. I would love to move away from Microsoft when given a realistic opportunity to do so. I loathe Microsoft trying to take up real estate within the private boundaries of my life. I just think some of these reported issues are widely exaggerated is all.
Genuine issue I have is my unbelievably well specced work laptop does not run win 11 nicely. It's not just the adverts.
As for moving away from windows, I've been a Linux user in work before, and a casual user on and off for 20 years but it was a combination of windows 11 pain and buying a steamdeck that finally pushed me to just move at least one of my home computers to Linux. But yeah, not for relatives.
I’ve never had a single setting switched from what I set it to. Nor have I had AI shoved down my throat. My guess is that since I set it up with a local account originally and have never added a MSFT account, that insulates me from a lot of the issues others have seen.
AI is like crickets - some people like the sound, some ignore the sound, and some are driven crazy by the sound
There are plenty of apps that do exactly this. Sublime was the best of them that I know.
Notepad was great for the opposite reason. It is ephemeral. I can use it as a scratch pad for passwords and what not, with the comfortable knowledge that it’s all cleared away next reboot.
You can bring classic notepad back, it’s still there, so that’s what I do.
Everyone's hating on win11, but I'm getting more and more inclined to switch off osx day-by-day. Direct X and gaming is a powerful drug.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...
Granted, I’ve never released perfect software in my life, have no intention of starting and tend to be sympathetic towards others who share my flaws. Maybe that’s a sign that I’m actually better at handling errors than the average person.
But, going through the same process now I notice a lot more of the cracks. Windows 11 nags a lot more, whether it's about OneDrive or Copilot or whatever new thing Microsoft is trying to push. My same Windows 11 install from 2 years ago kept reinstalling and re-enabling the same crap I originally got rid of, and I feel like it's only getting worse.
In short I think Windows 11 was actually really good when it first launched, minus the UI quirks at the time. But, in classic Microsoft fashion, it was totally ruined and has woefully lost my trust as something I can depend on for even just basic computing.
It is? How? Mine comes back every 30 days and there is no "fuck off, I never want this" button.
A friend of mine got a new PC as a present and it had Win11 on it. Found out it was Win11 Pro. I turned it on without it connected to my router, used the Shift+F10 trick to bypass OOBE and setup a local account, and ran a debloat script, and things seemed OK. The debloat script had removal commands for a lot of default apps and I think only the Xbox ones were on there. I believe Recall is not active. It has 16GB of RAM, 6 cores/12 threads, and Win11 didn't seem sluggish. I used a .reg file to disable the new context menu.
It was an upgrade from her old Surface Go 2 which came with Win10 on it, had only 8GB of RAM and was super sluggish after upgrading to 11 even after debloating. But this was Win11 Home since the original Win10 was Home edition too.
I keep hearing things like it's not possible to disable stuff in Win11 Home and I'm sure Win11 Home has more default apps and stuff enabled. I don't keep up with it. This is the only Win11 system here and other than my worklife I'm all Linux.
By the way, Home version does not differ in annoyances from Pro version in any significant way in my experience.
Complaints about Win 11 performance abound. Brings back slow context menu.
The purpose of the new context menu is to get rid of the COM init that made it so slow!
You can move the start menu back to the left if you like.
https://www.amandasterner.com/post/how-to-move-your-windows-...
Well yeah, maybe lead with that.
It seems like you don't actually need windows other than being a launcher for some very specific apps.
For example, iOS has a built-in API for managing calendar events. That means my third-party to-do list can show a calendar view with everything from my iOS-managed calendar. Similarly, iOS has an API that enables third-parties to build apps that interact with Apple Music - so you don’t need to use the default client. Another example is focus modes/contextual computing - the OS enables configuring various settings in an automatable way. Another service is the health-tracking database - all my health apps share a common view of data, so my nutrition app can see my weigh ins, calories burned, and glucose levels - all coming from different devices.
On macOS, it goes beyond being just a launcher by providing rich file system services - for example, features to automate working on directories as contents change. It provides integration points to enable providing actions/services that work on text fields. It lets you configure dictionaries that support right-click/force press to look up. It implements a rich eMacs-inspired shortcut system in text fields.
Windows used to have APIs and integrations to support showing calendar events in the clock area. It was going to have a unified tab system that let you have windows with tabs provided by other apps (Sets).
