Pretty sure it's just that Windows is horribly broken, privacy-invading, ad-ridden malware disguised as an operating system. I swear it seems like nobody at Microsoft not even once have asked the actual users for what they would like to see in the OS.
The video takes this one step further, and it has nothing to do with being 'out of touch' or something. The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to. Then it can track, tune and control everything we do, thanks to all the telemetry back and forth.
I wish people would engage with the content a bit. It's a huge claim (and scary).
> The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to.
This trend is not even limited to Windows.
We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
I don't know, I think a simpler explanation for Google's behavior is that monopolies act like monopolies. Combating spam and SEO junk is hard and expensive. Once they became synonymous with web search for most people they gradually cared less and less about product quality. If people will keep using the product no matter how bad the results get and how many ads get jammed in it's hard for a corporation like that to care.
Possibly, but it makes more sense when viewed through the lens of "Google is an advertising company" rather than a search company.
Also, it's not like Google went on autopilot and pursued nothing in recent years. Clearly they've dedicated resources to AI, so it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired, all the while making it appear as a choice the user was making.
Google famously solved the search problem and the spam problem, and technology has only gotten more capable since then. Suggesting that blogspam etc are too difficult to defeat is a tough sell imo.
> it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired
I find that very hard to believe because it implies a level of foresight that we have not observed from Google. The notion that they degraded their own search on purpose for years to funnel people to AI seems very implausible, especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI, and that level of foresight would also imply that they should have beaten OpenAI to the punch instead of reacting to ChatGPT.
> especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI
This would be a calculated financial bet on their part. This kind of risk taking is not limited to SV startups.
I realize companies under late stage capitalism aren't typically known for having foresight past one quarter, but that doesn't mean some of them can't have somebody optimizing for the long-term in a financial sense.
It's seems premature to rule this possibility out entirely.
Occam‘s razor says prefer the simpler explanation.
It is possible that Google as an organization had enough foresight to see that search would eventually be eaten by AI chat bots and so intentionally degraded the experience of search to encourage movement in that direction. And also that Google was too dumb to actually ship their chat bot first and capitalized on their choice to sabotage search.
It seems a lot more likely that the the decline in the quality of search is due to a combination of hyper-optimization for revenue and difficulty combating large scale spam farms.
> We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
So Google ruined search so they could give their market share to ChatGPT. 4D chess. Maybe 5D even.
If you have some explanation for how doing this makes any sense at all, please share. But I think you’re basically engaging in conspiracy theory by claiming Google intentionally reduced the quality of search to drive AI adoption.
It's not that hard to synthesize how business leadership would both optimize for the present of the pre-AI era while also continually refining their strategy as AI became clearer on the horizon.
You're jumping through hoops when this really isn't that complicated or far fetched in a business sense.
It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It is extremely farfetched because it would provide no present or future advantage to Google to do so. If they hypothetically wanted to intentionally degrade their search, they could always do that when they are ready for the switch to AI.
> It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It literally does though.
Furthermore, even if you reject that, in practice it could be as simple as Google funneling resources from maintaining search (which is obviously a never ending game of cat-and-mouse between forces of SEO, etc) to AI prospects, which would have the same outcome: neglect leads to degradation and dysfunction, and it makes their new venture more appealing. They obviously have enough capital to play such a game in the short-term and eat whatever loss necessary during the transition.
Google is well known by now for abandoning their products in favor of what they deem to be the Next Thing.
Microsoft has a handful big clients - Dell, Lenovo, HP being the top three. They are the ones that make Windows be the default operating system on everyone's computers and they need to be happy, not the person who buys the computer. When the computer becomes unusable, they'll just get another from the same brands and everyone, except the user, are happy.
Corporations don't run Windows. They run Outlook, Excel, and Teams. Windows and generic PCs (or thin clients and VDIs) is just the cheapest way to achieve that goal.
Corpos definitely run Windows. There are many highly technical people and advanced software that need Windows. Not every company employee is just a pencil pusher or bean counter.
This myopia in tech is so baffling to me. Windows has been around over 40 years and tech people still act like it will go away “any day now” just because they don’t like it.
Corporations will continue using Windows the same way they'll continue using mainframes (at least mainframes are interesting machines). If Dell, HP and Lenovo decide tomorrow to ship all laptops with Fedora by default, very few people will install Windows. Or notice it's a different OS. They'll just think that Windows 12 no longer has ads.
Corporations will continue to corporate. Active Directory is a powerful thing. SharePoint is another dependency that's hard to get rid of, even more so when it becomes the file server where all Office content is stored.
I have been waiting for this day since the move to SFF and thin clients. They've been threatening to do all compute in the cloud... at which point the OS, local or otherwise becomes irrelevant.
In fact, the thin client that drives my desk at [company] runs Linux with the Citrix client to connect to a VDI that exists somewhere in a datacenter we own, because regulations.
> They are the ones that make Windows be the default operating system on everyone's computers
I've got to disagree. Macs are a fantastic option as long as the software needed to do actual work is available. That's the real bottleneck and it's not something Dell, Lenovo, or HP have any power over.
They still ship a lot more computers than Apple. For most of the world, Apple is a niche product. I use it, and I love them, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking corporations will start buying Mac Minis to replace their desktops and thin clients anytime soon.
I am not fooling myself and I do not care what corporations would or would not do - I simply state that the reason there is such a pressure to use Windows is not due to Dell and other providers, but software providers - mainly Microsoft.
That… does not follow. Corporations simply aren't going to start buying Macs for all of their millions of rank-and-file corporate drones. Even if they wanted, and they don't, they're tied to the Windows ecosystem in all sorts of ways, even though the software lives on someone else's computer these days.
Thanks for saying the same thing I have said? Do people even read before they post? Seems like the moment Apple is mentioned some folks just turn on a downvote + disagree autopilot, even when they agree?
Nah. I think the problem is that windows and macOS did everything users wanted them to do about 10-15 years ago. Everything since then has been lipstick on a pig.
If windows were a building, they need to stop tacking on more rooms like it’s a gaudy McMansion. If they really wanna keep working on it, work to make what’s already there more beautiful. Optimise. Reduce the install size. Clean up some of the decades of tech debt. Unify the different generations of UI toolkits. Write documentation. Port security critical parts to rust, where appropriate. Refine, don’t reinvent.
> did everything users wanted them to do about 10-15 years ago.
Certainly not; not by a long shot. Besides, most users don't even understand the potential of software. But why bother improving it if you still make money shipping crap?
I agree, I've been amazed watching people release after release upgrading to newer versions of Windows and office, when what they used them for functionally didnt change. I could never make sense of how people didnt see it for what it is, and accepted the continuous costs.
