(They may have turned it into a joke, but that is the truth https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/the-microsoft-365...)
Maybe these days for interviews, instead of calculating how many golf balls fit in a schoolbus, they can calculate how much time, money, intellect, and brand goodwill they've spent renaming Office 365 -> Microsoft 365 -> Microsoft 365 Copilot. Then add in how much time, money, and intellect everyone else has spent trying to figure it out
I'm not sure if they'll manage to top this one ("Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 SP3 Feature Pack") https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=442...
I might title this piece, "Full STEM without liberal arts"
Microsoft and 365 are ok.
Microsoft should really be the hidden name like Meta or Alphabet.
Office Copilot is a great name. Of course they didnt use it.
I'm not entirely sure how Copilot integration helps them beat Notepad++, but I suppose that's why I'm not a PM.
But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe
> But at least an earlier, less bad, version of Notepad is still available on Win 11. There's just no icon or link to it, so you have to know it's there. It's C:\Windows\notepad.exe
Also, for what it is worth, a new relative to EDIT.COM is now back, in almost its former glory, just not yet installed in every Windows by default: https://github.com/microsoft/edit
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...
Notepad has had nearly identical UX from Windows 1.0 until 10. Sure, there's a search feature that appeared at some point, ditto with the status bar, at some point they made it able to open files larger than 64K, and apparently you can open files from URLs directly?
Five or so noticable changes in an extremely lightweight and utilitarian application in thirty years is not at all like completely redesigning it into an AI slop machine.
So much for that
They were very unwelcome to me.
This was a funny sentence to read, as my first thought as I started the article was “Windows users are starting to remind me of people stuck in cycles of abusive relationships.”
Windows has been in a cycle of abusively bad releases followed by sheepish "sorry, we learned our lesson" releases for nearly thirty years. What is the author’s plan for five years from now, just hope that Windows 12 isn't garbage?
All I can figure is that every generation spawns a new set of users who never knew any better, a segment of them reaching the breaking point, but can't be bothered to influence the next generation.
regardless: this is always who Windows was. Get out and get help.
It's been steadily downhill since 7 though. Integration of spyware got it's foothold in 8 and now that we are at 11, you've got a completely spyware ridden OS, and then on top of that, basic things like context menus, audio drivers, screenshot tools, and connecting monitors to laptops is broken.
Many of these issues were ironically the same issues that stopped me from running Ubuntu Dapper Drake when I first installed it. It's just an unacceptably bad product from Microsoft, and if businesses weren't vendor locked (specifically the business I work for) I'd never even look at it, much like I don't look at Lotus or Corel products.
The biggest problem with Vista is you had a lot of Windows XP computers running happily on 256 and 512MB of ram. That made updating to Vista REALLY painful to a lot of people.
I think people forget about how little resources 95, 98, and XP needed to run.
XP was also criticized for being a hog when it first came out. People viewed Windows 2000 as being the good windows right up until memory became more abundant. You couldn't run XP on a machine with 64MB of ram, but you could run windows ME and 98 on that same machine.
Not really, Windows 7 had a lot of work poured into it, fixing Vista issues. Even first public betas of W7 were more polished than any of Windows 8..11 releases. That includes work on minimal amount of "noise" notifications, driver issues, speed, design etc
The reason the W7 beta went so well is because it was already just based on later versions of Vista.
Linux has suffered from the 32/64 bit problem as well for quite some time. The only difference is because of opensource it's been easier to slowly kill off the 32bit ecosystem.
That's not been an option for windows.
First up, the nature of dlls is that the same dll for multiple applications gets saved in memory just once. If you have 2 windows applications and one is 32bit and the other 64bit, then both of those applications end up loading up effectively the same dlls, but one is compiled for 64bit apps and the other 32. That nearly doubles the amount of ram needed in a mixed system.
But then there's just the fact that 64bit code by it's nature uses and passes around 64bit pointers everywhere. That's not quite as significant but it does have an effect.
The other part that ends up adding to the memory consumption is from XP on microsoft added compatibility layers. What those effectively did is distribute a different set of dlls based on the application being launched. So now instead of having 1 copy of the dlls like you did with 95, 98 and ME you can end up with potentially 3 or 4 different dlls. And that's ultimately exploded as more versions of windows have been released.
The Kernel Version Numbers are a better hint at what is going on than the marketing releases.
Windows 2000 NT5, XP NT 5.1
Vista NT6, 7 NT6.1, 8 NT6.2, 8.1 NT6.3
To be fair, I agree they are overdue for a truly awful release.
I mean, there was Windows Me and then 7 years later Windows Vista.
Those were truly Gold medal awful podium releases.
Even with Windows 11 I don't think we've hit that level in the cycle just yet.