In other words, an OS isn’t just a launcher. It’s a system.
I added that because this article is complaining about things like the built-in email client or Notepad, neither of which I use.
I bring my own text editor. I don’t care if Notepad has an AI button.
For those of us with higher standards, it's not.
- I've shut off the dumb, simplified right click menu. - StartAllBack solves my issues with the Start button and menu bar. - I've removed the weather, the ads, anything else dumb. - Other than that it's just... Windows. - EXCEPT I haven't had a screen of death... One time in years.
Been using Windows since 3.11, Mac OS since 6, and I just don't get the vitriol.
MacOS is less for power users. On my Mac (macbook pro with Notch) I can no longer see menu-bar apps, since I have 11 icons up there which are not from Apple. The 12th / 13th are simply inaccessible. Added Tailscale this week .. Annnnnd it is not visible...sigh. Looking into purchasing "notch optimizer" apps, but am disgusted every time I restart searching for the right tool.
MacBook Pro is less for power users. The miniscule builtin RAM "because we use RAM so much more efficiently" is causing my machine to chug. I continue to feel pain, then search + find, and pound-down apps that use more RAM than I need at this moment.
It's like being a computer user in 1988. And I wish it were more like 2025. AAPL is ridiculously successful .. maximizing profits.
Macbook Pro's are the best laptops I've ever used. But if you go that route you better up front that RAM or you'll be stuck. The one place the Mac destroys the framework is battery usage. It's not a deal killer for me, but it might be for many.
Select the one with the smaller vertical value, this will turn the notch off at the cost of that small loss of vertical space.
Free/libre software is the only bastion of hope but I'm sure if it would ever become large enough to threat the CC revenue models it'd be locked down, amputated, bought out or silenced by any means necessary. For the time being the technical hurdles and low quality is what keep the majority away from it and gets the job done for the corporations.
I agree about free software but that only works as long as the hardware doesn't get too closed down. At some point even reverse engineering won't keep up with it. We need more free/libre hardware.
This is the mainframe experience for companies that run on z/OS, the licensing makes Azure look simple by comparison
https://ibmlicensingexperts.com/ibm-mainframe-licensing-z-sy...
I presume the problem is that users cause support costs?
Or that Linux and App updates cause costs?
Windows users have many support issues, however the users don't blame the laptop manufacturer?
I guess Chromebooks serve that market. And Google allow Linux installs on Chromebooks (helps attack Windows instalbase, but too little)
Microsoft's EOL for Win10 means a lot of people are either going to e-waste their old laptop or just run without patches if they can't afford new hardware.
I'm actively helping people convert to Ubuntu if they want to give it a try. Their computer is effectively EOL so the risk is quite low. Especially when you can save several hundred or thousand dollars on a new box. The risk/value ratio is properly aligned. It's different to try out a new OS on new hardware - too much risk for your average user.
I disabled sleep and hibernation because it never worked well (hot laptop in bag or flat battery).
On purchase I felt I needed to install a WiFi module with better Linux support (even though that interferes with warrantee?).
Admittedly Dell had superb ongoing Linux support for updating the BIOS - I would worry about that issue with other brands.
However I suspect overall I would never buy another Dell again.
I would help friends install Linux, however most of my friends either get a laptop through work or they have Macs.
It was good enough and they just needed to make security fixes and tweaks; and I still would have paid for it!
Yet, the leaders at Microsoft found a way to lose their marketshare.
tl;dr; it just needed to remain quiet, boring, but reliable to remain a cashcow.
It's worse than the data harvesting (which required two hours to turn off), irritating ads (for an OS you pay for) and generally schizophrenic UX (don't get me started on the Start menu).
The Windows team has gone far beyond typical bugs. They're introducing new classes of bugs; one day your computer's working fine and the next, your GPU's 3D performance (somehow) drops by a half — you know, the thing I bought the computer for? — https://www.guru3d.com/story/windows-11-kb5066835-update-tri...
The bug impacted CAD too, AFAICT btw, though I couldn't find a publication that tested this update on solidworks / shapr 3D etc.
They shipped a patch that started bricking SSDs, https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/latest-windo... / https://www.pcmag.com/news/pc-building-group-figures-out-why... / https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/reports-...
Another that kept crashing on certain motherboards and processors with integrated graphics, https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-11-24h2-intel-z890-...