But hey, I guess that's capitalism, and people are captured by it. If it has a new shine, and everyone else is doing it, let's all jump over the cliff's edge.
Microsoft is declaring all users are now corporate drones. All your activity will be tied to your Microsoft account. All your files, images, and regular screenshots of your PC will be sucked into OneDrive. If your mouse has not moved in five minutes a manager will be notified.
Users want a one time payment of $150, for a 50 million LoC software product, and then get 10 years of support.
Everyone here slinging mud, while getting paid out of the SaaS pot. Would windows be a better product if it was user focused but cost $40/mo? From Microsoft's POV it would probably kill numbers.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. What matters is being upfront and transparent. Microsoft could just have said the initial license is just that. If you want updates be prepared to pay.
In a couple years you won't have to bother with that. The device will connect to the ID chip embedded in your body when you're born. And this will be a one-time hard-wired coupling for that device when it is first turned on.
A bit of a tangent, but your worst case answer here is the culmination of all the secure boot and remote attestation concepts.
What would stop it is a combination of not being able to buy new hardware that will even boot the modified kernel, and not being able to get vintage hardware to connect to any public ISP etc. due to being unable to attest its validated boot chain information, signed by a required modern hardware OEM key.
So you would be stuck in some kind of underworld of vintage folks attempting mesh networking between themselves. Then, because of basic market forces/economics, there will be a dwindling amount of software that is able to run in such environments. It will become the esoteric realm of old-school hobbyists who don't need to run any commercial apps which require ABI/API features of the modern commercial OSs which require this boot chain of the modern commercial hardware, etc.
They might force the Linux kernel to add a value 'age' to the couple username/password. Although in Europe OSS is exempt from age verification obligation.
Used to be that people who bought the OS were the customer. Now just like everything else these days, they're the product. And the OS still isn't even free.
Plus it's hard to buy a computer without paying the MS tax, unless you build one yourself.
That's an issue I would like to see legislated! In fact, in my country there is a law that prohibits bundled purchases: it's just that the authorities are not tech savvy enough to see it when it pertains to computers and Windows.
I'm being slightly absurd here since you need some sort of firmware to simply start up the computer and install an operating system, but here is my point: to most people, the operating system is part of the computer. The computer is simply an expensive brick without it. On top of that, a lot of the negativity towards bundling Windows originates from Microsoft's past monopolistic practices[1]. We certainly don't hear many people criticizing the bundling of macOS or iOS on Apple products or Android/Chrome OS on Android devices or Chromebooks. (There may be people who want to load alternative operating systems on these devices, but that is different from criticizing the bundling of the OS.)
[1] Is Microsoft forcing hardware vendors to install Windows even a thing these days?
It makes sense, if manufacturer provides support for Linux on the same laptop SKU. But that's very rarely the case. So selling laptop without OS seems like selling half-working product. When you're buying a car, it comes with a lot of software. ECU software, multimedia software (sometimes it's Windows CE) and so on.
I saw laptops selling with FreeDOS but realistically speaking I think that majority of these laptops end up with pirated Windows, so all it provides is increasing level of piracy.
Ideally laptop should provide a choice between Linux and Windows on the first boot. And easy way to buy Windows license if user chooses it.
Compared to a hypothetical world without computers with Linux preinstalled, presumably.
“Plenty” doesn’t really seem like a relative term here, but a statement that there are enough options on the market if someone wants to buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.
Windows was fiercely hated for a long time for being extremely buggy, low quality, high price, weak security (a later concern), and Microsoft’s general anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices.
Things improved slightly for a while and maybe the generation of Mac/linux using tech workers never suffered through the worst of it, but Microsoft seems to be back on track with their old ways.
Microsoft cleaned up when they got hit with antitrust and then started feeling a bit of competition when operating under consent decree. That's all "behind" them now and the Google settlement put antitrust to bed.
Yah, a 180 would actually be a good thing, but I guess it depends on your reference point. Like people, the analogy breaks when tortured. I like yours better overall :)
For over three decades Microsoft offered a free planned obsolescence to PC manufacturers. Windows got heavy and slow after a couple of years and needed a hardware upgrade which generated billions of revenue and all were happy. This continues till today and is the reason that MS increases the Windows bloat and HW vendors keep installing them.
If they installed Linux, we would still have our 12 yo PC until now. The year of Linux desktop will never come due to this reason.
I strongly prefer my Linux machine but use Windows mostly so that I can run Quicken. I feel doubly trapped: can't get off Quicken and thus can't get off Windows.
I'm only very slightly less reluctant to get an Apple machine (though the M* chips tempt me) and there will probably be incompatibilities between the versions of Quicken.
I think I should probably rip off the band-aid and migrate to:
+ spreadsheets (more control/future proof)
+ gnucash or similar (and risk that going unmaintained)
+ Wine
+ something I've not considered
At my work we use quickbooks enterprise (which is a desktop app) for some clients and another (not Intuit) online/cloud app for other clients. I have extensive experience using both. The cloud apps are slow, buggy, lacking features, immature UI/UX, and not as open.
The principal limitation of qbe is lack of multi-location support. The main advantage of cloud is the ability to provide direct access (though the role/permission models I’ve experienced have other downsides).
It’s a mixed bag, but the advantages of qbe outweigh the aggravations of windows—for now.
IIUC the cloud solution provides cloud-based storage|copies of the quicken file and accessibility through a less-functional web-based tool and Simplifi isn't compatible.
So, thanks again for the suggestion but these solutions won't work for me.
Yeah, you're right. It is astonishing that Quicken's web app does not offer the same features and functionality as the desktop version. Having worked for many years as an SRE, I would have imagined that the opposite would be true - that Quicken would want to migrate its users to its online version, precisely so that customers could use the software from any client, be it Mac, Linux, WinBlows, or whatever.
Bro, I played KCD2 on Ubuntu the day it launched last year. The games themselves are basically a solved problem and have been for a while now. Multiplayer games with anti cheat are the sticking point now, with only a little bit of progress there.
- work is still ongoing to get performance of direct x 12 games on NVIDIA closer to that of windows.
Big tech apologists: “while I used to enjoy playing Starcraft on Windows XP, it’s become clear that computing is no longer ‘personal’ and society needs some guardrails around it. I’m okay with sacrificing some liberties to protect the children.”
The way I see it, there is very little creativity in big business. Fund an interesting new concept, or fund a formulaic sequel? Same thing every time.
So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smartphones and think: We must do as they do. And thus S3 suspend gets replaced by "modern suspend" - just like a smartphone, not really suspended, just in a low power, always online, always ready to act mode. And local storage gets replaced by cloud, and local accounts get replaced by cloud accounts, and the cloud reaches in and modifies features and apps. Does this really make sense? Does it matter? Smartphones blazed the way and are successful. Must copy the formula, of your device just being an extension to the cloud, nothing more.
