This was new in 2025, so it is still moving over.
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).
Um, I am very skeptical that Microsoft's KPIs have this level of alignment with actual user workflows.
Whoopsy!
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.
For all its faults I think it's strange to criticize Microsoft for maintaining backwards compatibility.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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. [...]
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
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.
You can move the start menu back to the left if you like.
https://www.amandasterner.com/post/how-to-move-your-windows-...
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!
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.
For those of us with higher standards, it's not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At some point it starts to feel like a drug for C-suites.
It's madness.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
When I was working on a deployment dashboard, I made it show ">0%" or "<100%" near the endpoints, to avoid misleading rounding.
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.
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.
Meanwhile they keep downsizing their workforce while not making personal sacrificed (personal pay) while they chase AI.
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".
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].
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.
It does not ask you to play Candy Crush, for example.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
Holy shit that’s insane, what a giant middle finger to users.