"I've been a lifelong Windows user since the 90s and even MS-DOS back in the 80s, but things are changing. I've been using other operating systems more and more."
OK, that's one user. But clearly he is still using Windows. Microsoft has not "lost" him. He is just complaining. He even provides a solution re: printing for other Windows users that implies his readers are still using it, too.
"Microsoft is in a panic from the continued loss of it's user base."
Is there no need to present any evidence of this statement's veracity.
Perhaps some evidence has been published of which I am unaware.
The closest thing to info on this I've seen is statcounter's Desktop OS share. According to that Windows has actually lost 15-20% marketshare in the last 10 years. It doesn't look like linux is stealing it though, OSX and "unknown" seem to be the biggest hitters. For all I know unknown is still Windows!
Bad article. Microsoft does NOT care about users. It cares about corporate licenses and ads. It will force you to use windows at work. Imagine watching commercials 8h/day. That's the future. You can't avoid it.
Because I have to use Autodesk apps everyday I am forced to use Windows. There is not one other thing I can't do better, with a more efficient workflow on Linux. If ever there becomes a good way to run Revit on the cloud or on Wine, etc, I will throw a massive party.
Best option is just to have a second computer running Windows that you keep completely disconnected from the Internet. Then run Linux on another computer for everything else.
He's not angry that it changed, he's angry that the new settings interface doesn't let him fix the issue at all, and while he used to be able to easily access the old interface so he could fix it the old way, MS has now hidden that ability too. If not for some user-hostile magical incantation, printing would have been permanently broken. Who wouldn't be seriously annoyed with this situation? How many non-technical users would have chucked a perfectly good printer because of a poorly executed software change? The Windows control panel UI transition has been a serious boondoggle from the start.
The article doesn't specify what the issue was, neither you or I can say what the best way to fix the problem would be, if it required something specific of the old panel unable to be accessed via more appropriate or modern tooling.
Well I still need to access the good old control panel each time I long on to a new machine, since the new settings app thing still doesn't have all the regional settings.
Quite basic stuff, at least it's still available in the old control panel for now.
Every Windows user I know hates the new control panels. (I use plural because they've been trying to replace the actual good control panel basically every version of Windows since 7 and it's an incredible mess). Enterprise users put up with Windows because it's better to administrate than anything else, so taking away that stuff really is murdering windows.
I did enterprise administration of Windows boxes, ~400 seats.
We did not manually muck with control panels per station. I could not care less what the settings UIs for home installs of Windows are.
And that's the real truth, power users and these small fry IT install bases are not major markets. The most prominent markets are OEM installs for non-technical home users (who hate complex panels and love the push-button UIs), and large 3/4/5 digit enterprise installs that do not give a damn about this stuff because they're using MDT (or whatever) to deploy images to all their stations and not playing with this per-station configuration stuff.
I dunno man, with Steam on linux and most of the major game engines making porting easy (or at least moving in that direction) I have very few reasons to stick with Windows anymore. At this point it's basically Photoshop and Fusion 360, otherwise I'd abandon it completely. If they lose gamers, I think they'll have a real issue.
You're a power user unable to understand the needs of non-power users.
We all go through that stage, it's natural.
I once installed Linux on all my siblings' desktops because I had convinced my parents it would lead to "less viruses" (Fedora 13, I think, GNOME 2, those were the days). The nightmare of providing support for that over the rest of my high school years provided me with a powerful and important lesson.
You have few reasons to stick with Windows, you are a very, very tiny droplet in an ocean of users with different needs than you. Judging what such markets will do based on your personal needs is unwise.
Here's the thing though, the desktop now really is about power users or corporate users, because everyone else just uses cell phones or tablets. So ok, sure, your sales people and your secretaries probably aren't going to care about the control panel, but people that use computers outside of work are mostly going to be power users and they're starting to have options. (I can use all the software I need on macOS, and linux is rapidly getting there too)
And honestly, breaking Printers is a thing that everyone is going to care about, especially people in a workplace.
As explained above this is irrelevant to enterprise users, corpo installs don't play with per-station configuration like this or care about consumer-facing UIs, the needs of that market revolve around things like image management, deployment, and active directory administration.
You're right that the home market is shrinking though, the OEM install market is down billions in revenue and has been dropping by double digit percentages each fiscal year, but you're wrong in your assumption that the power user market is worth anything. Power users, represented by direct license installs, are a rounding error of Windows revenue. There's nothing worth fighting for there.