I sit here in front of my old school Linux machine, with terabytes of local storage and as little cloud dependency as possible. Heck it's part of the cloud itself, hosting an ancient cobwebsite right here from the basement. But I feel increasingly like an anachronism. Want to pass a photo dump to computer-neurotypicals? Not even a USB stick will do. Not even a USB-C stick that will plug right into their smartphone and allow the pix to be copied off easily from its UI. The whole concept of non-cloud stuff has become alien to most people.
Don't even get me started about getting photos from them! Anyway if that's how the world works now, why would anyone bother making a traditional operating system any more?
The last line was really good. I may have differing opinions on some specifics but I loved this line:
"The personal computer movement was about empowerment not dependency"
I really dislike the “expiration” date, and at one point they were very short (5 years) and poorly documented so it was a nasty surprise if you got an older model on sale.
I'm absolutely sure there are people who do. Chromebooks just have a practically nonexistant market share compared to Windows, and a lot of those users being kids being issued school laptops probably doesn't translate to a lot of visible complaining about Chromebook-specific problems.
What? I passionately hate Chromebooks, firstly because they were conceived as a power grab by Google to get people to do everything through online Google services instead of locally, and secondly in a more personal way when I actually had to use one, in a remote hostel with ropey internet.
I respect you. It's very hard to be passionate about something as bland as a Chromebook. It's like being passionate about tofu, or toothpaste, or baby shampoo.
I recently helped liberate about 70 EOL'ed Chromebooks. Now students in a college near me will get free laptops they can actually use for college work, running the latest and greatest Linux distros.
SusyQ USB-C Cable + USB-A to USB-C Cable + Coreboot?
Recently liberated a Chromebook that powerwashed my hours of manual provisioning again due to remote login control failure FWICS
Can't believe how much faster the same machine is with a modern Linux distro.
(ChromiumOS was originally Gnome and Chrome on a Gentoo derivative by Linux workstation users, but now has a "Turn on Linux" button greyed out for all the kids.)
I still don't understand all of the hate. In my eyes Windows has never been more capable and stable.
- Windows Terminal is actually pretty dang good
- There's actually a package manager built in now with WinGet
- Hyper-V comes with pro and is incredibly powerful
- While WSL2 isn't great at times, it does fill in a lot of gaps and working with Docker is pretty seamless
- Ever since Windows Defender became standard, cleaning up relative's machines has basically turned into disabling some startup apps and removing spyware-like browser extensions
- With 11 the UI actually feels reasonably consistent for the first time in a long while. There's still some core applications that need a rewrite (Disk Management, Format, RegEdit, Device Manager, Event Viewer), but it feels like real progression when compared to 8/8.1 or 10
- Backwards compatibility is quite simply unmatched
There's some areas that have regressed or have been omitted for _some reason_:
- If you're going to push Microsoft 365 family subscriptions, I never want to have to download TeamViewer, AnyDesk, etc. Give me some capable remote assistance tool. It's obvious this is ignored so they don't piss off partners.
- NTP synchronization shouldn't be behind the location access permission. I understand why it is, but then make location access more granular.
- Disk performance could be much better
- NTFS is so antiquated. It's time for another filesystem. I want native overlay support, checksumming, not-ass permissions (though tbf nobody gets this right)
- Windows + D is just a key shift to the right from ctrl C so I hit it all the time. It would be less infuriating if hitting it again actually put all of the windows in their previous state / stacking order.
- I usually sign in with my Microsoft account when I setup my PC, but ffs let me create a local user. If you want to put signing into my Microsoft account in my face, do it at first login not at first setup.
While 10 got a bunch of features back ported, they've started out on 11 and I would argue many of them wouldn't have happened if they didn't learn from the mistakes of 8 and 10. Particularly when it comes to UI uniformity. As for the other complaints, I don't fully disagree, but so much of what you listed can be disabled / customized that it often doesn't affect me past OOBE.
I'm not saying Windows is infallible, but it's actually getting quite insufferable to hear nothing but the Windows hate train day in and day out as if it has no redeeming qualities and the only reason we aren't on Linux is because some game developers want nasty anti cheat/DRM measures. I think the proliferation of this is largely due in part to "Windows sucks" being an actual valid avenue of revenue for creators.
Yeah, I really like Windows 11. I'm not a developer; just an ordinary user. I guess the difference is that I fully embrace the MS ecosystem—i.e., OneDrive, M365 Family account (the storage alone is worth the cost), Power Toys, Edge (sync'd across computers), etc. It works great.
The only problem I’ve had was with a family member who refused to restart the computer. Eventually, something got corrupted. Fixing it was simple—I just reinstalled the current version of Windows. It was so much easier than in the past, when it meant reinstalling everything from scratch or reverting to a saved snapshot.
Serious (related) question: is the the state of window 'snapping' equivalent to or better than Windows 11 in any *NIX, non-tiling WM desktop environments?
Personal Computing was never in a better position.
Linux is a joy to use. Self hosting is easy as hell, with an abundance of tools and applications available. You can buy old refurbished machines that are still pretty amazing home servers for cheap.
Hell, even AI help with that. It's pretty good at making scripts and detailing step-by-step what you need to to get things running.
I had to restore my son's desktop PC last night from a USB stick. It didn't even have drivers for graphics over 800x600 or the wifi card. I was flabbergasted. It's windows 11, 2026, a 6-month old PC. I genuinely don't know how someone could sell something this awful with a straight face.
Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.
Faster than OS/2, sure. Now try to download a file in the background while doing work in the foreground. You would be lucky if your Windows 3.1 communications application could complete it without multiple retries.
The two operating systems were trying to solve different problems, and had different system requirements because of that. Windows 3.1 was fine for running multiple interactive applications since neither application would be doing real work in the background. When Windows 95 entered the picture, that changed and its system requirements weren't all that different from OS/2.
And that is just one example. Windows 3.1 didn't provide much in the way of memory protection. (From my recollections, it could detect a memory access violation. At that point it would blue screen.) One of OS/2's most noteworthy features was memory protection. All of a sudden you could use your computer for an entire day without losing work from crashing. Yeah, OS/2 would happily terminate an application (rather than the OS) when there was a memory access violation. On the other hand, it made it much easier for developers to detect and address such bugs.
On that last point: I have fond memories of bringing OS/2 boot disks to my high school programming classes after the upgrade to Windows 95 (and, when they started refusing to let me boot OS/2, they let me use the NT server). There was a world of difference between programming under OS/2 or NT verses Windows 95. No one bothered to try programming under Windows 3.1!
