It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.
I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice
One point that wasn't mentioned is that we've been through this cycle many times before with Microsoft, and we will again.
It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft went "all in" on Windows for developers and power users. WSL was drastically improved, developer tools were revamped and open sourced. The press adored the "new" Microsoft. Many developers moved over to Windows because they "got the best of both worlds".
And then, they just went back to the same old shit. The thing is, the shit phase of this cycle lasts longer than the non-shit phases.
This next phase is just words, so far. But, mind you, even if Microsoft does produce releases to back up those words, they'll be back to their same old shit within a year or two, once again.
And the whole process will repeat.
PS: And regardless of this supposed change of direction, if you listen to recent statements from Satya and other senior leadership, they are still spewing the same platitudes about agentic computing and software. So what's really going to change long-term?
Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.
But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.
Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.
While I have many grievances with Windows 11, I am particularly upset about the taskbar. Back in Windows 10, I used a double-height taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. I forget the name of the specific setting, but all windows would appear as their own item, and, the taskbar would ensure that all items retained the same width.
The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get past not being able to at least make a double height taskbar. But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10 also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would resize all existing items to the same dimension.
This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running Windows 10.
As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows platform today.
- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;
- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.
- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.
- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements.
But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.
Unfortunately Apple is learning to be as annoying too. I don't want to upgrade to Tahoe which is inscrutable to me. Maybe remind me next year. But they pop up every week reminding me to "upgrade" even though most the problems are unfixed. They have pushed iCloud in the settings application as if it is an adboard.
Hopefully they stop but I recognize these steps from Windows slippery slope.
Just a guess, with Macbook Neo releasing, M$ likely got scared of mass exodus to MacOS (the average PC user can now consider a Macbook and it likely wipes the floor with all Windows laptops out there) and decided to throw in a damage control piece.
I bought my first x86 PC in 1994 to install Linux on. I wanted a Sun workstation but couldn't afford it.
I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like they have Stockholm Syndrome.
My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac.
When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.
Don't care about windows. Haven't used a windows computer in over 20 years. Happy Ubuntu user here. What bothers me is the upcoming Android restrictions. I distribute an app that none of the app stores want to touch with a 10 foot pole. That's fine -their store, their choice. But now, to distribute the app from my website I have to jump through hoops and pay their stupid fees through a credit card (at a time when I'm trying to stay anonymous because of the nature of the app). I don't know what to do.
The solution for "Windows" is to use the current US derangement to convince the EU, China and even the Russians that, as a matter of national security, it's in their best interest to come to the negotiation table and create an international organization that "adopts" WineHQ[^1] and any other projects that focus on a Win32 compatibility layer. It can be financed with increased sales taxes for any PC software distributor that doesn't natively support Linux.
> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions
sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?
as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.
mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.
No idea why anyone would buy a Windows machine over a mac unless in this day and age unless they can't afford one, Microsoft's OS dev philosophy has been trash for years.
Even if they fix it, and that's a big if - It doesn't really mean anything when they have a ton of MBAs and product managers working internally to make it creep back in. It's going to take a decade to grow trust again and I don't think they're up to the task.
Recently I got tired of having random changes occur to a Windows installation I use for one purpose: running X-plane. I took the drastic measure of disabling both inbound and outbound network access in Windows firewall by default and turning off most of the pre-installed rules. Then, I allowed outbound access from the things that really need it. Spurious network traffic dropped to zero and surprises are gone. If I cared more, I'd explore profiles for enabling only useful network activity in more situations, but this has been really good for my use case.
X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.
Shameless plug: My products (FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit) can filter all types of potentially unwanted traffic from your Windows PC to Microsoft cloud: namely, Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and many more — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools (e.g. various GitHub scripts) can’t achieve.
https://www.prime-expert.com/
Maybe it would be a good idea for Microsoft to split Windows into a version for business that supports all the cruft that has accumulated and is needed, and another version where they start from scratch. Something that is lightweight and respects the user. A man can dream.
Still getting MSN widget displayed, even though I turned it off.
The best was - the unremovable desktop icon for the desktop wallpapers! That's what people who love a clean desktop always wanted for.
I wish there was a better alternative for average users. It's easy to say, especially on HN, that using Linux or Windows LTSC is a way to avoid these issues (and I do.)
Has it always been a case of incentives with Microsoft?
Builders - let's build awesome stuff with great experience.
Execs - need to meet next earnings reports goals. Let's sneak a few features to help M$FT stock price at expense to our users.