ME was unstable but had charm, it deserved a lot of the dislike because NT was just so good... and they really should not have removed Real-Mode; that would have been the reason to use ME over NT2000...
Vista though?
If you genuinely gave me a patched Vista and said that it was a viable alternative to 11... I would 100% take that 10/10 times.
Vista's problem was that it was heavy and people sold devices that could barely run the basic version as if they were fully compatible.. Widgets were a bit of a misstep too, but I mean, you can ignore them. Oh and the new driver system meant that you needed totally new drivers for everything; and annoyingly the UAC dialog just got in everyones grill: but we still have that!
And anyway after SP2; Vista was a pretty good OS, especially on reasonable hardware for the time.
I would genuinely rather sniff farts all day and use Vista, than be forced into using the consumer version of Windows 11.
My IT department doesn't suck when it comes to trimming down Windows, but it's still not ideal, you can feel the shit constantly trying to break through.
Do they know about LTSC? There is no reason to run Windows 10 without security updates: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol (pirate site but you don't have to use their tools, all the information here about update tracks for Windows is still valid)
Can’t wait til this phase is done.
I started using Double Commander over Explorer and Terracopy for moving files around. Double Commander isn't the prettiest but it works quite well.
The responsiveness of both these apps shows that the problem isn't necessarily the Windows 11 operating system itself.
With Windows 10, I started using "O&O ShutUp10"[0], which lets me easily disable (and revert the changes if needed) most of the crap enabled by default. There's no OneDrive, CoPilot, weather, "news", etc, annoying me, which makes my Windows experience bearable. I just have to open the app once after each major update because Microsoft loves to re-enable features.
My upgrade to Windows 11 was smooth. I didn't have the issues reported in the article. But man, it sometimes feels like they forgot to optimized it. Opening/closing the start menu, viewing all apps, isn't that smooth for me. I have a powerful computer, with a fast GPU and one of the more recent AMD CPUs... and at times it's like it's running at 24fps.
I mainly use a Mac, which is better, but after seeing the "Liquid Glass" UI lag on M1 machines, I decided to stay on MacOS Sequoia. Is everyone ignoring performance now?
Like, yes, I know there are many flaws with both. A lot of sound, technical issues with windows and macos. A slew of UX ones as well. But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.
Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.
My experience with the distros and desktops Ive tried in Linux have felt like windows 98 with a janky web interface on top, or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
Often feels like a thin veil on top of a technically-inclined terminal OS.
Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?
That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc.
> or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.
The emphasis here should be on the word _looking_ instead. A lot of these desktops (majority are hyprland setups) reveal themselves to be superficial jank when you try to do anything remotely commonplace, like connecting to a new wifi network. It's great that windows slide around at 60fps, but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for?
And I say this as someone who uses Gnome and maintains his own extension forks.
Precisely but I'm on the "if you can see your desktop at all, you're not using the computer right" side of the coin. I use KDE because keyboard shortcuts and infinite customization and reasonably powerful automation. I do not care what things look like, so long as whatever the look like, they stay in the same spot that they have been in for the last decade.
I think my distro changes the wallpaper every point release for KDE but I'm not really sure, I only see it briefly after a reboot.
Since when is Flatpak on life support? Everybody (except Ubuntu) is pushing for it, from the regular desktop distros like Feodra all the way to image based distros like KDE Linux and Fedora Silverblue.
Several linux distros use that UI. Im on NixOS but i probably wouldn’t recommend that as a starting place. I’ve used bazzite and it worked pretty well out of the box. But i think there’s ubuntu and debian variants that use plasma that are probably pretty good as well.
I'd say it's close to the windows 7 or 10 experience. But without any of the clutter that has crept in.
But to answer seriously: Have you tried KDE Plasma as a desktop environment? I think Fedora's KDE spin is among the better options for a distro: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/download
I personally think it's the best desktop experience, and always miss it when having to use Windows at work. I've never really worked with Macs.
My top recommendation for a Windows user though is Linux Mint. It's desktop is called Cinnamon and while it doesn't look exactly like any Windows desktop, it's familiar enough that people don't have trouble switching to it. Linux Mint seems to be the, "It Just Works", Linux distro these days.
Beyond that, if you don't mind installing themes, most Linux desktops can be themed to look like whatever version of Windows, MacOS, etc. that you want. Getting the feel can be more difficult. KDE Plasma is very customizable though if you are willing to spend the time.
Sure. Ubuntu, for example.
I don't know what people's expectations are in terms of UX & GUIs, but I have been perfectly happy with Ubuntu over the last 10-15 years.
Other than gaming (I am not a gamer) and some specialized applications (Photoshop, etc.), I can always find an application on Ubuntu that worked for me: Libre Office, FreeCAD, KiCAD, IDEs, most programming languages, ...