> No one bothered to try programming under Windows 3.1!
VB and Windows 3.11 paid for my first home. I wouldn’t enjoy programming in C in Windows though, and, IIRC, it was a while before Microsoft’s C tooling got a Windows version.
I should have said: no one in my programming class bothered to program under Windows 3.1. Clearly there were people out there writing software for Windows 3.1, and I have heard that VisualBASIC was a nice development platform for Windows 3.1.
I'm not sure what the C situation was like for Windows 3.1. I did have Borland C++ and fiddled around with the Windows IDE a bit, but never recalled making any progress.
3.1 was still nice compared to its main competitor, which was MacOS 7. Only the richest kids would be running things like Solaris, SCO, and other preemptive multitasking systems because memory demands were high and memory was very expensive.
Also, Windows 3 would run on 286 computers (as would OS/2), which made the barrier of entry very low. I started running it on a 286 with a Hercules adapter.
This all pre-dates AI. It's response to market forces and revenue growth.
With the rise of Linux and ChromeOS the operating system is becoming a free commodity. Applications with real revenue are becoming web bound, google here as shown the way. Google's productivity software is a major threat to Microsoft. Here there is monthly recurring revenue.
There is no significant profit left in producing the operating systems. It is a necessity, sure, but it's not offering a USP. It just is.
So, the corporate thinking goes, switch investment into monthly paying applications, like Office 365. Reduce the investment in the OS, while using the established user base as a way to push new customers toward the online services Microsoft provides. Sure, MS can extend it to ARM, but this is because they are chasing the Chrome OS users.
Of course, Windows, like MacOS can still host "native" applications like desktop versions of office, or adobe products. But the real revenue is in the online monthly subscriptions. Games will fall into this section too.
In the end to the user, Windows becomes just like Chrome OS, a launch pad into online services.
Valve seeks the direction of travel and creates it's own OS designed to launch games and drive users to its store... it's the same story, and play book.
For developers, and creatives, the only home left is Linux (and maybe *BSD). This is acknowledged, as both Windows and MacOS can now run Linux applications via WSL and Apple Containers. Why? = because this helps developers create applications that can be hosted in the cloud... something that has recurring revenue.
AI? - Well, it's a possible accelerator down this path, as the hardware needed to host the inference is huge.
So what's going to happen in the future? - Well, the cost of AI is a limiting factor. Add in the political moves between China, the US and the EU are going to limit the growth of US owned cloud. Digital sovereignty is key, and the US government can get access to anything held on US owned servers. China is moving forward with plans to remove US technology from its ecosystem.
The result, well, AI does offer great productivity gains with costs so high, and latency of online services, tasks specific small models will be pushed to the desktop. Laptop and hardware manufacturers will add accelerators for this. In the EU there will be new opportunities for competitors to Microsoft / Google to stand up solutions, open source will be key to this, so NextCloud, will be popular. But overall there will be a pull away from the very thin client toward a slightly thicker client. The EU will probably want to sponsor, or help create a version of an AI agent similar to DeepSeek in China, they've shown what's possible with a smaller budget.
This won't run on Windows, or MacOS, it's all going to end up running on Linux. A Linux disto from China, and one for the EU.
Even Linus Torvalds himself acknowledges they have done some outstanding pieces of software (and I wholeheartedly agree with every word he says on this clip - it's absolutely on point about this thread's topic).
Their hardware, however, was always top-notch. It's really a shame they divested from it almost completely. I'm getting a Logitech ergo keyboard because Microsoft no longer makes them.
Pretty sure it's just that Windows is horribly broken, privacy-invading, ad-ridden malware disguised as an operating system. I swear it seems like nobody at Microsoft not even once have asked the actual users for what they would like to see in the OS.
The video takes this one step further, and it has nothing to do with being 'out of touch' or something. The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to. Then it can track, tune and control everything we do, thanks to all the telemetry back and forth.
I wish people would engage with the content a bit. It's a huge claim (and scary).
> The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to.
This trend is not even limited to Windows.
We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
I don't know, I think a simpler explanation for Google's behavior is that monopolies act like monopolies. Combating spam and SEO junk is hard and expensive. Once they became synonymous with web search for most people they gradually cared less and less about product quality. If people will keep using the product no matter how bad the results get and how many ads get jammed in it's hard for a corporation like that to care.
Possibly, but it makes more sense when viewed through the lens of "Google is an advertising company" rather than a search company.
Also, it's not like Google went on autopilot and pursued nothing in recent years. Clearly they've dedicated resources to AI, so it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired, all the while making it appear as a choice the user was making.
Google famously solved the search problem and the spam problem, and technology has only gotten more capable since then. Suggesting that blogspam etc are too difficult to defeat is a tough sell imo.
> it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired
I find that very hard to believe because it implies a level of foresight that we have not observed from Google. The notion that they degraded their own search on purpose for years to funnel people to AI seems very implausible, especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI, and that level of foresight would also imply that they should have beaten OpenAI to the punch instead of reacting to ChatGPT.
> especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI
This would be a calculated financial bet on their part. This kind of risk taking is not limited to SV startups.
I realize companies under late stage capitalism aren't typically known for having foresight past one quarter, but that doesn't mean some of them can't have somebody optimizing for the long-term in a financial sense.
It's seems premature to rule this possibility out entirely.
Occam‘s razor says prefer the simpler explanation.
It is possible that Google as an organization had enough foresight to see that search would eventually be eaten by AI chat bots and so intentionally degraded the experience of search to encourage movement in that direction. And also that Google was too dumb to actually ship their chat bot first and capitalized on their choice to sabotage search.
It seems a lot more likely that the the decline in the quality of search is due to a combination of hyper-optimization for revenue and difficulty combating large scale spam farms.
These things are not mutually exclusive.
Your thesis would seem to be that Google is playing some 4D chess, but also kind of sucks at it. I mean, that could be the case, I guess.
No it isn't. Try again.
> We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
So Google ruined search so they could give their market share to ChatGPT. 4D chess. Maybe 5D even.
If you have some explanation for how doing this makes any sense at all, please share. But I think you’re basically engaging in conspiracy theory by claiming Google intentionally reduced the quality of search to drive AI adoption.
It's not that hard to synthesize how business leadership would both optimize for the present of the pre-AI era while also continually refining their strategy as AI became clearer on the horizon.
You're jumping through hoops when this really isn't that complicated or far fetched in a business sense.
It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It is extremely farfetched because it would provide no present or future advantage to Google to do so. If they hypothetically wanted to intentionally degrade their search, they could always do that when they are ready for the switch to AI.
> It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It literally does though.