Product suffers... Execs then allow builders to make the products better. Then execs step in again because they need some quick wins. Visual Studio and .NET really seemed to exemplify this a few years ago as Code was eating into Visual Studio's user base.
I for one hope ending quarterly earnings reduces patterns like this in companies.
If MS brings back normal local accounts, I'll switch back. This is insane, imagine I have bought a kitchen stove or a washing machine which requires to setup an account on some website.
I would just like to add forcing users to use bing online to search their local files to one of their cards. I think that’s the main one they missed, but it’s a good article.
I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).
I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.
Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better product. People who know they need Windows will always have the option to install it themselves.
In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.
Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.
For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.
Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.
They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!
They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.
It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.
Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.
"By October 2025, Microsoft had systematically hunted down and killed every single workaround for creating a local account, the `oobe\bypassnro` command, the BypassNRO registry toggle, the `ms-cxh:localonly` trick, even the old fake email method."
I don't know how it is for Windows 11, but for Win10, activating it is super-trivial, even without downloading some crack .exe. With that in mind, I never bought Microsoft's claim that it hates "pirates". In particular one work around that is even published on github - which is owned by Microsoft - so there is no way Microsoft does not know about it. Why does it not take that github site down?
Clearly Microsoft does not have anywhere near as much as a problem with pepole using Windows as such. I switched to Linux more than 20 years ago so I don't care much about Microsoft anymore. I do have a secondary computer run Win10. I don't see why I would want to switch to Win11 ever though - it only has drawbacks. And Win10 was already really bad. Microsoft used to be objectively better; all that trend to AI or ads, lowered the quality. It seems that corporation past a certain size, become super-lazy.
The forced telemetry and blocking local user accounts is particularly egregious. I've been running Shutup10 for over a decade now, disabling their telemetry after every update. It's outrageous that they force mt to do this.
And local accounts, all the methods required following a guide, using a hidden hotkey like shift-F10 and typing in an obscure command. Nobody did this by accident, or was coerced into it. These were sophisticated users who did not want to login to a MS account. Microsoft not only didn't care about their users' preferences, they actively fought us. It's downright offensive.
And like a battered spouse, we lived with it, we took the hits, because we wanted to play videogames. Well, now Windows is no longer required, thanks to Valve's work on WINE. And suddenly they're apologetic and conciliatory. No thanks, Microsoft.
Wait the local user account workarounds are totally gone now? I assume that means the only reason why it still works for me is because my iso is still on a previous version, good to remember…
Would rather seed 9front torrents at this point than use Windows 11 after seeing how they shoved slopware into everything immediately. Just fuck off with that noise.
And these apologies they’ve been rolling out - to whom? For what? Gabecube is going to eat their gaming market share, servers are already predominantly Linux. I’m sure they’ve got tons of enterprise customers. Fuck ‘em, they can keep them.
Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years. Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them, but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm probably leaving some stuff out.
Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.
Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.
Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.
Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.
Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.
Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.
If it starts to get better after it absolutely cannot get any worse and users start to parade their experience switching to other platforms like badges of honor, is that really a win? After so many got their time and money wasted?
I mean I guess there is no reason to care, since their main products work in a browser, powerbi users and gamers can endure anything and old people will just get their grandchildren to fix their windows.
Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely unhelpful logs, but gave up.
I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.
I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well. It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.
But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.
the funniest thing in this whole "fixing windows" campaign is that you can download "fixed" (read: not enshittified) windows TODAY instead of waiting for microsoft to deliver on these promises
reduces focus on AI, better performance, more stable updates, etc are all already here with windows 11 LTSC, why the hell would i move back to the GA release and deal with their crap?
It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate. Especially with software where they can just go flip a switch and turn off whatever feature did cross the line but keep everything they gained by inching up to the line, which seems to inevitably result in things like the condition of windows 11.
I think the only way this gets better for consumers is if customer response more often insisted further roll backs than just the last straw if a company crosses the line. The risk of losing other gains at the expense of the user should discourage companies from trying to go full on maximum extraction.
Sadly the only recent cases to achieve that level of success were the reactions to Unity’s install pricing and wizards new OGL. Mostly companies get away with “oh my bad, this final step was just an experiment, we’ve rolled it back for now” to try again later, or just toughing out the negative reception and hoping their competitors come along for the ride too so users have no choice
One point that wasn't mentioned is that we've been through this cycle many times before with Microsoft, and we will again.
It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft went "all in" on Windows for developers and power users. WSL was drastically improved, developer tools were revamped and open sourced. The press adored the "new" Microsoft. Many developers moved over to Windows because they "got the best of both worlds".