There is no problem with installing stuff either. In the last 10 years, I did not have to build anything from source and "apt" (or its GUI equivalents) works perfectly fine.
There are several good quality distributions. Linux Mint is often mentioned, it comes in different flavors, including its own Cinnamon, which would also not feel too alien to the average Windows user. In my opinion, Fedora is also a good choice based on the last few years of running it on various laptops.
It's very easy to run some popular distribution in a virtual machine to get a feel for things if you're just curious.
So I never felt like paying a “linux tax”. Quite the opposite, when I dual boot into Windows 10 it irritates me to no end. Random web based link and ads in the start menu. Updates are kind of a pain - they halt both the shutdown and the startup process. I don’t like the flat UI look in general.
As far as overall consistency and polish nothing beats MacOS but well Macs cost more. So if you look for design and UI polish and have the money that’s probably a better choice.
The problem with linux has been either hardware compatibility or when things don't work it's a pain to figure it out however I have good news on that front! For the life of me I've never managed to send audio to my monitor / TV speakers when running linux but now with Gemini I've managed to finally fix it. So if you're scared about things breaking and spending hours inside man pages.. just copy paste your console into an LLM and it'll probably help you out.
I install everything from Flathub, I don't think I've ever installed an APK (is that a thing?)
I don't think the Linux distributions can really do anything better by themselves at this point. Most of the issues you run into are because you're trying to run Windows software (via Wine/Proton) that may have issues, the hardware support is subpar (Nvidia) or the Linux version of the app is poor.
It did finally cross the line for me where using Linux is more enjoyable than Windows or Linux, which I honestly never thought would happen when I started using it on and off ~20 years ago.
I recommend Linux Mint. It has the windows feel for sure. I am not exaggerating when I say it works better than Windows.
I didn’t customize anything. Just installed it and connected to WiFi.
Key things to consider: - installing apps sometimes isn’t as easy as running an exe. But really you get the gist of .deb and .AppImage files really fast. - I don’t game but I’ve heard GPU drivers just work these days. - I am a heavy excel user. LibreOffice isn’t even close. However, for basic stuff it is usable. Excel is too bloated these days anyway so it is a pleasure to work with something that runs fast. YMMV.
Microsoft Store? .msi? Custom .exe installer that litters random junk in inscrutable places and that is impossible to know how to cleanly uninstall? Just a zip file that you dump somewhere? Chocolatey? WinGet?
Or, macOS: Is it a .dmg with an .app that you drag to Applications? A standard installer? A custom installer that does who knows what? App Store? Homebrew? MacPorts? Just a tar.gz with random crap in it?
Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.
Linux can be a much cleaner and more coherent desktop experience than Windows but at some point you have to respect that you are using a fundamentally different operating system. If you're trying to use Windows on your Linux computer, you are going to have a bad time.
- In 98% of cases it is a .dmg with .app ... so drag and drop or App Store install.
- 1% of cases it is a standard installer and that is mostly because the developer is old-school and too lazy to make a .app (e.g. here's looking at you Microsoft)
- The remaining 1% (Homebrew/Macports) is really for the power-user, and in most cases you can just download a pre-compiled mac binary from the developers Github anyway.
> Meanwhile, 99% of my Linux software is "apt install foo" and that's it.
But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"
Why ?
Your average user will blindly follow `trust me, sudo curl foo | bash` ...
And your average user is unlikely to look at the apt package build rules and/or source and/or dependency list and in the majority of cases will just answer `Y` to any questions from `apt`.
Part of my job is automating macOS software deployment. I do this all day. I can confidently tell you that your percentages are way off. I wish you were right because dragging an app bundle into Applications is obviously the correct way to do it. But alas, that is very far from the world we live in.
For example I have never used Homebrew/Macports because my 1% power-user software has been available through the developer's Github (e.g. `bazel` etc. all publish mac release binaries )
This is "a tar.gz with random crap". Convenient perhaps, but it doesn't help your argument that macOS is less of a hellscape.
But `apt install foo` is a synonym for "custom installer that does who knows what" and/or "tar.gz with random crap in it"
No, it's really not. It knows what files it puts where and can cleanly upgrade and uninstall with a predictable and standardized method. It's not that I usually care where the files are strewn exactly, it's that I want consistent installations done in a systematic and coherent way; I don't want to rely on an UNINSTALL.EXE that, like the installer, I have no idea what it does.
I guess if you install systemsettings from kde3, a text editor from gnome, remove 90% of the features from dolphin you're in the vicinity of the mess they are.