Furthermore, even if you reject that, in practice it could be as simple as Google funneling resources from maintaining search (which is obviously a never ending game of cat-and-mouse between forces of SEO, etc) to AI prospects, which would have the same outcome: neglect leads to degradation and dysfunction, and it makes their new venture more appealing. They obviously have enough capital to play such a game in the short-term and eat whatever loss necessary during the transition.
Google is well known by now for abandoning their products in favor of what they deem to be the Next Thing.
Seeing people use chatGPT to write words they themselves don't even understand is terrifying.
No, Windows was broken before AI
Microsoft has a handful big clients - Dell, Lenovo, HP being the top three. They are the ones that make Windows be the default operating system on everyone's computers and they need to be happy, not the person who buys the computer. When the computer becomes unusable, they'll just get another from the same brands and everyone, except the user, are happy.
Corporations don't run Windows. They run Outlook, Excel, and Teams. Windows and generic PCs (or thin clients and VDIs) is just the cheapest way to achieve that goal.
Corpos definitely run Windows. There are many highly technical people and advanced software that need Windows. Not every company employee is just a pencil pusher or bean counter.
This myopia in tech is so baffling to me. Windows has been around over 40 years and tech people still act like it will go away “any day now” just because they don’t like it.
Corporations will continue using Windows the same way they'll continue using mainframes (at least mainframes are interesting machines). If Dell, HP and Lenovo decide tomorrow to ship all laptops with Fedora by default, very few people will install Windows. Or notice it's a different OS. They'll just think that Windows 12 no longer has ads.
Corporations will continue to corporate. Active Directory is a powerful thing. SharePoint is another dependency that's hard to get rid of, even more so when it becomes the file server where all Office content is stored.
I have been waiting for this day since the move to SFF and thin clients. They've been threatening to do all compute in the cloud... at which point the OS, local or otherwise becomes irrelevant.
In fact, the thin client that drives my desk at [company] runs Linux with the Citrix client to connect to a VDI that exists somewhere in a datacenter we own, because regulations.
> They are the ones that make Windows be the default operating system on everyone's computers
I've got to disagree. Macs are a fantastic option as long as the software needed to do actual work is available. That's the real bottleneck and it's not something Dell, Lenovo, or HP have any power over.
They still ship a lot more computers than Apple. For most of the world, Apple is a niche product. I use it, and I love them, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking corporations will start buying Mac Minis to replace their desktops and thin clients anytime soon.
I am not fooling myself and I do not care what corporations would or would not do - I simply state that the reason there is such a pressure to use Windows is not due to Dell and other providers, but software providers - mainly Microsoft.
That… does not follow. Corporations simply aren't going to start buying Macs for all of their millions of rank-and-file corporate drones. Even if they wanted, and they don't, they're tied to the Windows ecosystem in all sorts of ways, even though the software lives on someone else's computer these days.
Thanks for saying the same thing I have said? Do people even read before they post? Seems like the moment Apple is mentioned some folks just turn on a downvote + disagree autopilot, even when they agree?
Nah. I think the problem is that windows and macOS did everything users wanted them to do about 10-15 years ago. Everything since then has been lipstick on a pig.
If windows were a building, they need to stop tacking on more rooms like it’s a gaudy McMansion. If they really wanna keep working on it, work to make what’s already there more beautiful. Optimise. Reduce the install size. Clean up some of the decades of tech debt. Unify the different generations of UI toolkits. Write documentation. Port security critical parts to rust, where appropriate. Refine, don’t reinvent.
> did everything users wanted them to do about 10-15 years ago.
Certainly not; not by a long shot. Besides, most users don't even understand the potential of software. But why bother improving it if you still make money shipping crap?
Like what? What important user facing features were shipped in the last 10 years in windows or macOS?
I agree, I've been amazed watching people release after release upgrading to newer versions of Windows and office, when what they used them for functionally didnt change. I could never make sense of how people didnt see it for what it is, and accepted the continuous costs. But hey, I guess that's capitalism, and people are captured by it. If it has a new shine, and everyone else is doing it, let's all jump over the cliff's edge.
and it made the pig actually uglier!
Microsoft is declaring all users are now corporate drones. All your activity will be tied to your Microsoft account. All your files, images, and regular screenshots of your PC will be sucked into OneDrive. If your mouse has not moved in five minutes a manager will be notified.
"I swear it seems like nobody at Microsoft no even once have asked actual users for what they would like to see in the OS."
Why would they want to do that (serious question, think about it)
Users want a one time payment of $150, for a 50 million LoC software product, and then get 10 years of support.
Everyone here slinging mud, while getting paid out of the SaaS pot. Would windows be a better product if it was user focused but cost $40/mo? From Microsoft's POV it would probably kill numbers.
There are more than 10x more users than lines of code
Two wrongs don’t make a right. What matters is being upfront and transparent. Microsoft could just have said the initial license is just that. If you want updates be prepared to pay.
And to add to this, proprietary OSs are about to get worse and can blame the politicians for it.
With these new age laws, these systems can legally ask for personal information, and I am sure as time goes, information required will expand.
As for Linux, seems systemd is all in on this, as for the BSDs, I doubt they will enforce these new laws.
You can lie when it requests for personal information.
I always identify myself as "Conan, The Barbarian" when creating account.
why I should be the one bothering with that though? and what happens when it starts requiring internet connection and biometric age verification?
In a couple years you won't have to bother with that. The device will connect to the ID chip embedded in your body when you're born. And this will be a one-time hard-wired coupling for that device when it is first turned on.
Are you claiming Linux is becoming always online?
That's one hell of a claim.
if it is governmently mandated that it is, it might become, at least the user facing distros.
The nature of Linux makes this pretty much impossible.
Say Ubuntu ships with some package for identity validation bullshit. What stops anyone from repackaging it and offering it without those packages?
A bit of a tangent, but your worst case answer here is the culmination of all the secure boot and remote attestation concepts.
What would stop it is a combination of not being able to buy new hardware that will even boot the modified kernel, and not being able to get vintage hardware to connect to any public ISP etc. due to being unable to attest its validated boot chain information, signed by a required modern hardware OEM key.
So you would be stuck in some kind of underworld of vintage folks attempting mesh networking between themselves. Then, because of basic market forces/economics, there will be a dwindling amount of software that is able to run in such environments. It will become the esoteric realm of old-school hobbyists who don't need to run any commercial apps which require ABI/API features of the modern commercial OSs which require this boot chain of the modern commercial hardware, etc.
They might force the Linux kernel to add a value 'age' to the couple username/password. Although in Europe OSS is exempt from age verification obligation.
of cource you can, but in the future ? Maybe you will be required to upload an ID.
