What a hot mess Windows has become. It's over, Microsoft. Give it up. Your precious hacks on top of hacks on top of half-ass fixes on top of even more hacks of half-ass fixes has finally become unfixable.
It's time to move on.
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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Are you suggesting the build a new OS from the ground up? It'd certainly be interesting
I'm frequently told that Linux is hard and you need to be a tech guru to use it, yet every week I see 1-2 articles of issues in windows you need to do some bullshit to fix, and in my own use of it I've ran into issues (especially after doing an update) that I just don't run into on Linux or MacOS.
Windows is easy, bro, you just need to run this shady PowerShell script to get rid of ads, run this random EXE from github.ru to disable telemetry, install ClassicShell to make the UI actually usable, install a million utilities for basic features (each from a separate site, of course ; the centralized Windows Store is full of malwarei), then pray sfc /scannow fixes your system after every update.
BTW, don't bother searching for a solution to your problems other than "retry, reboot, reinstall" ; even certified MS professionals don't know how anything works.
I've been on Win10 for years, never had a single problem with any update whatsoever.
Still not subjecting myself to W11 though. As soon as Win10 support ends, I'll make the switch.
I recommend setting up whatever your alternative is a little before committing to ease the transition a bit. It's different, and it's good to fall back to something else for a bit if you get frustrated.
Windows 10 had an update that notoriously broke a lot of games a while back and the only solution was to manually roll it back.
It's been the same on win 11. The only experience i have had was at work. I work closely with the updating team, and there have been a few times where things would break like printers, and we would revert the updates to stop it from going to everyone and uninstall. Sometimes, that meant a help desk guy had to go to the pc or remote in to do it manually. I've been there 19 years now, and it's happened twice?
I've had my enterprise-distro linux machines updating by cron for 22 years. I had two glitches in those 20 years, too, just like you. But in addition to my two glitches - I had to bring in one unlisted dep for cobbler and also correct the smb.conf's old format on another box - in 20 years, I also got
- out-of-the-box
- do-nothing patch runs
- trivial back-out if I needed it
And while I know your numbers are excellent, I simply haven't had to DO ANYTHING since deploying some boxes. They patch, they bounce later on a weekend if they need it ('needs-rebooting' is centralized because ALL software installs are) and I can patch while under load because linux write-locks instead of read-locking. My effort is to check 'some time later' and ensure things are working in ways nagios doesn't catch.
Printer issues? Nah. Supply thing. App not working because java/perl/python/DLLs rug-pulled a dependency? Proper packages list hard dependencies, so that cobbler thing is a bug not an expectation. Network offline? nah. Reboots? timed at 3 minute downtime (1 min before systemd), or 7 minutes if I just updated 1gb of gitlab install because it starts like a manatee.
It's really a different world; and while I've teased the heck out of my windows peers, it's a true statement.
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Same boat here.
The only issues I’ve ever personally run into with Windows are a missing driver for a software I was installing, like twice, and compatibility for gaming which was solved with admin mode and selecting a different compatibility. I’ve used Windows since 3.1
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That manual correction: installing Linux.
I manually corrected mine with Mint, 10/10, do recommend.
And yet again: install Linux. I've been a happy lojix desktop user forever 2 decades now. Linux was ready for normal users 10 years ago, it was more than ready 5 years ago, and it is definitely beyond ready today
I REALLY want to see normies "manually correct" their machines after bragging with Windows supremacy for so long
normies
bragging with Windows supremacy
I don't think that's as common as you think it is. Most Windows users see Windows as part of the computer, a tool to get the job done. As a DIY'er (basically a tool normie) I don't brag about the supremacy of my Kobalt tools, I just drill the damn hole
As far as I know a lot of Windows users are unhappy with Windows itself but can't/won't make the switch for various reasons. I don't mean them, they are usually very nice.