And then, they just went back to the same old shit. The thing is, the shit phase of this cycle lasts longer than the non-shit phases.
This next phase is just words, so far. But, mind you, even if Microsoft does produce releases to back up those words, they'll be back to their same old shit within a year or two, once again.
And the whole process will repeat.
PS: And regardless of this supposed change of direction, if you listen to recent statements from Satya and other senior leadership, they are still spewing the same platitudes about agentic computing and software. So what's really going to change long-term?
Microsoft lost its way much earlier than 4 years ago. It abused users at the time of Netscape wars and forcing Internet Explorer down people's throats.
But they hit an infinite gold mine with government adoption and for the last 30 years no amount of bad engineering was able to shake off government use.
Windows 11 is bad? Yes, but did you try Microsoft Teams? The only way to force Microsoft into "users matter" engineering is to get govvies off it. My 2c.
I believe they are abusing their customers but I think it's in poor taste to compare this to domestic violence.
While I have many grievances with Windows 11, I am particularly upset about the taskbar. Back in Windows 10, I used a double-height taskbar positioned at the bottom of the screen. I forget the name of the specific setting, but all windows would appear as their own item, and, the taskbar would ensure that all items retained the same width.
The taskbar in Windows 11 is a downgrade in every conceivable way. I can look past having the icons be centered and grouped by default, as that is an option that can be configured. I can't get past not being able to at least make a double height taskbar. But the biggest frustration is that Windows 11 refuses to make ungrouped items have a static width. Moreover, the width of a taskbar item will depend on the title of the window. So when I have a browser open with multiple windows the taskbar will animate the taskbar item expanding or contracting based on the title of the page I am looking at. I, personally, find this incredibly distracting, especially considering how often one visits a different page or tab while browsing. While Windows 10 also changed the size of taskbar items, it only did that when opening a new window and the taskbar was full. Even so, it would resize all existing items to the same dimension.
This became nigh intolerable for me, but thankfully, I was given permission to install a third-party taskbar and start menu replacement called Start11. I would say it gives me about 95% of the functionality I wanted back. At home, I'm still running Windows 10.
For me the worst is Microsoft Start news. I've already turned it off multiple times and it always come back.
To add insult to injury, it always displays terrible gossip, sports or far right news.
If any developer that works in MS news service is reading this message, please know that I hate you.
As I saw it, there are 4 things that lock people in the windows platform today.
- Gaming: a problem being tackled by Valve mainly, and I getting better day by day;
- Printing Services: a lot of manufacturers, specially of high end business printers only work on windows.
- Photoshop: I think many of these will eventually just fully migrate to mac.
- Excel: the rest of microsoft office is used because its in the package. But is not necessarly irreplaceable.MOst people already exchanged Outlook by the webmail (damn, outlook itself is just the webmail in a electron wrap in the new version). Word is a pain, but there are suitable open source and paid replacements. But Excel is the big one. Tons of small and big business runs on Excel, and there's simply no alternative in the market for it, with 100% compatibility. And considering the ammount of stuff running on obscure excel formulas, and excel macros, it will take a lot of time before one arrives.
Its the curse of the power user.
Pulling the emergency break promising to improve a situation will in general not build any trust unless the mea culpa also includes:
1. An analysis of what allowed the situation to get out of control to begin with
2. Systematic changes to prevent it from happening again
Otherwise you will just be in the same situation again in 3 years. And neither is included in Microsoft's messaging here.
Thanks, but no thanks. The only winning move, long-term, is to excise everything this wretched company makes from your life as vigorously as possible. It's been true 20 years ago, and it's even more true today.
Unfortunately Apple is learning to be as annoying too. I don't want to upgrade to Tahoe which is inscrutable to me. Maybe remind me next year. But they pop up every week reminding me to "upgrade" even though most the problems are unfixed. They have pushed iCloud in the settings application as if it is an adboard.
Hopefully they stop but I recognize these steps from Windows slippery slope.
Just a guess, with Macbook Neo releasing, M$ likely got scared of mass exodus to MacOS (the average PC user can now consider a Macbook and it likely wipes the floor with all Windows laptops out there) and decided to throw in a damage control piece.
I bought my first x86 PC in 1994 to install Linux on. I wanted a Sun workstation but couldn't afford it.
I know people run an operating system to run programs on so it isn't easy to switch but so many windows users make it sound like they have Stockholm Syndrome.