Is it too optimistic to hope that sanity will prevail and users will get treated with respect?
Actual users are less important to Microsoft than execs who actually purchase the licenses.
Used to be that people who bought the OS were the customer. Now just like everything else these days, they're the product. And the OS still isn't even free.
Plus it's hard to buy a computer without paying the MS tax, unless you build one yourself.
That's an issue I would like to see legislated! In fact, in my country there is a law that prohibits bundled purchases: it's just that the authorities are not tech savvy enough to see it when it pertains to computers and Windows.
While we're at it, lets stop bundling UEFI.
I'm being slightly absurd here since you need some sort of firmware to simply start up the computer and install an operating system, but here is my point: to most people, the operating system is part of the computer. The computer is simply an expensive brick without it. On top of that, a lot of the negativity towards bundling Windows originates from Microsoft's past monopolistic practices[1]. We certainly don't hear many people criticizing the bundling of macOS or iOS on Apple products or Android/Chrome OS on Android devices or Chromebooks. (There may be people who want to load alternative operating systems on these devices, but that is different from criticizing the bundling of the OS.)
[1] Is Microsoft forcing hardware vendors to install Windows even a thing these days?
It makes sense, if manufacturer provides support for Linux on the same laptop SKU. But that's very rarely the case. So selling laptop without OS seems like selling half-working product. When you're buying a car, it comes with a lot of software. ECU software, multimedia software (sometimes it's Windows CE) and so on.
I saw laptops selling with FreeDOS but realistically speaking I think that majority of these laptops end up with pirated Windows, so all it provides is increasing level of piracy.
Ideally laptop should provide a choice between Linux and Windows on the first boot. And easy way to buy Windows license if user chooses it.
1. There are plenty of computers sold with Linux installed.
2. You absolutely should build the computer yourself. You get a much better computer with best of class parts. And you learn something.
There are a few, but it seems that the best option is usually offered with Windows.
The last 3 machines I bought (for myself and for family members) came with Windows and I immediately installed Linux on them.
What I learned is that I am no good at building computers.
> 1. There are plenty of computers sold with Linux installed.
Compared to what?
Compared to a hypothetical world without computers with Linux preinstalled, presumably.
“Plenty” doesn’t really seem like a relative term here, but a statement that there are enough options on the market if someone wants to buy a machine with Linux preinstalled.
Windows was fiercely hated for a long time for being extremely buggy, low quality, high price, weak security (a later concern), and Microsoft’s general anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices.
Things improved slightly for a while and maybe the generation of Mac/linux using tech workers never suffered through the worst of it, but Microsoft seems to be back on track with their old ways.
Microsoft cleaned up when they got hit with antitrust and then started feeling a bit of competition when operating under consent decree. That's all "behind" them now and the Google settlement put antitrust to bed.
With Windows 10, I thought MS had turned a corner. But then came Windows 11, and turning two corners means doing a 180.
A 180 would imply a different direction than the original. I’d say they did a fakie 360 faceplant.
Yah, a 180 would actually be a good thing, but I guess it depends on your reference point. Like people, the analogy breaks when tortured. I like yours better overall :)
For over three decades Microsoft offered a free planned obsolescence to PC manufacturers. Windows got heavy and slow after a couple of years and needed a hardware upgrade which generated billions of revenue and all were happy. This continues till today and is the reason that MS increases the Windows bloat and HW vendors keep installing them.
If they installed Linux, we would still have our 12 yo PC until now. The year of Linux desktop will never come due to this reason.
I strongly prefer my Linux machine but use Windows mostly so that I can run Quicken. I feel doubly trapped: can't get off Quicken and thus can't get off Windows.
I'm only very slightly less reluctant to get an Apple machine (though the M* chips tempt me) and there will probably be incompatibilities between the versions of Quicken.
I think I should probably rip off the band-aid and migrate to:
+ spreadsheets (more control/future proof) + gnucash or similar (and risk that going unmaintained) + Wine + something I've not considered
Do you need to run Quicken locally on your PC? Can you just use the cloud version of Quicken?
At my work we use quickbooks enterprise (which is a desktop app) for some clients and another (not Intuit) online/cloud app for other clients. I have extensive experience using both. The cloud apps are slow, buggy, lacking features, immature UI/UX, and not as open.
The principal limitation of qbe is lack of multi-location support. The main advantage of cloud is the ability to provide direct access (though the role/permission models I’ve experienced have other downsides).
It’s a mixed bag, but the advantages of qbe outweigh the aggravations of windows—for now.
I was unaware that there is a cloud version and will investigate, thanks!
IIUC the cloud solution provides cloud-based storage|copies of the quicken file and accessibility through a less-functional web-based tool and Simplifi isn't compatible.
So, thanks again for the suggestion but these solutions won't work for me.
Yeah, you're right. It is astonishing that Quicken's web app does not offer the same features and functionality as the desktop version. Having worked for many years as an SRE, I would have imagined that the opposite would be true - that Quicken would want to migrate its users to its online version, precisely so that customers could use the software from any client, be it Mac, Linux, WinBlows, or whatever.
I agree and I would pay for this service!
When is gaming on the latest hardware going to be mature enough to move off this garbage operating system?
Can I play Kingdom Come II on Mint now? If not, are we moving there?
Ooof, you're way behind - see sibling comments. Come join us in the promised land, brother!
KCD2 works fine on Linux.
Bro, I played KCD2 on Ubuntu the day it launched last year. The games themselves are basically a solved problem and have been for a while now. Multiplayer games with anti cheat are the sticking point now, with only a little bit of progress there.
- work is still ongoing to get performance of direct x 12 games on NVIDIA closer to that of windows.
Nvidia is indeed what holds me back. If not for that id be much happier (even though I'll end up with Wayland/KDE, with its quite revolting quirks)
Thanks to valve its possible to play many games on linux
I use a SteamOS distribution for all my gaming, Bazzite. KCD2 works perfectly. The only game I haven't tried to get running yet is Star Citizen.
Big tech apologists: “while I used to enjoy playing Starcraft on Windows XP, it’s become clear that computing is no longer ‘personal’ and society needs some guardrails around it. I’m okay with sacrificing some liberties to protect the children.”
Personal responsibility is dead in Silicon Valley.
Honestly those people can buy an Apple device. Got my mother one- just email and a web browser.
(But I have to give MS credit: you can still disable BitLocker and their ridiculous smart screen. I am using my PC the same way I've always used it).
The way I see it, there is very little creativity in big business. Fund an interesting new concept, or fund a formulaic sequel? Same thing every time.