Convincing Mom that she should buy a Windows laptop instead of an Apple laptop is still worth ~$750M/Q, and Mom doesn't ever want to see the old Windows panels, she loves the "Add Printer" button. Convincing Timmy Q Hacker that he should buy a Windows license key instead of installing Arch Linux is worth squat.
I think you're overestimating the importance of the revenue generated and underestimating the importance of mindshare and people caring about their system. If the next generation of creators (IE, coders, designers, etc.) grow up on macOS and linux then Microsoft has a real problem down the line. The Windows monopoly has been VERY good to them, they would be foolish to lose it by angering their most passionate users even if in the short term they don't see an effect on their bottom line.
> I think you're overestimating the importance of the revenue generated
It is literally impossible to do this. Revenue is the only thing that matters when measuring markets. If it doesn't affect the bottom line, it does not matter.
Passion does not sell OEM installs or license keys. Creators and hackers didn't buy MS products in appreciable numbers to begin with (compared to consumer and enterprise markets), so to the degree MS can be said to be losing them, MS does not care. If moms and humanities majors stopped buying laptops entirely and that $750M/Q dropped to the ~$1M/Q the power users drive, MS would probably pull out of the OEM license market.
This is a very different mindset about how businesses operate than you seem to share, which is fine, I'm explaining it not trying to convert you to it.
You are certainly right about revenue. You say you are in enterprise IT, I used to be there. I actually built and was responsible for the IT of one of the few larger "Linux only" enterprises in the mid-2010s in Germany (like you said, Fedora and Gnome2. Ubuntu and Gnome2 for us). When I left we were talking about a 1000 seats. Needless to say, it worked mostly flawless. Yet we always had the same "battle" with new joiners, unfamiliar work environments. We had to move accounting (20 seats) to MS Windows so that accountants would come to work for us. No matter that the 20 seats caused three times the support compared to the Linux seats, no accounting is still worse ;)
Anyhow, that's what Microsoft is abandoning. Familiarity. If young people do not learn MS Windows and MS Office during school or at home, the grip on the enterprise will vanish. We already see it in tech-oriented departments, where Macbooks reign supreme. I for one wouldn't like to use a Macbook, but I sincerely hope that MS grip on enterprises is broken sooner rather than later.
How was the old school control panel not better for non power users? Everything in one compact and intuitive display with understandable icons and a description of the icon in the English language. I'm confused when I try to change or navigate settings in Windows 10 or in modern apps in general where there's an array of icons with no description. I can memorize what the hamburger means but beyond that is too much!
You haven't worked in IT with "truly" non-technical people if you're asking this question (yes, No True Scotsman fallacy, I know).
They never opened such panels, they don't read error messages, they just say "the printer doesn't work". If the "Add Printer" button doesn't work it's all over for them. The only thing you can do is make the "Add Printer" button as good as possible.
The least common denominator is so much lower than you think it is. It's why Jobs and Timmy Apple worked so hard to eliminate the concept of the "file system" and make everything built around the concept of the "app". These abstractions that seem intuitive to power users and technical people are nonsense to the much larger market of push-button users, and that's where all the money is outside B2B enterprise.
TBF I don't think there's any control panels people are in love with.
Apart from the issue of needing control panels mostly to solve problems, they're just not great.
Windows legendarily keeps multiple versions of them, while for ios/macos it's a game of finding which image is actually a clickable button or understanding that wi-fi hotspot is under sharing and not networks. The FA was about command line incantation to fix printers and of course at every new macos version there will be a set of new defaults to get back behaviors. I think that's just the way of life at this point.
Sure, but here's the thing, all they really have to do is... nothing. Just leave the old control panel alone and stop making new ones. Make small evolutions, not redesigns. It might not have been brilliant, but once people learned where things were there's very little upside to changing it and all sorts of downside.
I think we're underestimating the amount of stuff going on in Windows and the amount of settings that are globaly needed after decades of trial and error.
Right now, we have machines that basically do what macs do (traditional "computing", a mouse, a keyboard a screen, office or image related work).
Then you have tablets (the whole Surface Pro line + 2 in 1 convertibles) and their touch options, including the impact on existing settings (you now have two or more sets of keyboards that might be in different mappings with different interlocked behaviors. Same for screens. and so much more)
Then thin clients, mirroring and remoting. For mac it's remote desktop or screen mirroring at most. Windoes gets a flurry of inbetweens.
Then all the hardware that only works on Windows and need some way to be managed relative to the system.