Multiple desktops on Windows is not a nice experience for me. When you switch the desktop on one display then they ALL change for every display. I need them independent ala macOS or it is just so infuriating to use. Win11 also has big Fisher Price sized title bars now and macOS Tahoe isn't far behind. I think the GUI designers are on magic mushrooms when coming up with these designs.
I think you'll always pay the tax on Linux, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing from certain perspectives.
As far as app installations, system things come in from dnf on fedora 43. Everything else I install is usually a flatpak from flathub.
I guess if you look for one you can find Linux distribution with ads in start menu
> But despite W11 carrying around remnants of Windows 98 still, both of those OSes _feel nice_.
not to me
> Multiple desktops work well, nice gestures, simple installers and applications. Stuff often just works.
For me on Lubuntu my two desktops work well. Required a bit of googling how to setup, but it took me more time to fail at removing similar Windows annoyance.
Package managers are great, I have configuration of my packages in Ansible and single script run installs all my software except VSCodium and Android Studio.
Stuff nearly often just works.
Not sure what you mean by gestures.
> installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
Even that beats what I remember from my Windows days that required going through billion of installer wizards, with decent chunk of them trying to bring some unwanted stuff.
And my install is nearly pure install from OS packages with some minor annoyance for Android Studio and VSCodium.
Undo Close Tab - A very handy add-on, adds a button to quickly undo
a closed tab. There is probably a shortcut for that, but I
cannot bother remembering it.
At least they finally added back the “don’t combine taskbar icons” but it’s still lacking basic functionality that was previously there.
RemoveWindowsAI https://github.com/zoicware/RemoveWindowsAI
ProtonDB The list of AI crap is jaw gobbin massive.
ProtonDB checks known linux game compatibility && login with Steam to check your library! https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
RemoveWindowsAI shows a massive amount of AI crap they are trying to force on us. It removes EVERYTHING and is updated regularly.
I DO HATE Windows 11 and don't trust Microsoft with my data one bit. Every prompt you make lives in their logs no matter what they say - they flat out lie about it. "Oh we made it anonyomous". Sure. Yeah. RIGHT. With AI any data can be made Not-Anonymous.
Hopefully the EU will smash!
I'm trying bazzite (https://bazzite.gg) which is made for gaming.
My official reasons to hate Windows 11 go on and on. Here are a few
Windows 11 REMOVED vertical task bars - the most screen space efficient way to Task! Windows 11 ARBITRARILY limits the number of Apps you can have pinned to your task bar, Windows 11 WASTES a massive number of pixels and forces you to have a blank task bar.
Just typing this is letting the rage flow and I'm embracing the DARK SIDE.
I love AI when it's my choice to give them my data, and I love developing with it, and I love building it into Apps for users who need it as a tool.
Plus 1000% NSA scooping up everything including with moles on site at every major tech company.
I don't mind duck duck go's search assistant.
When I switched to Omarchy, I've had zero crashes. Omarchy gave me a great OS that I spend no time tweaking and fiddling with. Steam works out of the box, and all the games I play work out of the box. Control, Duke Nukem 3D, Blade Chimera, Elden Ring, Ender Lilies, Lorn's Lure, Pragamata, RE 4 Remake, it just works. If you're a gamer don't be scared and give it a try, you will not want to go back to windows.
I despise W11.
2026, the killer app for many Windows users is now a text editor that has ran in Wine since 2012.
We're making good progress, folks!
Your comment is a little confusing since the author already mentioned Wine with the following sentence that's after the one you quoted: >"Using Wine is an option... well. Buggy option."
Were you trying to disagree with the author and say it's not actually buggy?
But I think we have to recognize that it has had a pretty large usability issue. There are several programs, like winetricks, that have existed because of how hard it can be to get things setup to work well with random bits of software.
It's been a far cry from the windows or mac experience of double clicking on an installer and having everything just work. Though it's pretty close to that now.
this is a legitimate complaint, but I see latency absolutely everywhere. my iPhone 17 Pro dropped frames out of the box . now 3/4 unlocks drops frames.
I'm not defending Windows, it's obviously in decline -- but trying to identify root cause. There used to be curmudgeon engineers on staff who would berate team members over blocked UIs, dropped frames, input latency over 30ms . Dave Cutler made a rubber stamp that rejected (then paper) code reviews with "Size is the Goal". That culture has retired.
Web-dev's design interactions targeting 500-2000ms, so to them everything on the OS looks fast . Adding 150ms to right-click is unnoticeable . Like 15kHz audio to a boomer or purple to the color blind .
It's easy to beat up on MS, because most open-source devs have despised them. But Microsoft had a very high bar for engineering until about 10 years ago ( you may laugh, but remember they were writing OS's that last 40+ years) . Apple had an extremely high bar until about 5 years ago.
This isn't just one bad product, but an entire industry lowering its standards.