So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smartphones and think: We must do as they do. And thus S3 suspend gets replaced by "modern suspend" - just like a smartphone, not really suspended, just in a low power, always online, always ready to act mode. And local storage gets replaced by cloud, and local accounts get replaced by cloud accounts, and the cloud reaches in and modifies features and apps. Does this really make sense? Does it matter? Smartphones blazed the way and are successful. Must copy the formula, of your device just being an extension to the cloud, nothing more.
I sit here in front of my old school Linux machine, with terabytes of local storage and as little cloud dependency as possible. Heck it's part of the cloud itself, hosting an ancient cobwebsite right here from the basement. But I feel increasingly like an anachronism. Want to pass a photo dump to computer-neurotypicals? Not even a USB stick will do. Not even a USB-C stick that will plug right into their smartphone and allow the pix to be copied off easily from its UI. The whole concept of non-cloud stuff has become alien to most people.
Don't even get me started about getting photos from them! Anyway if that's how the world works now, why would anyone bother making a traditional operating system any more?
The last line was really good. I may have differing opinions on some specifics but I loved this line: "The personal computer movement was about empowerment not dependency"
TL;DW: the exploding hate is due to Windows transitioning into a fully cloud-first OS.
Which is exactly what the entire market is doing- except for Linux but come on that OS will never be relevant.
Nobody passionately hates Chromebooks.
I really dislike the “expiration” date, and at one point they were very short (5 years) and poorly documented so it was a nasty surprise if you got an older model on sale.
I recently helped liberate 70 Chromebooks that were going to recycling. Now students get a Linux laptop for free.
I'm absolutely sure there are people who do. Chromebooks just have a practically nonexistant market share compared to Windows, and a lot of those users being kids being issued school laptops probably doesn't translate to a lot of visible complaining about Chromebook-specific problems.
What? I passionately hate Chromebooks, firstly because they were conceived as a power grab by Google to get people to do everything through online Google services instead of locally, and secondly in a more personal way when I actually had to use one, in a remote hostel with ropey internet.
You hate Google. I don't like them, but they are OK computers that lack some important keys. Lacking a Meta key makes using Gnome less convenient.
You are not forced to use Gmail or Google Docs. You are mostly forced to use a browser, unless you jailbreak it.
I don’t think I have ever spent over $100 on a Chromebook. I can’t imagine putting serious money in one; it’s a toy/disposable computer.
I do
I respect you. It's very hard to be passionate about something as bland as a Chromebook. It's like being passionate about tofu, or toothpaste, or baby shampoo.
Me too
I recently helped liberate about 70 EOL'ed Chromebooks. Now students in a college near me will get free laptops they can actually use for college work, running the latest and greatest Linux distros.
Oh well that's a different matter. Nobody hates acceptable cheap hardware.
Oh I thought it was a very dodgy process. Can you give some pointers? I will also ask an LLM?
Here you go
https://mrchromebox.tech/
This was it. It involved dismantling the machine, removing a screw, and some other maneuvers.
Depends on the Chromebook. Some use a screw as a write protect jumper, some do not.
Agreed. This was, so far, my worst experience with liberation of locked down machines. It’s fun that it scaled to that many units.
SusyQ USB-C Cable + USB-A to USB-C Cable + Coreboot?
Recently liberated a Chromebook that powerwashed my hours of manual provisioning again due to remote login control failure FWICS
Can't believe how much faster the same machine is with a modern Linux distro.
(ChromiumOS was originally Gnome and Chrome on a Gentoo derivative by Linux workstation users, but now has a "Turn on Linux" button greyed out for all the kids.)
Mrchromebox > Supported Devices: https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html
It's possible to install a list of apps with a script on Win, Mac, and Linux computers.
Try to `adb install com.google.android.calculator`.
Which should be the security priority? App download counts or automated provisioning?
But Microsoft says that it's ok: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
I still don't understand all of the hate. In my eyes Windows has never been more capable and stable.
- Windows Terminal is actually pretty dang good
- There's actually a package manager built in now with WinGet
- Hyper-V comes with pro and is incredibly powerful
- While WSL2 isn't great at times, it does fill in a lot of gaps and working with Docker is pretty seamless
- Ever since Windows Defender became standard, cleaning up relative's machines has basically turned into disabling some startup apps and removing spyware-like browser extensions
- With 11 the UI actually feels reasonably consistent for the first time in a long while. There's still some core applications that need a rewrite (Disk Management, Format, RegEdit, Device Manager, Event Viewer), but it feels like real progression when compared to 8/8.1 or 10
- Backwards compatibility is quite simply unmatched
There's some areas that have regressed or have been omitted for _some reason_:
- If you're going to push Microsoft 365 family subscriptions, I never want to have to download TeamViewer, AnyDesk, etc. Give me some capable remote assistance tool. It's obvious this is ignored so they don't piss off partners.
- NTP synchronization shouldn't be behind the location access permission. I understand why it is, but then make location access more granular.
- Disk performance could be much better
- NTFS is so antiquated. It's time for another filesystem. I want native overlay support, checksumming, not-ass permissions (though tbf nobody gets this right)
- Windows + D is just a key shift to the right from ctrl C so I hit it all the time. It would be less infuriating if hitting it again actually put all of the windows in their previous state / stacking order.
- I usually sign in with my Microsoft account when I setup my PC, but ffs let me create a local user. If you want to put signing into my Microsoft account in my face, do it at first login not at first setup.
Most of those benefits were available in Windows 10, with less of the pain and shortcomings of Windows 11.
I like that list, and appreciate those items. I run Windows... begrudgingly 11.
But why can't I have the above without...
- full screen ads for Microsoft 365 / Copilot
- inserting Copilot everywhere
- changing the UI and removing user choice, such as where you pin your task bar, how you like your start menu to work / look
- forcing your documents and desktop into OneDrive without asking and making it hard to separate them back out
Windows didn't necessarily go backwards with some of their moves, but they confidently went anti-consumer and pro-adware in quite a few of them.
EDIT: Like this... https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459296 )
While 10 got a bunch of features back ported, they've started out on 11 and I would argue many of them wouldn't have happened if they didn't learn from the mistakes of 8 and 10. Particularly when it comes to UI uniformity. As for the other complaints, I don't fully disagree, but so much of what you listed can be disabled / customized that it often doesn't affect me past OOBE.
I'm not saying Windows is infallible, but it's actually getting quite insufferable to hear nothing but the Windows hate train day in and day out as if it has no redeeming qualities and the only reason we aren't on Linux is because some game developers want nasty anti cheat/DRM measures. I think the proliferation of this is largely due in part to "Windows sucks" being an actual valid avenue of revenue for creators.
Yeah, I really like Windows 11. I'm not a developer; just an ordinary user. I guess the difference is that I fully embrace the MS ecosystem—i.e., OneDrive, M365 Family account (the storage alone is worth the cost), Power Toys, Edge (sync'd across computers), etc. It works great.