All in all, mac made the choice to only cater to the proverbial 20 of the 20/80 power law. Windows fundamentally can't just pile on the existing chaos, even if it means bringing new layers of chaos.
I don't even think a full rewrite in a new layer would be humanly possible at this point.
I disagree with this notion. Enterprise GNU/Linux environments with a configuration management system like Salt are easily on par (if not superior) to Enterprise MS Windows environments in all regards. Add a 389 or Samba4 domain controller on top and off you go. The difference is obviously that you need people who can administer such systems. 389 is just as part-time admin friendly as AD, but Salt actually requires you to understand a little bit about the computers you are administering.
Will the 10 person SME run such an setup? Unlikely. Can a 100 person SME that employs four MSCE run such a setup? Yes, but you only need two RHCE or LPIC-2 admins now (for vacation and somesuch). Those are rare, I know, but they will scale to 1000 persons, no problem.
Yep. My first reaction was printer issue? Riiight, that's definitely going to be the large market issue driving ppl away. People like the blackbox OS that doesn't do anything. It's not good for IT, but neither is Mac OS!
Forty-four years ago another guy felt the same anger towards a
closed-source printer driver, and he started a movement that actually
did end Microsoft's stranglehold.
On Tuesday, I had a printer issue at a client site and I was going to pull up the “Devices and Printers” panel to manage the drives and printing default settings. In the most recent 22H2 Windows 11 update, they hid it!
Using old Control Panel (Start->Run->control)
Clicking on this will redirect you to the new settings printer that gives NO options to do any advanced troubleshooting and removes the ability to FIX the issue!
A long time ago there was a video (or was it audio) of a really angry dude ranting about this and that and in the end he exclaims: I can’t print. And that is the punch line, his life was miserable and the root of the problem was printing.
Printers have been this evil hellhole of driver support for a decade or more, compared to other devices.
These days, I print so little I either stop at my local library, where printing is free, or I pay a pittance to print at a shop. It would take me a decade or more to pay off a printer when pages cost $.10.
Accurate as every other week's predicting of Microsoft's
impeding doom from users who don't like Windows in the past 30 years.
- 1995. wah, wah! Windows 95 sucks, it's so bloated, MS-DOS was so much lighter, this will be the end of Microsoft.
- 2001. wah, wah! Windows XP sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 2000 with Fisher Price coloring, this will be the end of Microsoft.
....
- 2021. wah, wah! Windows 11 sucks, it's just a bloated Windows 10 with a different UX and TPM requirement, this will be the end of Microsoft.
Maybe in 30 more years, when PCs will be in museums as we'll all have AR glasses or neural implants for personal computing, they'll finally be right with their prediction.
I don't think it's the same. I have been a Windows user all my life. Bloat and bad UX changes is one thing, but this is the first time I feel like I am having to actively fight the OS against showing me ads and dark practices like changing user preferences unbeknownst to me.
What problem? In 2013 Microsoft only had 2-3 big products, Windows, Office and X-Box. Now it's significantly more divested and the company's growth no longer depends on Windows' success or failure, and the stock pricing reflects that.
So, you're saying that losing 21% of their OS market share by actively pissing off their customers shouldn't be seen as a problem? OS stagnation would be an improvement compared to what they're currently doing.
Why is having even bigger market share so important? Android has bigger market share than iOS too yet iOS is the more profitable one. Microsoft cares about profit first, not unprofitable market share.
Not saying they're right or wrong, just saying it seems to be working for their bottom line as Windows is less relevante towards that as the PC market has been in a continuous decline anyway in the last decade.
Fighting to capture more % of a declining market seems like a fool's errand, when they have bigger fish to fry now.
why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue?
Because of revenue? a large seller of windows is genuinely just it’s market cap, it doesn’t really have a lot of killer utility compared to contemporaries. If it loses market cap then it’s a precipitous issue for them as there’s no point choosing the OS for other reasons, it simply lacks the value.
It’s market cap comes from people thinking it has a huge audience and so tailoring software for that audience and putting significant resources into that. Without that third-party effort: windows is toast.
>why is being unable to maintain market share not an issue?
Because unless you're from the 90's, the market for desktop operating systems is not one that generates a lot of revenue anymore. That's like laughing at Netflix for loosing DVD rental market share to Blockbuster.
>Because of revenue?