My advice as a Linux user of 32 years for normal people is to buy a Mac.
When I saw most of the games I play work perfectly on linux, and that emulator support is even better - I swapped my RTX3090 for 9070XT and installed Fedora 43.
Their office subscriptions are also going up in price at. Crazy rates. Giving Stiff competition to food price inflation
All because it has some AI stuff on it that I don’t want.
i am never switching off windows 10, even when it goes off completely support. if i have to i'll switch to mac instead.
Don't care about windows. Haven't used a windows computer in over 20 years. Happy Ubuntu user here. What bothers me is the upcoming Android restrictions. I distribute an app that none of the app stores want to touch with a 10 foot pole. That's fine -their store, their choice. But now, to distribute the app from my website I have to jump through hoops and pay their stupid fees through a credit card (at a time when I'm trying to stay anonymous because of the nature of the app). I don't know what to do.
The solution for "Windows" is to use the current US derangement to convince the EU, China and even the Russians that, as a matter of national security, it's in their best interest to come to the negotiation table and create an international organization that "adopts" WineHQ[^1] and any other projects that focus on a Win32 compatibility layer. It can be financed with increased sales taxes for any PC software distributor that doesn't natively support Linux.
[^1]: https://www.winehq.org/
I think we need to be a bit more careful and considerate around the use of language around physical abuse, or abuse in general, and using software.
Saying that here as someone that isn't fond of the Windows experience these days, but the two are not relatable.
> injected advertisements into the Windows 11 Start menu's "Recommended" section. These showed up labeled "Promoted" and pushed apps like Opera browser and some password manager nobody asked for. And the Start menu was just one surface, they also placed ads on the lock screen, in the Settings homepage hawking Game Pass subscriptions
sorry, I have never seen these supposed ads in win11. the lock screen does display icons for things like local events and weather, but i consider them useful at best, and innocuous at worst - it's not like i spend much time in the lock screen. i have never seen an ad in the start menu or settings.
am i specially blessed, or is there a bit of (wrong) groupthink going on here?
as for microsoft accounts, i find having one (i have 365 subscription) more useful than not. day to day it doesn't irritate me at all, because i never see it.
mostly, i find win11 pretty good - its fast, smooth and the UI is about as good as UIs get.
No idea why anyone would buy a Windows machine over a mac unless in this day and age unless they can't afford one, Microsoft's OS dev philosophy has been trash for years.
Replaced all our windows machines with mac silicon and linux 6 months ago. No one is going back no matter what they do now.
Even if they fix it, and that's a big if - It doesn't really mean anything when they have a ton of MBAs and product managers working internally to make it creep back in. It's going to take a decade to grow trust again and I don't think they're up to the task.
Recently I got tired of having random changes occur to a Windows installation I use for one purpose: running X-plane. I took the drastic measure of disabling both inbound and outbound network access in Windows firewall by default and turning off most of the pre-installed rules. Then, I allowed outbound access from the things that really need it. Spurious network traffic dropped to zero and surprises are gone. If I cared more, I'd explore profiles for enabling only useful network activity in more situations, but this has been really good for my use case.
X-Plane runs on Linux but my simulator devices do not work as well. So I keep Linux for work, Windows for flight.
Shameless plug: My products (FlashBoot and Emergency Boot Kit) can filter all types of potentially unwanted traffic from your Windows PC to Microsoft cloud: namely, Telemetry, Windows Updates, OneDrive, builtin advertisements, tracking of your location and many more — making Windows 10/11 completely quiet online — something competitor’s tools (e.g. various GitHub scripts) can’t achieve. https://www.prime-expert.com/
The pattern is pretty familiar at this point:
1. Ship something user-hostile 2. Wait for backlash 3. Roll it back partially 4. Get credit for "listening"
Love the quiz at the end
It's remarkable that computer users are paying $139 to give data to Microsoft through an ad-supported "operating system"
Back in the day (generally) only OEMs paid
What is the $139 for
This follows the standard windows pattern of every release alternating between bad/good.
98 good
ME bad
XP good
Vista bad
7 good
8 bad
10 good
11 bad
When 12 comes windows will be tolerable again.
Maybe it would be a good idea for Microsoft to split Windows into a version for business that supports all the cruft that has accumulated and is needed, and another version where they start from scratch. Something that is lightweight and respects the user. A man can dream.
Are we pushing sambent.com now?
Sometimes I wonder what Operating Systems do nowadays that they didn't do 15 years ago that requires so many resources.
Sorry Pavan, I'm happier with Fedora Atomic and Bazzite now.