If I didn't have a Solidworks license and Solidworks wasn't Windows only, I'd have switched to Steam OS or another linux distro a long time ago. I'm currently being held hostage by Dassault (and – to a lesser degree — the Windows-Gaming Industrial Complex).
Forget Apple Maps bad, this is Windows 11 bad.
I'm tied down to the Windows eco-system (Teams, Outlook, etc).
I still haven't gotten use to the idea of every link in Microsoft apps opening in Edge regardless of your settings.
This might seem like a small thing, but the entire UX seems to be designed around benefiting Microsoft, not the user.
They're treating folks shelling out $200 for an OS as if they were cattle on the adtech train.
I wouldn't say it's in any way equivalent to Windows 11, but it does feel like Apple is following a similar path as Microsoft, just with a little more Apple design on top.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250786208
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254431520
Having talked to Apple Support, there is no way to disable the pop-up permanently due to Apple's Promotional Policy.It's perceptually free if you bought it with your PC. And it's actually free if you took advantage of the free upgrade offer.
I've picked up a few licenses off MacHeist for like $10
Bizarre phrase. If you think mandatory bundling is free stuff then your perception is not very good.
Your $10 licenses are not legal. Sorry. Those are sketchy grey market keys. Though Microsoft likely won't go after you for it, so I'm not sure it matters.
You should have just saved the $10 and downloaded a cracked copy.
fwiw, there is a setting in Teams itself to have it use your default browser instead, on top of having to change it on a system level. This does not work when using the PWA though
Unfortunately I think it can and it will get a LOT worse before the push back will make any difference.
After all most users are not tech savvy and will be stuck with whatever is installed when they buy the machine and for the corporate there aren't any real alternatives.
At this point I'm using Windows almost exclusively for gaming (and it sounds like non Windows options have been getting better recently, so I may be able to step away from the Windows ecosystem entirely when that machine eventually dies).
Once I have that all comfortably running I am walking away from iOS on the iPhone. I'm a bit tired of lock-in and in a position now where I have free time to manage the various things that interest me and to sort through any issues with data or software compatibility between the old/new OSes.
I've been a pc user since the early 1980's with DOS and my first pc was a 128k MAC which I still have. I won't have any more Microsoft or Apple stuff in a couple of months if all goes well. Wish me luck.
I have multiple systems set up, but my second-favorite is still my Win7Pro Core2Duo with 4GB RAM. It sits next to one of my typewriters, and still handles official/govt/tax forms quite well. It is my only machine that I allow access to Google services, all others being heavily PiHoled.
But this year I did finally convert an older dual core Xeon into a Linux-only box, which runs local Ollama quite well for predating ChatGPT by a decade+ .
Lastly, I sold all of my MSFT over this past year. I had only bought in, late 2022, because I had high-hopes for their integration of AI assistants... boy did they fumble that...
>walking away from iOS on the iPhone
Have you considered walking entirely away from smart phones? I don't even carry a cell phone, anymore (it is heavenly), but voice/text-only flip phones could be a sobering life experience for you.
Funny enough, my workstation here that I am ditching is a 2006 Xeon dual core with 32 - 8 GB of RAM and a nice NVidia GPU (can't remember which one). The "-8" is because a couple of RAM slots are dead, LOL. It has three dead caps that I can see but still boots if you're extremely patient and lucky. The main HD also has some boot sector issues that nearly prevent a Win7Pro boot but with the right combo of disk repair tools I can boot on the 10th or 12th attempt. That's the main reason I am moving on. I have a brand new NZXT machine with PopOS that I bought several years ago that is just sitting here waiting for someone to power it up and I bought a high spec mini-pc to see what that world offers.
I ditched MSFT stock a few years ago in favor of AMD. That's worked out pretty good so far. I'm no fan of AI. I'm sure there's a legitimate use case but today most of the players seem to be on a cash grab and I hate thieves and liars so I have a natural disinclination to support that shit.
I bought equal amounts of MSFT and AMD, about four years ago. Haven't touched any of the AMD, yet... and was thinking maybe I should sell it all (also don't like AI-integrated things, fellow Old Man)... but now that GPUs are getting even more expensive I haven't sold, yet. Until a few months ago, AMD had been break-even for my then-three-years of holding.