See my comment above. Microsoft makes a fuck tonne of revenue from services no matter if your company doesn't buy Windows PCs. If they buy Macs, they'll still pay Microsoft subscription fees for Office 365, Outlook, OneDrive, Azure, LinkedIn, GitHub, etc. and soon Copilot AI stuff. All these are platform agnostic and way more profitable for them than selling more Windows licenses.
office365 will die without windows, it’s genuinely terrible on every non-windows platform and onedrive is objectively worse than alternatives too.
Office365 subscriptions are propping up azure numbers, without them their cloud business looks shit, and azure itself is often only used because “we are a microsoft shop”, it’s all inertia.
You're kind of missing the point, which is that they obviously are putting a lot of effort in (we're talking about changes they're making, not stagnation), and actively making things worse. And in doing so they're objectively losing customers. This isn't like the situation where they just stopped updating IE6. They're clearly investing in Windows and doing an AWFUL job. If I were an investor I would be calling for change in the Windows division.
- There's so much existing software for Windows on x86 computers that it may not be feasible to migrate to MacOS or Linux.
- Windows does improve sometimes, and security updates are important. There's nothing forcing anyone to stop using Windows, like if it were abandoned.
But just because it hasn't happened so far doesn't mean it won't. MacOS market share has risen. Windows used to have 85% market share, but now it's 53%, and MacOS accounts for 31% of US desktop systems.[0] Perhaps that's just because the desktop market shrank, though.
Maybe in the future, 64-bit ARM Macs will be the standard workstation like Windows PCs, with a minority running Linux on their Macs instead. I don't like that future, though; as much as Windows sucks, at least they don't try to limit user freedom to the extent Apple does. If Windows stopped being profitable to continue for Microsoft, I'd hope another company would rise up and sell their own operating system.
Linux is also removing tools people use. Just the other day I found out hcitool and rfcomm were removed from bluez, yet another thing I now have to handwrite myself even when I just want to tinker.
Sure, you can still do things like I can write to a socket using python over using rfcomm, but isn't it the same as this article? It's gets in the way of gnome and friends wanting to "cater the experience" plus it's legacy now (meaning "I don't want to read someone else's code, blegh!") So out it goes! Developers in foss seem to love label things "legacy" to remove, not just in windows and mac land.
You say “Linux” as if it was a single company. What prevents you from either re adding it yourself or being part of the group working on that and changing what you don’t like?
Gnome/freedesktop is essentially a single entity, and their choices affect the FOSS as a whole. If you're going to say well there are individual contributors, well there are individual employees and teams at microsoft too. I also addressed your point, I can always make my own script to play with bluetooth just like OP can run control panel with some hexstring incantation. Can is can I suppose.
On Linux, since companies are paying for it now, Orca, the Linux GUI screen reader, is getting bug fixes on the main branch just about every day. Lol, if Windows loses even the loyal blind folks like me, I'll die laughing at Microsoft.
>hey are making some improvements like the GUI and cleaning up other elements that give a more cohesive look. No more mixing Metro UI and Legacy panels like Windows 10
I don't even think this is wholly true. The new / old context menu that for some reason now exists in parallel so you have to do two clicks on every right-click actions still mixes legacy and modern UI, and there's so many redundant mouse control and audio control settings also with entirely different look and feel. It's like you're on three Windows operating systems at the same time.
Baffling to me how a company the size of Microsoft cannot streamline their user interfaces.
The new two stages desktop context menu is indeed insane. Probably "we need to give it a new look, but we can't risk breaking anything, so let's keep the old one too".
I knew Windows was fucked when pressing WIN and searching for something brought up random crap from the internet instead of what I actually wanted. Do people at Microsoft use Windows or mac?
The UX designers reportedly use macOS and want to make Windows look more like it. Management uses Windows Enterprise which doesn’t have the ads. Everyone who cares about pre-8 Windows installs Open-Shell.
I used Ubuntu on my laptops from 2008 to 2023. Last year I switched to Windows 10. Looking at what's going on, I believe I'll be back to Ubuntu in my next laptop. Cycles...
I've always preferred Mint over Ubuntu itself. It runs better and seems to drain the battery on my laptop more slowly. Cinnamon is a nice and simple DE, though I usually use Plasma.
It may be true that Linux on the desktop is finally here, but I used to read about that on /. in the late '90s and early '00s, and people talk about it occasionally on HN.
Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it won't, but like 25 / 0 of the last "Linux is taking over the desktop" moments have been predicted.
I think by this point Linux desktop has matured enough that you can say with certain that the biggest problems is application availability.
