I will leave this comment here by an ex Windows desktop experience team developer which says that designers have lots of control but don't even use Windows, they use Macs.

     > It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows 

      This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.

      I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.

     Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

I used to manage NT-based infra back in the day, have been on a mac for 15 years now because of stuff like this. A few years ago I bought a Windows box for my daughter. Out of the box the clock was wrong and it would just hang on auto-update. No message, no logs anywhere, just hangs. A few years later the son comes of age and gets his own box. And it’s the same story, no automatic adjustment of the clock. I’m running a bog standard unifi network leading to fiber, nothing complicated, everything else works including all the windows laptops of my wife. But a basic standards-based library-supported Windows function.

I am delaying it because iOS development is currently making me money but once that stops, I am so looking forward to moving back to Linux. Neither Windows or macOS are going in a good direction. The difference is only in the degree and speed of ensh*ttification. Ironically the only thing I might miss is the often criticized Xcode.

Both Windows and Mac OS are going through a rough patch. I think these mature OSs have most things that users want, and since incremental polishes don't give people promotions, executives go for major changes that almost always degrade the product.

One way I phrased it to a friend was: "if you try to make a radical improvement to a spoon, chances are you'll make it worse".

I think there's plenty to do in both products, but they are not sexy things that drive upgrade conversations.

After recent update fiascos I decided to install PopOS on a gaming rig that ran Windows 11 (as a pre-made set).

As they say, you can't see the light in the darkness and the difference between two is like between night and day.

Stable performance, consistent Remote Play to Steam Deck, quick bootup and no "hey want to play, that's a shame cause I got 20 minutes of patches to install".

Sure it's still a Linux with all consequences (had to switch from Wayland to Xorg for remote play and being returning user after couple years it wasn't straightforward) but it works much better.

I won't ever install Windows on my family computers. If I can afford to equip them with Macs I'll do so. If not - they'll get Linux instead.

A lot of comments saying that Windows is indestructable because it has no competition for a portion of the market due to:

- MacOS is too expensive

- Linux requires configuration and expertise

I'm not doubting those too, but like the article points out I would question if they're guaranteed to be true even in the short term. Chromebooks, Steamdecks and Android have all shown making a commercial requirement out of Linux is do-able, and the $600 Macbook Neo is due out any day.

I'm not predicting the death of Windows or anything, but I do think Microsoft's thrown is a lot less stable than they seem to realise.

"and a MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,099 against a capable Windows laptop at around $400"

Pardon?

But it's not bad enough yet to have a New Coke type consumer rejection.

All fine and good, yet even me that used to have M$ on the email signature, and signed to Linux Journal during its whole print lifetime, starting around when it was still on early issues, now runs Windows/WSL.

I am not paying for Apple margin's, their lack of options in customising hardware, nor I want to spend evenings reconfiguring BSD/Linux installions.

If there is a good PC (laptop) at a consumer store pre-installed with GNU/Linux, 100% supported hardware, I will consider it, buying online isn't my thing.

Thus my house is full of Android and WebOS powered devices and none GNU/Linux one.

The main issue is games. Drivers and overall performance under Linux for win games run under Wine is pretty low. The good stuff they became runnable but framerate of 12 fps is nothing for my razor laptop with rtx in Cossacs 3.

Now my setup is MacBook for work, and special game laptop Razer Blade especially for games with win11 removed defender/firewall and tons on useless stuff. Personally for me win7 will be enough but I just cannot install it on my laptop due to lack to drivers.

Can anyone please tell me how can i get my win11 to update to version 25H2?

It has been months I am stuck at "Update and shut-down" but it never updates. Nothing works :((((((((((((

I hate trying to teach my children how to use Windows these days. When I was young, it took some effort to get programs up and running, but once you cleared that hurdle, the computer worked the same, consistently, every single time you turned it on.

Now, most of the time they log in there's a new update to install; or a fresh and distracting dark pattern popup; or a service they need to re-enter credentials for; or, occasionally, a game I've previously installed for them either missing or no longer working properly. It's maddening and confusing even for experienced users.

Perhaps I do need to drop Windows. I'm not a huge fan of the obfuscaon and walled gardens on Macs, and Chromebooks and iPads are more geared towards consumption than creation.

My work keeps me on Windows (programs that have no good Linux equivalent, and a corporate environment that won't accept it for desktop users), but I'm seriously considering dual booting for my children's sake. It's a testament to how far Windows has fallen.

Sometimes I forget there are people who love Windows and genuinely believe it's the best operating system.

I grew up recommending windows to everybody I knew for most of my early life. I’ve had my boomer dad on Linux mint for almost a decade. Any time I am asked for a recommendation I cannot say to buy a Mac fast enough. Yes they are overpriced but the build quality to me is worth it. The windows 11 start menu is user hostile, I seriously can’t believe people use that day to day. I’m old enough to remember when they called it Micro$oft -unfortunately Microslop is going to stick (the author is right about the two settings apps). When was the last time you think an exec at MSFT played an Xbox or described using teams as “pleasant”?

“Adobe and Office run better on Mac, change my mind”

Apple doesn’t have a cloud business, and yet their OS hasn’t been a success story either recently.

Well on the plus side at least we’ll see how this story ends. Seems MS is going all in with win 12 on subscription and AI everything

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Wonderful writing. As someone who is in exactly the same boat (as I assume a lot of us here are), being called on for family tech support for around 30 years now, I too am starting to reconsider recommending windows.

My son is getting to the age where is taking an interest in computers(not just games) so I think I will be starting him off on a linux box.

While the demise of Windows is overblown, it has definitely started. With gaming on Linux slowly hitting mainstream - not as a serious solution yet but not a completely deranged idea either - I assume within a few years we'll see the first wave of casual gamers on Linux, and then after that those gamers will start recommending Linux to their families. It's really unfortunate that the second iteration of Steam Machines was to be released exactly during chip shortage, because looking at Steam Deck, the software side of things seems to be good enough.

I get that it says something we like to hear, but it's a content-free post that's almost certainly LLM-generated to get clicks. Serious content mill vibes - here's their latest blog article:

https://www.yankodesign.com/2026/03/09/a-cluster-of-volcanic...

Different byline, but somehow essentially the same as this story that appeared several days ago elsewhere on the internet:

https://newatlas.com/architecture/volcano-in-hotel-of-arriva...

Satya Nadal will go down in history as the guy that killed Microsoft. The insane push to AI and copilot jammed in every app plus ads has done exactly what the OP states…

I will recommend that $599 MacBook every time now and power users invest in a MacBook Pro.

I was a loyal Windows user and now my own Surface Laptop 5 sits dark while I work on a Mac-Mini that was meant to be a side app dev machine.

Satya Nadella doesn’t care in the slightest. Windows is of no interest to him.

And the Microsoft management layer has no clue at all.

So that’s the end of it.

What's wrong with Windows?

At this point, Windows just needs to die

I recently understood why so many people are anti-AI and think AI is a scam.

It's because they are Windows users and being shoved piss poor Copilot implementations down their throats by Microsoft.

I have no doubt that Microsoft is using the cheapest(worst) cloud model possible for free Copilot users or they're running a tiny local model on the NPU when available.

These people aren't running Opus 4.6 or GPT 5.4. No wonder they're so anti-AI and can't see the why there is AI hype.