>I am ditching is a 2006 Xeon dual core
Mine is a 2009 (24GB RAM), and is figuratively held together with patches & glue. Also very stable after boot-up, but boots are becoming 50/50. With a VEGA64 GPU, this thing can easily pull 600W+ (idles @160W, compared to Apple Silicon @15W~).
I migrated off of Xeons (as my main machine) Jan 2023, when Apple released their M2Pro "Silicon" mini models. I also got a 15" M3 Macbook Air. Both machines make great internet browsers. I hate modern macOS, but it is usable when you block apple/icloud (entirely), at the host level. No update nags, no cloud storage BS, no problems.
>my first pc was a 128k MAC
Mine was a 68k Quadra 605 (which I also still have). The day I got 10mb ethernet was a BIG deal (upgrade from localTalk/dialup).
----
All my serious writing/paperwork happens offline, on quite antiquated equipment (oldest being my Smith Corona c~1946). For copyediting, I still love my 24" iMac Core2Duo — it IS literally held together with tape.
Very happily awaiting the return of in-person meetups, as generative AI video begins encouraging such authentic connection(s).
Tangent: Containerizing one's digital life feels smart - isolating apps and data from exploitation and unhelpful constraints of the underlying systems seems to be more and more necessary. E.g. can't launch my video-conferencing camera on Windows because the camera provider has a conflict with my recent OS updates. I do not want to pay money / attention / energy into the lagging software maintenance of a collection of finger-pointing ("not my fault") companies.
So, if I could bundle up the dependencies, and re-learn my own ability to trust (not "digital trust", genuine trust!), then that would be the future I'd potentially enjoy, using computers.
Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, .. these consoles achieve long term stability for their games because they put effort into making THAT possible. Old games do NOT need updates to run on newer Playstation/Xbox OS updates because the old games can rely upon their APIs working the way they did when the game originally shipped.
Sailing the seas of "my PC supplier wanted to release AI Copilot Online Storage Face Prettifier app 2028 and it broke my camera" is kinda an inhumane way to live.
The incentives for improving Linux are driven only in part by commercial interests, and those interests are not completely centralized. Windows' fate is entirely in the hands of the current Microsoft leadership, and they seem hellbent on extracting maximum value from their users while ignoring the suffering their "Continuous Innovation" creates.
It's almost as if they want everyone to start looking for the exits, and thankfully Linux is finally at the point in its maturity on desktop to start attracting power users who have no prior experience.
I don't think 2026 is the year of the Linux desktop, but it does feel like we're at the start of a big shake-up in the industry. Once we start seeing the hockey stick pattern in the adoption rates I would expect that more money and developer time will follow to help smooth out the areas where the transition is still difficult, like professional software.
it is not the 1980s anymore. majority of apps are for better or worse in the browser or cross platform with electron.
Wine is merely a stepping stone for adoption because some software compatibility is a hard requirement for user to even considered another platform as an alternative, without these user there won't be any native development to begin with proven by the failure of the original steam machine.
If WINE fills the gap (and it largely does), there's zero reason to create native Linux builds. That's simply more bugs and more headaches for devs.
Personally, I find software more stable when coding on Linux and making Windows changes after it is operational. Windows takes more work with edge cases than Linux, BDS, and macOS.
Windows treats STDIN and STOUT different between console and GUI. All other OSes that I have worked on threat them the same.
It's quite obvious that not all software is for one platform or another. It's just the vast majority of Desktop software happens to be Windows. And if that's what you're writing, targeting Win32 gets you Linux on the Desktop as well as Windows. There's no reason to write a Linux-native version and have to deal with all of the incompatibilities across distros, let alone compatibility issues over time.
You simply do what Steam has successfully done for many years with there containerized Steam Linux runtime based on ubuntu or something like flatpaks.
Not so with run-of-the-mill desktop software, games or otherwise.
I could also write the same article about this website, how it was so full of bloat and ads that nobody wants I could barely get it to scroll, and it eventually crashed before getting to the end of TFA due to general resource exhaustion on mobile. None of that predicts the websites financials or “disasters” though.
Compared to us nerds, people aren't leaving Windows "to fight the evil Empire and join the rightful FOSS fight" or whatever pretentious bullshit de jour.
They're leaving for the same reason most people stopped buying Roombas or Sonos Soundbars: New versions kinda suck, they have become expensive (if they have to buy a new device if they can't upgrade to Windows 11) and Knockoffs (Sure, linux isn't a knockoff but bear with me) or alternatives like macOS are good enough.