Users want to run Adobe's creative suite or Affinity software (because they have to, even tough there are some decent alternatives) or run some very specific Scientific/CAD/whatever software that has no parallel in the Linux world. Worse, sometimes its hard to get Linux native software to run on your choice of distro due to it not being available in your distro repositories yet (flatpaks are changing that but still not a perfect solution) or it being some proprietary software that was really only tested on some old version of Readhat meant for high end workstations which requires you to run some arcane scripts on the command line to install and therefore tainting your whole installation, kinda defeating the purpose of running away from messy Windows installations.
I understand that there are closed source software tools used in science out there, but it seems pretty wrong-headed to me. A scientific tool that doesn’t have exposed source code seems not very trustworthy. If you get unexpected results, how do you know it wasn’t a bug?
Linux have been usable as a daily driver for at least the past ten years (exhibit: my mom), and with Proton it has even become usable for gaming.
For people above 60 who've spent two decades using windows, Linux Mint has even shown to be more manageable than jumping to a newer version of Windows.
I was talking specifically about Ubuntu. ASUS Linux folks recommend Fedora and Arch to have proper kernels and refuse to touch Ubuntu, so the engineering marvel of G14 with 4090 barely works on Ubuntu.
Bingo. Many people need to justify their role in an organization so they need to just deliver anything even if harmful.
Most companies I've worked with are full of similar projects, rebrandings, major rewrites in micro services, everywhere I look at from UI to tech to product there's always a huge bunch of people needing to show they are actually delivering and working.
I tried to buy Minecraft for a friend and found that the website declined all my purchasse methods. They also removed it from Amazon. One visit to a grey market key site and I got a good key, and $10 cheaper.
The best economical path forward is to redefine intellectual property and reinstate the fact that math cannot be IP. Repeal DRM clause in the DMCS. This forces big entities to compete by having quality products. Large market power is not supposed to have all the advantages. Innovation is meant to disrupt them when they are not operating in the consumers interest. But corps have been allowed to write their own laws to keep themselves ahead artificially. Change the rules of the game.
I don't think the OP meant to piss on GUIDs. I think they are laughing at a very cryptic command line recommended to access "old devices and printer". That was always a classic jab at Linux and this looks extra cryptic as it is a literal random string.
Also UUIDs in the classic sense do suck in my opinion and Linux and FreeBDS use them, because they have to, to support standards that were made with Windows in mind. UUIDs are strange - i.e. their mixed endianess or how version bits are placed in them. All for a 128 bit random identifier as it is mostly used nowadays. I like the below to get a random identifier:
I think it's kinda nice that my random identifiers have a little flag bit to indicate they were random v(._. )v
> their mixed endianess
Pardon my pedantry here but this is a misinterpretation of GUIDs through the lens of the UUID structure. The actual difference between GUID and UUID isn't the endianness-on-the-wire within the chunks but the number and sizes of the chunks themselves.
Endianness only matters with multi-byte data, so the "mixed-endianness" thing comes from the fact that the two specs mostly line up, but then people interpret GUID's array of octets as if ⅞ of it were a single multi-byte field as it is in UUID.
> or how version bits are placed in them
Indeed this is mostly lost to time and seems like odd placement these days. For anyone who's curious, the reason why those bits are where they are is because the Apollo Network Computing Architecture "version 0" UUIDs had a different third layout where the ninth octet indicated socket address family. IP's dominance led to the ossification of AF numbers which did not keep growing as anticipated, leaving several bits of effectively wasted space that were then reused to indicate the version since those bits could always be assumed to be 0 on NCA/NCS due to lack of any network standard on which they could be anything else.
Source: wrote a GUID/UUID library that implements all the old weird shit just for the fun of it:
I think it's not the GUID, but the fact that referencing the GUID is the only way to get at the functionality any more.
Yes, your devices and various other underpinnings have GUIDs, but very few of them _only_ surface the GUID as a referent to the thing in a place a user would have to access it.
Similar to how, if you could only get at this by doing "rundll32 shellex.dll LoadOldPrinterSettings", the issue wouldn't be a function named LoadOldPrinterSettings, the issue would be that it's making you reach into a DLL to invoke a function by hand to get at it at all.
I think that Windows was kind of usable till Windows 7. Windows 10 was not that bad from a performance point of view, an improvement over Windows 7, but it had a ton of bloatware that you had to clean up with third party applications, after it it was kind of ok.