The only problem I’ve had was with a family member who refused to restart the computer. Eventually, something got corrupted. Fixing it was simple—I just reinstalled the current version of Windows. It was so much easier than in the past, when it meant reinstalling everything from scratch or reverting to a saved snapshot.
Serious (related) question: is the the state of window 'snapping' equivalent to or better than Windows 11 in any *NIX, non-tiling WM desktop environments?
Personal Computing was never in a better position.
Linux is a joy to use. Self hosting is easy as hell, with an abundance of tools and applications available. You can buy old refurbished machines that are still pretty amazing home servers for cheap.
Hell, even AI help with that. It's pretty good at making scripts and detailing step-by-step what you need to to get things running.
It is for us, the average user doesn't understand that.
Which version because I have been using it and it "functions" but it's not a joy.
I really love Fedora and GNOME. It looks nice, it's reliable, and stays out of the way. That's all I ask from an OS.
I have been on Mint for 4 years and I adore it. But I am a filthy casual, I like my OS to be pleasantly boring. Arch is not for me.
It's a genuine pleasure to use.
Microsoft's playbook: take somethign that works, add telemetry, subscriptions, and a Copilot button, then act surprised when people notice.
...for people who insist on using only Windows on their personal computer.
I had to restore my son's desktop PC last night from a USB stick. It didn't even have drivers for graphics over 800x600 or the wifi card. I was flabbergasted. It's windows 11, 2026, a 6-month old PC. I genuinely don't know how someone could sell something this awful with a straight face.
Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.
> It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had.
TBH, Windows 3.1 was reasonably nice compared to macOS 7, and much faster than OS/2 or Solaris 2.1 on the same hardware.
Faster than OS/2, sure. Now try to download a file in the background while doing work in the foreground. You would be lucky if your Windows 3.1 communications application could complete it without multiple retries.
The two operating systems were trying to solve different problems, and had different system requirements because of that. Windows 3.1 was fine for running multiple interactive applications since neither application would be doing real work in the background. When Windows 95 entered the picture, that changed and its system requirements weren't all that different from OS/2.
And that is just one example. Windows 3.1 didn't provide much in the way of memory protection. (From my recollections, it could detect a memory access violation. At that point it would blue screen.) One of OS/2's most noteworthy features was memory protection. All of a sudden you could use your computer for an entire day without losing work from crashing. Yeah, OS/2 would happily terminate an application (rather than the OS) when there was a memory access violation. On the other hand, it made it much easier for developers to detect and address such bugs.
On that last point: I have fond memories of bringing OS/2 boot disks to my high school programming classes after the upgrade to Windows 95 (and, when they started refusing to let me boot OS/2, they let me use the NT server). There was a world of difference between programming under OS/2 or NT verses Windows 95. No one bothered to try programming under Windows 3.1!
> No one bothered to try programming under Windows 3.1!
VB and Windows 3.11 paid for my first home. I wouldn’t enjoy programming in C in Windows though, and, IIRC, it was a while before Microsoft’s C tooling got a Windows version.
I should have said: no one in my programming class bothered to program under Windows 3.1. Clearly there were people out there writing software for Windows 3.1, and I have heard that VisualBASIC was a nice development platform for Windows 3.1.
I'm not sure what the C situation was like for Windows 3.1. I did have Borland C++ and fiddled around with the Windows IDE a bit, but never recalled making any progress.
Didn't MS also do OS/2 early on? Didn't they bill IBM by line of code?
I can't say much about Solaris, I used it - much later - on sparc and amd64.
I can say that I was writing 16 bit windows apps in '95, including drivers and VxDs, and Win 3.1 was a piece of garbage inside and out.
3.1 was still nice compared to its main competitor, which was MacOS 7. Only the richest kids would be running things like Solaris, SCO, and other preemptive multitasking systems because memory demands were high and memory was very expensive.
Also, Windows 3 would run on 286 computers (as would OS/2), which made the barrier of entry very low. I started running it on a 286 with a Hercules adapter.
This all pre-dates AI. It's response to market forces and revenue growth.
With the rise of Linux and ChromeOS the operating system is becoming a free commodity. Applications with real revenue are becoming web bound, google here as shown the way. Google's productivity software is a major threat to Microsoft. Here there is monthly recurring revenue.
There is no significant profit left in producing the operating systems. It is a necessity, sure, but it's not offering a USP. It just is.
So, the corporate thinking goes, switch investment into monthly paying applications, like Office 365. Reduce the investment in the OS, while using the established user base as a way to push new customers toward the online services Microsoft provides. Sure, MS can extend it to ARM, but this is because they are chasing the Chrome OS users.
Of course, Windows, like MacOS can still host "native" applications like desktop versions of office, or adobe products. But the real revenue is in the online monthly subscriptions. Games will fall into this section too.
In the end to the user, Windows becomes just like Chrome OS, a launch pad into online services.
Valve seeks the direction of travel and creates it's own OS designed to launch games and drive users to its store... it's the same story, and play book.
For developers, and creatives, the only home left is Linux (and maybe *BSD). This is acknowledged, as both Windows and MacOS can now run Linux applications via WSL and Apple Containers. Why? = because this helps developers create applications that can be hosted in the cloud... something that has recurring revenue.
AI? - Well, it's a possible accelerator down this path, as the hardware needed to host the inference is huge.
So what's going to happen in the future? - Well, the cost of AI is a limiting factor. Add in the political moves between China, the US and the EU are going to limit the growth of US owned cloud. Digital sovereignty is key, and the US government can get access to anything held on US owned servers. China is moving forward with plans to remove US technology from its ecosystem.
The result, well, AI does offer great productivity gains with costs so high, and latency of online services, tasks specific small models will be pushed to the desktop. Laptop and hardware manufacturers will add accelerators for this. In the EU there will be new opportunities for competitors to Microsoft / Google to stand up solutions, open source will be key to this, so NextCloud, will be popular. But overall there will be a pull away from the very thin client toward a slightly thicker client. The EU will probably want to sponsor, or help create a version of an AI agent similar to DeepSeek in China, they've shown what's possible with a smaller budget.
This won't run on Windows, or MacOS, it's all going to end up running on Linux. A Linux disto from China, and one for the EU.
The company never made good software
Even Linus Torvalds himself acknowledges they have done some outstanding pieces of software (and I wholeheartedly agree with every word he says on this clip - it's absolutely on point about this thread's topic).
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BS-_ur-tYPw
Their hardware, however, was always top-notch. It's really a shame they divested from it almost completely. I'm getting a Logitech ergo keyboard because Microsoft no longer makes them.