If your laptop is just a big window into Notion, Clickup, Jira, Slack or your web mail client, your OS has become entirely disposable.
I found it ironic that after reading an article about all the stuff in Windows 11 that no one asked for, the site hijacked my back button to show me more articles I might want to read.
"These modern biologists, however, did not produce any evidence contradicting Fratscher's results since they did not test such slow water-heating as in Fratscher's experiments."
Sounds undetermined whether they croak or not...
If you force employees to dedicate 100% of their thinking power to agents, prompts, "AI" meetings, working on their necessarily fake "AI" success stories and "impacts", no one has time to do real work. Or have any real new ideas about anything else.
But Nadella doubles down and goes into "startup mode":
https://www.ft.com/content/255dbecc-5c57-4928-824f-b3f2d764f...
Not only Windows 11 got worse, Github got worse, too. So did the free Copilot.
At some point it starts to feel like a drug for C-suites.
Windows code base is just too heavy to maintain. They need to break compatibility with older products like MacOS often does, so that Windows can be manageable again… but that goes against Microsoft philosophy it seems.
Older Windows bugs seemed fair: mostly edge cases, weird UI interaction, or stuff that only came out under heavy workload (also, windows file system).
This past few year, the bugs are incomprehensible. I understand non-professional versions are considered as Beta since Win10, but what it felt like is that Home version are actually alpha, and windows pro seems more and more like a beta.
Windows bugs have moved more and more into the 'edge case' territory. Not that major issues don't crop up for "everyone" today, but BSODs used to be much more common. Part of that was due to the architecture, thus drivers, but the other side of it was core Windows functionality that just had bugs.
But Explorer has had it's fair share of issues. I have a 98SE machine to prove the stalls, lockups, lack of refreshing directories, etc...
Windows had a reasonable share of bug analogous to its huge breadth and backwards compatibility needs. Otherwise, it was very stable and mature.
Now it's gotten way worse...
It's madness.
Citation? I've been hearing this from Gamer's Nexus for decades, but Nvidia seems to be fine RAM shortage notwithstanding.
Arguably, Nvidia has a point, probably more than the other companies, because they really are at the heart of the current buildout gold rush. So it's more actual economics for them than the FOMO it feels like for the other companies.
Gone are the days of affordable graphics accelerators in the $300 to $500 range. Now it’s $1000 to $2000. 400 watts now instead of 100.
https://www.xda-developers.com/shrinkflation-is-making-nvidi...
That's even before you get into bullshit like fake frames
That article doesn't support what you're saying whatsoever. GPU cores going down at the same price point is the opposite of shrinkflation, especially when you consider the US dollar is worth ~40% less than it was in 2012. And VRAM prices aren't going down anywhere, especially now.
> bullshit like fake frames
Fake frames are an option. You can play at native 4K/8K resolution, with the same 2.25-4x cost in power usage and raster compute. It will be miserable, but that's your choice.
What are you talking about? nVidia only has two models in the $1000 to $2000 range and they’re clearly premium parts.
The $300 to $500 cards are actually fine for normal gaming unless you demand to play at 4K at high settings.
I don't think that wanting to play games at the native resolution of your screen without changing settings from their defaults in order to make the game look and perform much worse is a very unreasonable "demand".
That used to be possible without spending as much money and it's also not unreasonable for people to point that out
Looking at the best looking games from today vs 10 years ago, they're so similar it's hard to see where that extra performance is even going.
So far waiting ~5 years to bother with them has been a working strategy for me.
That used to be possible when the most common resolution was 1080p and refresh rates weren't pushing 240hz+.
People want to pretend fundamentals of economics don't exist AND the company has moral obligations to fulfill to consumers. It's laughable.
It's not just nVidia, I've seen other expensive consumer brands getting the same sentiments.
I liked the idea of Gamer’s Nexus at first when it was supposed to be a data-first rigorous independent journalism.
Somewhere along the way it turned into a constant grievance and outrage channel. I guess audience capture pays the bills and YouTube Drama is hard to ignore. I haven’t bothered with that channel since they tried to go to war with Linus Tech Tips. I don’t even watch LTT and I certainly don’t want to watch two channels go to YouTube war against each other when I’m just trying to hear how the latest coolers perform or something.