Anyway, I use Linux and to me Windows is so far behind, for example only in recent years they introduced features such as virtual desktops that in Linux DE are present till the 90s... the user experience of windows is kind of bad, and still misses some (to me) basic features, such as the possibility to keep a window always on top, not to mention the mess that is installing and updating software (you still have to download programs from the internet because not even all Microsoft software is distributed trough the Microsoft store, or use third-party package managers), or the Windows updates themself (possible that in 2024 Microsoft or Apple still haven't found out a way to update the system without rebooting it and wasting a ton of time? I mean, come on...).
Wasn’t 7 the one people liked vs the previous version Windows, Vista? I remember windows 7 being popular until about Windows 10 or so. Lots of people think Windows 7 was the last good Windows version (at least from my memory).
If your linux system update included a new kernel you _will_ need to reboot to actually use the new kernel. I am not aware of any desktop distros that come with kernel live patching enabled.
Microsoft has been driving me away since the Windows XP days.
Before that (and being young and not exposed to anything else) viewed Microsoft's OS as the best thing since slice bread. I was able to code and do things with Visual Studio 5.0/6.0. In my eyes nothing could compare.
One day, my mouse pointer would slowly move down the screen without touching it. Thinking it was a virus or something, did a reinstall of XP. A few months later, the pointer was playing up, again.
There were other things but it was the start to my journey to GNU/Linux. I was barely exposed to GNU/Linux a year or two before but due to lack of internet at that time, could not grasp the change being a Windows user.
This time I purchased a book on Ubuntu and realised how cool this really is. It also made me appreciate programming. I no longer was 'clicking the play button' on Visual Studio. Now I was understanding how to compile with gcc.
Since then I would choose GNU/Linux over Windows most days of the week. The only exception is my job.
For example, I have one job that still uses legacy software. We are talking programs originally written in the late 90s in Visual Basic 6. I have to use Windows. Some program before I joined moved over to .NET and SQL Server. My goal is to move away from Microsofts tools. No more Windows Servers. Using (perhaps) Go, Postgres, etc. The Company would save a lot more money as well.
Baby Steps.
I don't hate Windows, but I still have to install it on one laptop and the amount of stuff I don't want gets annoying!
Most of the time I am using Debian, both on my (other) laptop and as a Server machine.
The issue with Windows that the HN public might have trouble to understand, is how bad decisions are sticky in a company with little to no taste like Microsoft.
You can't suddenly change things and expect app developers to accept it like they do in OSX. This means they can't change Windows too much.
Any new change creates lots of compromises and just slapping a new UI doesn't fix the underlying issue.
This has been the case since forever, that's why Apple could survive and that's why we have Linux.
It isn't worth for Microsoft for example, to change how program becomes initialized at system startup. What happens is that every program then will want to be initialized at Startup.
The average windows user is used to have to close lots of garbage at system startup. Also dealing with pseudo-ads all around the OS and also edge. Changing this would probably mean less revenue and no corporation would prefer to delay revenue in a bad product that will likely never die.
Mac likely wouldn't be vibrant and with so much attention to details if Windows didn't exist. There wouldn't be a market for it.
Also, MS’s primary audience for Windows is corporate IT departments and to a lesser extent established ISVs, while Apple’s primary audience for *OS is end-users.
It seems to me that these complaints about MS and Windows have been more or less the same since Windows 95/NT4. Yet somehow most people keep using it because 'gaming' or because 'corporate'? Or because Mac or Linux are not good enough?
Reading all the comments in these discussions I consider myself lucky to never have made the switch 'to' Windows. After triple booting DOS/W98, OS/2 and Linux for a while in the nineties, it was just Linux after 2003 because it is easy and it just works.
Also used Macbooks several years at work and the OS never got in the way of productivity. To me at least MacOS appears to work fine.
I use OSX/Linux nearly 100% of the time, with the rare exception being a few years old Windows gaming laptop that I'll occasionally boot to play a game.
Every time I do, I'm blown away with the constant garbage like ads and "news" in the search bar, the bizarre mash-up of UI elements from various generations of WIndows in various menus and the like.
The strongest point for Windows for me is that things like displays and GPU drivers "just work"
Every Mac I've had has had issues with displays/compatibility in some fashion, yet old hardware running windows typically functions fine without any fighting.
Outside of the very minimal gaming I do, there's little value for any of my use cases with Windows.
I tried changing myself to linux (Fedora) and I still had problems with a Realtek ALC892 for audio, which is a chip from 12 years ago. No solution other than buy a soundcard with a different chip.
Unfortunately, we still be using windows.
Curiously the game were working quite fine as long as I was using x11.