I mean those people who judge you for not using Windows because "Linux is crap because of drivers and updates" (as if those were uncomplicated/unproblematic on Windows) and then blame every tiny inconvenience on Linux. One dude I used to play games with topped it when they blamed my Linux distro for him experiencing lags claiming Linux was "messing with the game server" (before that they used to say "switch back to Windows" every time I encountered lags or similar).
Most users could work with Linux without problems. They are using their browser, maybe a mail client and maybe some office suite to write stuff. If you mention this on the internet, there will always be someone who shows up and complains that his personal workflow with some obscure software that powers the nuclear reactor that he is running as hobby in his home won't work with Linux.
It's kind of the same with discussions about commuting/bicycles/cars. If you're discussing that maybe more people could commute by bike, the same people will show up and complain that this would not be possible for them because they live on a remote mountain top in the scorching desert far away from civilization and it's raining every day where they live.
MS Office's lie of WYSIWYG and the idiotic requirements to follow absurdly complicated formatting guidelines and them not rendering the same from system to system or even correctly is the most brutal offender. If we used simplistic markdown without page-breaking in the GUI, there could've been no point to buy Office, but we don't, and itso hsppens I had encountered many times where some arbitrary cosmetic request like 'you can't have less than X lines per page' caused people toy with formatting or rewriting their documents... only for it showing differently on the other side >:ç Thus leading to even worse things like PDF.
It being the most used piece of office software renders the voluntary switch close to impossible.
Let's be honest: That totally is a monopolistic tactic of Microsoft and regulators would do great to force this open. Force them to release a Linux Office. Force them to really make their file format transparent so that everybody can write working parsers
I agree. They need to be either pressured or abandoned.
I feel like they would need to rewrite it completely in that case, partially because no one knows how their legacy code works and partially because it's completely broken.
Google with it's billions and a promise of more free data did great with how office formats work. They set some little limits of what user can do compared to MS Word so ending up with a broken table or whatever is harder, and they aslo strong-armed their way into adoption with their obvious mechanics of real-time collaboration.
I'm not sure about MS users coming to Linux, but their marketshare was already bled by Google. And if in some scenario Google releases their own internal XML format for these, I guess it'd work too.
If you can only do X and Y is marginally similar how easy do you think it is to switch to Y?
I have customers that are unable to handle cables I described in great detail. They are afraid. Trying to push them to do anything is hard af.
Some of them just don't want to take responsibility if they do something wrong under your instructions.
Normies don't tend to perform OS installs from slipstreamed update media.
It's more of a prison for me. I just had to buy a new Win11 machine cause the software I depend on is cutting Win10 operation this year. Sucks
- Manually insert USB drive with bootable Linux ISO of choice
- …
- Profit!
2 is usually install, using a live version of Linux kinda sucks.
Welp, guess I won't be able to fix my Windows install
Microsoftatemyface
I made the switch too! I bought a MacBook! After 40 years of MS OSes, Outlook-online and Windows 11 made me quit. And so far so good!
"Consent required for free use" I doubt this is legal in the EU.
I just copy pasted the article into the post so people can read it without having to consent
It sadly is, or at least the data protection agencies don't act against it. They only declared it illegal under the digital services act for big gatekeepers like facebook.
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That's just what I like to see from an OS developer. "We fucked it up, but dunno how to fix it..."
IMO, to keep Windows competitive with Linux they need a complete rewrite from absolute scratch. It's realistically the only way that's going to keep Microsoft on top in the long term. And they'll never do it because of how expensive it'll be.
the only way that’s going to keep Microsoft on top in the long term.
You underestimate the complacency of the masses.
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They rewrote the taskbar and Start menu for Windows 11, and left out stuff like being able to move the taskbar or even have separate taskbar items for each instance of an application. Rewriting the whole OS would be a disaster.
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My guess is that they’ll keep adding to WSL until Windows is just a legally ambiguous closed-source wrapper around Linux. They’ll make the GPL’d part so convoluted that they’re the only organization able to maintain it, which will force people to continue using their proprietary wrapper. Basically Android but for PCs.
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