I think a lot of the ultra cynical HN comments about how it’s the end of computing or how gamers have been abandoned are coming from these channels, though.
Looking at the flip side, Apple, AMD and Intel all eschewed compute performance for raster and have nothing to show for it. No "DLSS killer" in sight, no CUDA alternative, nothing. It seems like the gaming revenue is a ball-and-chain holding back profitable applications.
Microsoft: Windows is pretty bad lately (and is certainly not ahead of Linux when used as a desktop system in the way that it was, say, 20 years ago). But Microsoft barely cares whether anyone likes Windows because so many corporations are already thoroughly committed to Microsoft. If Microsoft were just starting out with its current product, it would be a hard sell. (Not just desktop — a lot of their serious enterprise stuff like AD is awful. But AD doesn’t need to be good any more — it just needs to be AD.)
Apple, too: their last few generations added very little benefit and a whole lot of bugs. Their hardware is no longer ahead of anyone else’s, and I don’t think their software really is either. But people have bought in to the ecosystem.
Android: Ditto, except there is barely even canonical hardware. Want apps but not iOS? You’re using Android.
Boeing: The 737 MAX seems to have been a commercial success more or less solely because quite a few buyers specifically wanted planes compatible with their existing 737 investments. Boeing doesn’t seem to be trying to make planes that buyers would choose if they were unconstrained.
The list goes on. Not that any of this is really new,
The last VM I need to move to Linux is a somewhat complex Windows 10 IIS webserver setup that is still running on a Windows VM. I have to figure out a bunch of stuff to make that move to Linux happen, but I will do that soon enough.
Microsoft can fuck off, I'm done with them after 30 years. They have made it clear I am not their target audience anymore, and I won't recommend their products to anyone anymore.
People who are hard-tied to Windows for some program aren't the ones asking for my input. If they don't want Linux I point them towards a macbook, which no longer scares people who use iphones all day long. If they do that, I ask if I can repurpose their old computer with linux and donate it to someone.
You get at least 1 year if you log in with your Microsoft account.
>>>> Extended Security Updates for organizations and businesses on Windows 10 can be purchased today through the Microsoft Volume Licensing Program, at $61 USD per device for Year One. For more information, see When to use Windows 10 Extended Security Updates. The price doubles every consecutive year, for a maximum of three years. ESU is available at no additional cost for Windows 10 virtual machines in the following services
Maybe if you log in they just give it to you? It certainly seems like it's pay to play from the documentation quoted (I'm located in the US). Also, while I'm completely open to debate the exact definition of "official support", Microsoft's own marketing states that Win10 is no longer supported and they advise you to move to a supported version, or enroll in extended support as a temporary bridge to Win11.
>>>> Windows 10 support has ended on October 14, 2025
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-suppo...
https://www.cnet.com/a/img/resize/0a367f45c6857e16b622ece2d1...
By backing up your settings to the cloud they give you 1 year of ESU for free.
2 more years beyond that will be able to be purchased.
There's MacOS, which requires expensive dongles (an Apple computer), and has some of its own systemic issues.
And there's Linux, in different subtly incompatible distros, with its own share of problems, and a non-starter if you need and/or want to use many proprietary staples, from the Creative Suite to video, music, and business apps...
For work - because Visual Studio is the best IDE if you're a C++ programmer and if your toolchains only work on windows(so anything to do with PS5/Xbox/Switch development).
Then the Steam Deck came out, and I was skeptical. I was wrong. Gaming on Linux could happen, it was happening. Proton and the strides made in Wine in the past decade or so have been amazing.
A month ago I installed a few different distros to “try out gaming on Linux”. I was shocked when Cyberpunk with mods worked with a little tinkering. Not only that, but it performed extremely well.
So if you’re on the fence, try it. Also all my tools still work ;).
p.s. Don’t let lack of NVIDIA support stop you if you’ve got an NVIDIA GPU, the latest driver works really well.
Any "feature" of Windows is there because one or more organizational leaders wanted it. Government, commercial, academic. Somewhere in between. But they pray every night for your more complete subjugation.
Maybe there's a critical mass of Linux users that will force AC support. Maybe new cheating paradigms (DMA) will obsolete local AC. I suppose one of those could happen in the next 10 years.
All the nonsense in Windows 11 has me thinking about trying Linux desktops again for the first time in decades.