ALC892 afaik was a very common chip integrated into the mobo some years back, its not a discrete card itself but if it's causing the problem the solution is to either change your motherboard (and for something that old youll likely need to change CPU and possibly RAM too) or buy a discrete sound card
This is just sensationalist. Microsoft doesn't have their users by the users choosing Windows from a lineup of software. People use Windows, because that's the de facto PC operating system. It's what people learn in school, use in governments, use to conduct their businesses, play their games on. PC hardware is made for Windows, and PCs are bundled with Windows. That's why Windows is everywhere.
Not because it's relationship with users, but because of its relationships with the avenues leading to users.
The opening rant in the video is familiar, I've been inspired to colorful language on many occasions too.
I use linux and, reluctantly, macos (and will switch as soon as feasible). But my kids still use windows sometimes though, to play Roblox and Minecraft redstone edition, etc.
I dread any time I'm asked to help with microsoft accounts, or OS re-installations because windows update borked the system (happens at least every 6 months or so), etc. Microsoft's user experience seems to suck in absolutely everything they do.
linux is good for it but it's still no windows unfortunately. gaming is the reason my desktop still runs windows, the day linux gets decent support for VR and i can be assured that everything will run 100% perfectly, but thats going to need extensive changes to how DRM and anticheat in many games function, or massive leaps in compatibility layers (which may happen relatively soon)
Linux has never given me a notification that says "you previously removed this search box from your taskbar, but we put it back. You're welcome"
Paraphrased, but this actually happened on my work machine a few months ago. This kind of bullshit and bald faced disrespect is why I haven't used windows at home in years.
What’s happening in somewhat poorer (BRICS, say) countries? Surely they’d be price sensitive enough not to pay for a Windows license if suddenly it has a (widespread) reputation for being less user friendly than Linux? (And this cohort would eventually become the majority of computer users over time… where would that leave Microsoft?)
It's such a "first world question" haha. Sorry, not trying to insult or criticize you, but this is genuinely a question only people in developed countries would ask.
People in poorer countries use pirated software. No, the don't need to be tech-savvy enough to know torrents to use pirated Windows. They don't need to know how to install an OS themselves.
20 years ago when I got my first PC, pirated windows was the norm here. You needed to be tech-savvy to know how to get a legal version. That is how developing countries work.
I use Windows 10 & 11 for work and I agree and don't agree.
Yes they should keep all the old stuff for us that know how to use it.
But one thing, it IS stable. My Windows 10 install is 4 years old, and Windows updates never broke it. I am not sure what you are doing to your systems.
It's funny how people pick a random version and explain how it went downhill from there. If you combine these answers you get the idea that it went downhill ever since 95/98.
For me vista was the day I switched completely and haven't looked back.
My daft conspiracy theory I only slightly believe is that Microsoft is really fed up of maintaining Windows given the amount of technical debt it must have piled up and the limited revenue it produces given that paying for an OS isn't really a thing anyone wants to do anymore.
It sounds like a hell freezing over situation but maybe they'd even release their own Linux distro with compatibility tools only they'd ever be able to make with access to source code and engineer experience, and just push their web based versions of apps as much as possible.
Either way it seems like Linux will be profiting from the situation at the moment as a huge number of devices out there won't support Windows 11 but will perform perfectly fine with Linux. If Ubuntu / Redhat are smart they'll put the effort in to make transitioning as easy as possible and scoop up all the people who don't want to pay for a new device, and given the financial issues more and more people are having I don't think that's a small group.
Windows 10 will be the last version I ever install. Hearing the 11 ads and instability shitshow testimonials has convinced me M$ has entirely lost the plot.
What drives me mad is my lean 2023 windows laptop suddenly making noise because some installer or whatever started. If that was occasional, that'd be okay.
I really hate the way they're forcing their products I don't want on me. Stop opening things in Edge, I'm never ever going to use it. And stop asking me to backup folders on OneDrive, I already have Dropbox, I don't want it.
And jesus, stop breaking the taskbar. Every major windows version they just make it worse. Now you can't even dock it to different parts of the screen. Why?!? The Windows 2000 taskbar was infinitely superior to this macOS dock wannabe pile of trash. Also, why do "widgets" always come back. It's never been a good idea in any OS, but it feels like we're constantly being sold on it. If I want the weather I'll just do a quick internet search. I mean, they've been trying to make this a thing since Active Desktop in Windows 98 and most users have never ever cared or wanted these things. Maybe 26 years later it's time to say that it's not a good idea?