Still getting MSN widget displayed, even though I turned it off. The best was - the unremovable desktop icon for the desktop wallpapers! That's what people who love a clean desktop always wanted for.
Don't worry, they'll just destroy any goodwill they tried to claw back with these 'fixes' in following releases.
They absolutely can't help themselves but make their product more and more user hostile.
I have to be honest. The idea that Microsoft is even admitting that their products are less than perfect is a step in the right direction.
A step on a thousand-mile journey, perhaps, but it's a step.
So will I be able to upgrade my old computer without a Trusted Platform Module 2?
I wish there was a better alternative for average users. It's easy to say, especially on HN, that using Linux or Windows LTSC is a way to avoid these issues (and I do.)
Also, who is paying for Windows in 2026?
Domestic violence analogies for computing....really gross. I wouldn't hire or work with 'Sam Bent'.
Thanks for the curated and well described list!
Has it always been a case of incentives with Microsoft?
Builders - let's build awesome stuff with great experience.
Execs - need to meet next earnings reports goals. Let's sneak a few features to help M$FT stock price at expense to our users.
Product suffers... Execs then allow builders to make the products better. Then execs step in again because they need some quick wins. Visual Studio and .NET really seemed to exemplify this a few years ago as Code was eating into Visual Studio's user base.
I for one hope ending quarterly earnings reduces patterns like this in companies.
If MS brings back normal local accounts, I'll switch back. This is insane, imagine I have bought a kitchen stove or a washing machine which requires to setup an account on some website.
I would just like to add forcing users to use bing online to search their local files to one of their cards. I think that’s the main one they missed, but it’s a good article.
I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).
I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.
Microsoft should be scared about the Macbook Neo. They're going to lose a good chunk of the market because of it.
I had enough of Windows 11's ads that I bought a Mac mini for personal use and requested a Macbook to replace my Windows laptop.
I will have to use Teams and Outlook at work because I don't have a choice. But that's it Microsoft.
Windows 11 should run on ANY PC.
I am customer and I absolutely hate it that they have restricted the machine that Windows can run on.
If they don't fix this sort of anti customer garbage then all their words are pure horseshit.
Desktop and laptop sellers need to end their abusive business relationship with Microsoft, and start selling systems with a Linux distribution. They'll save costs while selling a better product. People who know they need Windows will always have the option to install it themselves.
Finally they realizing the power of linux is cannot be taken for granted
Don't you ever complain about that regulation which will require [x] on window corner to cancel-close.
In the end this kind of thing always comes down to trust and choices. Microsoft has by its choices and actions lost the trust of many of its customers. Some of those customers did not have a viable alternative available and so had to accept whatever Microsoft was offering even if they didn't really like it. For those who have had viable alternatives some will have chosen them and presumably will continue to do so. With the shift towards using online services at work and the decreasing reliance on desktop applications more of Microsoft's customers are probably finding they do have viable alternatives.
Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.
For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.
'Microsoft was entering a mode called "swarming",'
Swarming, as in locusts, or else flies on shit.
Every product manager at the company in the Windows and MS office products divisions need fired.
They have made so many unforced errors in recent years its hard to imagine serious people currently inhabit those roles.
Office.com, the cornerstone of Office, is now just a prompt. A prompt!!!!
They make it near impossible to manage a small/medium sized company with the unending tweaking, moving, and rebranding of every single portal in that product.
It's absolutely wild that a company as big and important to the business world as they are is playing this fast and loose. I'm quite frankly embarrassed for them.
microslop isn't going to fix anything. Action matters more than talks.
Why are there so many "slop" animations in this article? They don't actually provide anything useful over the already explained text, and the "click to restart" is incredibly distracting.
Side note but is this page not optimised for mobile at all or is it just me?
Either way, it's too little too late for me. I'll be trying to get into Linux again after Windows 8 times cause I've had it with Win11.
"By October 2025, Microsoft had systematically hunted down and killed every single workaround for creating a local account, the `oobe\bypassnro` command, the BypassNRO registry toggle, the `ms-cxh:localonly` trick, even the old fake email method."
I don't know how it is for Windows 11, but for Win10, activating it is super-trivial, even without downloading some crack .exe. With that in mind, I never bought Microsoft's claim that it hates "pirates". In particular one work around that is even published on github - which is owned by Microsoft - so there is no way Microsoft does not know about it. Why does it not take that github site down?