Now, though, Microsoft's antics with Windows 11 is starting to make me think that might not be the case anymore.
Search doesn’t work reliably. Right-Clicking on a file twice in a row will often present different options. Finally, inserting AI where you least expect or want it just slows common tasks. I don’t need AI to guess the next data value in a series.
They’ve left a huge opening for Google, more so than Apple, to get a foot in the door for corporate computing.
When I was working on a deployment dashboard, I made it show ">0%" or "<100%" near the endpoints, to avoid misleading rounding.
I have not had a non-work computer running Windows to play with in several decades
It has enough RAM that I can boot UNIX-like OS with rootfs mounted as tmpfs. This is how I prefer to run UNIX-like OS
Not interested in connecting a non-work computer running Windows to the internet but it might be useful for offline usage
Compared to the past, where some friend or relative who asked for help into moving from Windows to Linux or Mac usually had a certain ideology-driven strain in their decision, nowadays the requests I receive are along the lines of "look, I'm tired of Windows weirdness, I need something that doesn't change in weird ways between reboots, even if everything is not compatible 100%".
As of late my default answer has been "Do you need Photoshop or Office? Buy the cheapest Apple M-something laptop you can find. Otherwise tell me when you're free so we can install Linux on your machine", usually a bog standard version of Fedora KDE.
I've moved circa 10-12 laptops in the last year to Fedora, and outside of a single case it went way better than I expected. I've asked multiple times if they're ok and at least until now they all were like "yep, fine."
They do their job, expect their work device to never change in meaningful ways, and then forget about it for the rest of the day. Also they are not going to buy a new laptop just because a popup tells them their 3-years old pc can't be upgraded to Windows 11 for whatever reason.
Also we've reached a point where they couldn't care less if something like deCSS or an MP4 codec is missing. Entertainment apps are usually delegated to a tablet or an internet connected TV, as long as Youtube works they're fine.
They're people who don't really care about open source, GNU, Software Freedoms or so on. They're looking for something that doesn't interrupt them with Copilot this or AI Update that while they're having a call or a meeting on slack/teams/whatever.
Truth is linux has become... "Eh, good enough, that'll do it" for most people. Which is a lot more enticing compared to "Pay 400€ for something you already own and spend the rest of the day closing popups".
This is obvious to anyone. The management at Microsoft was naive or ignorant to make this process change, take your pick.
Even worse that there are no end-user settings to turn down what makes both suck... you have to run hacks, tweak registry keys in order to have it working ~normally~
Also Windows users: I downloaded this massive collection of registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts that I have to run as admin after every update to undo whatever fresh fuckery Microsoft just forced on me. And there's no guarantee that it won't all be undone with the next update.
I'm being facetious to make a point, but it's always amused me how much effort you have to expend just to keep a moderately sane experience.
Software should adapt to the user, not the other way around.
I wish there was a runner alternative. I love tofi on linux where a tiny bit of config makes it show up with dynamic yet deterministic results in a couple frames (at 60Hz).
Apple has had the same crap, Webkit/Safari is now the sick man of browsers, the entire development stack for Apple is a steaming pile of ad-hoc kludges (from Objective C to Swift to iOS APIs) and they even forgot to renew the certificate to their own app store, breaking all their apps. Twice!
https://magarshak.com/blog/if-steve-jobs-still-ran-apple/
Even today, the new OS they shipped is focused on creating a usability nightmare with liquid glass making everything hard to read and forcing users to use “Accessibility > Reduce Transparency” to try and combad rather than, say, focusing on fixing long-standing bugs and making their browser better. I mean hey, iOS has been around for almost 20 years and their search is still so broken that “Coo” shows a result but then continuing to type “Cool” hides all results including those with the word Cool, for some mysterious reason every search keeps hitting their servers before it can reveal what’s on the local device. The “Spotlight” MacOS indexing sucks more than “Sherlock” did 30 years ago, it never seems to find the files, always appears to only begin indexing only when you search (default setting), the search results interface sucks with everything including previews etc. despite a single guy at Apple literally creating Previews for every major file format! But somehow they can’t be bothered to make it easy to use, but you can hold Option or Shift and then open each found file in a full program to see what it contain. Technically takes literally at most $200K to get this right and rock-solid out of $50 BILLION DOLLARS. One would think they’d care about “user experience”. The old Apple did.
And Siri is nearly as dumb as it was 10 years ago, and ALSO needs to send data to their servers just to, say, find out what time it is on your own device. “I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t do that — I can’t reach my servers right now.” Sigh. This isn’t buildin rockets to Mars, people. You have BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SITTING AROUND and you don’t know what to do with them. This is a failure of basic product management. These corporations KNOW that their users aren’t leaving. They are an oligopoly in devices and browsers. That’s what they use to keep the plebs in line.
My biggest complain is that every time I reboot I get the annoying ad for copilot and one drive that I can only skip for a couple of days.
I specifically despise Microsoft Accounts being forced down our throats because, among all other things, they make certain workflows impossible. For instance, you can't schedule tasks to run as your user when you're not logged in[1]. It won't work because your Microsoft account doesn't have a password in the traditional sense. You basically can't do anything that requires you to enter your Windows user credentials. I also had problems with making Remote Desktop connections to my other computers at home in the past and maybe it's related to this too.
Another thing; I don't like seeing multiple WebView-based apps running on my system all the time either. WebView or Electron screams lazy to me. Because some dev team didn't want to bother to write a decent and lightweight GUI frontend with numerous GUI frameworks Microsoft had released, 1.5 billion Windows users have to pay the price to have an extremely heavyweight layers of layers of abstractions on their system running all the time. I can't imagine the waste at this scale. Something basic like "Start menu search" should never be a WebView, but it is[2].
I find JavaScript and its ecosystem atrocious in many ways, but several browser tabs and Electron/WebView apps running just fine on an early 2010s PC I employ.
I don't see an XAML based C# .NET desktop app performing marginally better than an equivalent well-written Electron app either. In both cases, GPU takes care of the graphics rendering, JIT and GC do what they do, and you might be able to offload the pain points over to C++ through WebAssembly and P/Invoke or COM objects.
"My car runs fine with the five anvils in the trunk" isn't the argument you're looking for.
Performance isn't the only problem with Electron either. Electron apps fail to integrate with native system components both from look and feel and accessibility aspects like incorrect zoom levels on HiDPI displays etc. They are even worse than browser tabs in that manner.
> I don't see an XAML based C# .NET desktop app performing marginally better than an equivalent well-written Electron app either
RAM usage would be at least an order of magnitude different. Nothing to do with how well-written it is either. It's inevitable.
Platform integrity and accessibility are the real concerns with Electron. What is the solution, though? Does anyone still have time and patience for the byproducts of WinDev vs DevDiv power plays, even at Microsoft?
Meanwhile they keep downsizing their workforce while not making personal sacrificed (personal pay) while they chase AI.
That, sadly, also applies almost perfectly to macOS. And yet, as bad as macOS has become, it is still a distant third in the race to become the worst desktop OS.
Very difficult spot to be in when the entire industry is racing to make desktops awful.
Linux starts to look very interesting, but is held back by the lack of good efficient high quality mobile hardware - the only such devices, Macs and snapdragon x elite devices, have poor Linux support.
It does not ask you to play Candy Crush, for example.
Windows fans? What?
> "As Forbes reports, a whopping 1 billion PCs are still running Windows 10 - despite half of them technically being eligible for an upgrade. During PC maker Dell's November quarterly earnings call, the company's COO, Jeff Clarke, admitted that "we have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," referring to all PCs, and not just Dell machines."
> In other words, those who own a whopping third of the estimated 1.5 billion PCs worldwide are outright refusing to upgrade, indicating Microsoft is seriously struggling to woo them. That’s likely due to a number of reasons, from simple frustrations over a tweaked and unfamiliar interface to the need to run software that isn’t Windows 11 compatible — and annoying ads.
At this point, Windows is just something I occasionally dual boot from my laptop, for the rare piece of software that I can't use on MacOS or Linux easily.
Holy shit that’s insane, what a giant middle finger to users.
The telemetry all the way through the operating system sucks ethically. But I'm invested and familiar with Windows and Office. Not being able to make Copilot disappear is annoying.
However, all my games and software that work on Windows won't necessarily work on linux. I am not interested in making a political stand and putting up without abilities and features I currently have.
So, for my own use-case, Win 11 it is.
Clearly not an endorsement, just a data-point.
Unless you specifically know what won't work: there's a solid chance that your games and software will work just fine on Linux.