Clearly Microsoft does not have anywhere near as much as a problem with pepole using Windows as such. I switched to Linux more than 20 years ago so I don't care much about Microsoft anymore. I do have a secondary computer run Win10. I don't see why I would want to switch to Win11 ever though - it only has drawbacks. And Win10 was already really bad. Microsoft used to be objectively better; all that trend to AI or ads, lowered the quality. It seems that corporation past a certain size, become super-lazy.
What an incredibly well-written article.
The forced telemetry and blocking local user accounts is particularly egregious. I've been running Shutup10 for over a decade now, disabling their telemetry after every update. It's outrageous that they force mt to do this.
And local accounts, all the methods required following a guide, using a hidden hotkey like shift-F10 and typing in an obscure command. Nobody did this by accident, or was coerced into it. These were sophisticated users who did not want to login to a MS account. Microsoft not only didn't care about their users' preferences, they actively fought us. It's downright offensive.
And like a battered spouse, we lived with it, we took the hits, because we wanted to play videogames. Well, now Windows is no longer required, thanks to Valve's work on WINE. And suddenly they're apologetic and conciliatory. No thanks, Microsoft.
Wait the local user account workarounds are totally gone now? I assume that means the only reason why it still works for me is because my iso is still on a previous version, good to remember…
Would rather seed 9front torrents at this point than use Windows 11 after seeing how they shoved slopware into everything immediately. Just fuck off with that noise.
And these apologies they’ve been rolling out - to whom? For what? Gabecube is going to eat their gaming market share, servers are already predominantly Linux. I’m sure they’ve got tons of enterprise customers. Fuck ‘em, they can keep them.
Until they talk about being able to remove Edge, they aren't serious.
Thus begins the next phase of their neverending cycle. They do this same shit every 10 years or so. This has to be what, the third or fourth time?
Today's reminder of how old I'm getting: this is totally predictable. Microsoft has been doing this for 30 years. Disclaimer: I'm aware of these things and have used most of them, but really none as a daily driver since Windows 2000. So I'm probably leaving some stuff out.
Windows 95 and 98 were great releases. Windows ME was so bad they scrapped the Win9x codebase entirely.
Windows 2000 was game-changing. One of the best OS releases of all time. Windows XP was very successful as well (although I, and many others, despised its default theme). Windows Vista was monumentally bad.
Windows 7 was the release they HAD to get right and they did.
Windows 8 was Vista all over again. Everyone hated it. The iPad had just come out and everyone lost their minds trying to develop some kind of convergence UX where everybody was convinced modal/tablet was the future. The OSS guys got into it to: Unity Desktop and GNOME3 went in the same direction. In fact GNOME is still like this.
Windows 10 unwound the experiments again and took us back to the good old Start Menu.
Windows 11, from a UI perspective, at least still feels like Windows. I get the annoyances though.
If it starts to get better after it absolutely cannot get any worse and users start to parade their experience switching to other platforms like badges of honor, is that really a win? After so many got their time and money wasted?
I mean I guess there is no reason to care, since their main products work in a browser, powerbi users and gamers can endure anything and old people will just get their grandchildren to fix their windows.
Lucky me, I'm stuck one or two releases back. Windows Update fails every time it tries to upgrade. I wasted a couple of days trying to troubleshoot the problem, reading their completely unhelpful logs, but gave up.
I sure wish we could just have Windows 10 back. My machine was so much faster.
I mean...this is a huge company. For them to do something even mildly consumer-focused I'll take as a win.
Holy shit they crossed the line to "actually fucking evil"
Am I the only one who’s been using 11 on multiple machines for years without any issues?
Did they really fix the taskbar? I still cannot change it to either side of the screen, am i missing something?
Microsoft is on track to be judged for digital genocide.
I don't that their organisation even know how to do things well. It's not in their DNA to not fuckup their users.
But that being said, I have a good laugh at their announcement because you know they will spend money to try to make the thing nice, everything they can at their own cost, to be able to win the users back and lock them, and then they will start to fuck them up again once they feel confident enough.
the funniest thing in this whole "fixing windows" campaign is that you can download "fixed" (read: not enshittified) windows TODAY instead of waiting for microsoft to deliver on these promises
reduces focus on AI, better performance, more stable updates, etc are all already here with windows 11 LTSC, why the hell would i move back to the GA release and deal with their crap?
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These flowers smell like shit.
If you don't use Linux or MacOS yet, why?
I've never seen any adverts in Windows. Just saying.
How many of the people pearl-clutching in this thread actually use Windows?
Heartbreaking: The Worst Company You Know Just Made A Great Point