A number of people really want widgets of some kinds - little things showing information like the time, or CPU clock, or battery left, or music playing.
The problem becomes that A) people really want different presentations of information, B) something tiny and satisfying in the corner isn't as easy to justify as a big improvement, even if it is, as a big flashy thing, and C) some people get very upset at anything doing this at all.
Look at how people got super excited about active desktop backgrounds, or how people used media players which turn into tiny widgets displaying pretty visualizations and a little bit of information.
People want widgets, but getting a consistent design that many people will use without introducing so much complexity that most people will never bother is hard.
My suspicion is that it has nothing to do with what users want, it's just a way to sell ad space essentially. I mean right now my "Widgets", which I never open, evidently has a bunch of news sites I never look at, coupons, some casual games I have no interest in. It's basically a bunch of ads pretending to be a feature
I also prefer the Windows Taskbar rather than the dock as you mentioned, that's why I created Taskbar for macOS. Feel free to check it out: https://lawand.io/taskbar
OS X works well especially with the hardware it was co-designed with. The only other option is an idealistic Linux, which still isn’t suitable for most people, so grandma moved from Windows to OSX, and never looked back.
Case in point, if I was running Apple hardware from 2011~2014 I would be out of support for quite a few years already with massively outdated hardware, Apple puts their customers on a MUCH faster treadmill to keep upgrading often. But instead my _daily drivers_ 13 year old Thinkpad X220 and both my 10 year old 4th gen haswell i7 PCs keep trucking along. It's easy enough to fix, upgrade and have access to ALL current software. Not only that but one of those machines perform just as good if not better than a PS5, so I can still play any game I want at a respectable fidelity and performance. Also, not running Windows helps keep the bloat overhead at bay.
Would you be better off with windows? I actually still have Apple hardware that old that I still use. Yes, Apple doesn’t fix it anymore, but no, I never needed Apple to fix it before. I guess it doesn’t get OS updates, but so what? It just works, the only thing I want I is no hassle computers, and that’s what I get with Apple hardware.
Yeah. Every time a pundit, even an Apple-focused one, complains that macOS “hasn’t changed” I have to shake my head at such ignorance from people who should know better.
The interface changes relatively slowly, all things considered. (When it does change suddenly, some of the same pundits throw a fit.) But the internals are always changing, virtually always for the better; things like the `discoveryd` situation are outliers, not the rule.
Under the hood, macOS changes things (and break them) so fast, that Linux distros blush with envy, while they figure out, how to change something in 5 years that macOS does in 1.
Well maybe, but with Windows maybe they shouldn't think about power users but power buyers. And power buyers (i.e. medium to large enterprises) care about security, maintainability, backward compatibility, and supportability and yeah lots of stuff has moved to the cloud but the end user has got to use something to get there.
So, the question is, is this creative destruction or just destruction. Not every change is an innovation even in IT and large vendors have a long history of failing in computing usually because they either got sclerotic or too focused on the organization and promoting the organization and too little focused on the customer.
I think that is the crux of the problem actually. Same with Teams, what the buyer wants is misaligned with what the end user wants unfortunately. Most resources are put towards making it an easier sell rather than towards a product the end user loves.
Windows 10 and 11 are miserable. At this point, I only use them for gaming, but just about every windows update breaks performance and stability, or introduces a headache. Sometimes they fix it, but mostly it’s drifting towards the abyss. Meanwhile, they endlessly shovel unwanted products and insert their corporate surveillance into just about every aspect of the Windows experience. I’m just sick to death of it. We are so close to the point where I can just delete it and run SteamOS exclusively or at least a majority of the time, and I cannot wait.
In general, MS is pissing a lot away. Office, both the desktop apps and Office 365, are absolutely atrocious (just started using it due to a new job, I previous thought Google Docs was the worst). VSCode has become slow and frustrating to use. I stopped developing on their platform products long ago because most are a terrible value proposition and frustrating developer experience.
I have been a dedicated DOS and Windows user since the 80s, and a Microsoft developer since late 90s and 2000s, but between Vista and Windows 8 it was clear they were circling the drain and I have been distancing myself from their products as much as I can.
My issue with Windows is, once you have a legit license, dual booting becomes a nightmare on your laptop.
I ALWAYS have to boot up the BIOS and re-disable Fn keys as media keys (personal preference), secure boot and change the SATA mode to AHCI instead of RST + optane, otherwise I can't dual boot Linux.
Literally. every. time. I update Windows and I have to go back to the BIOS.
I would say the fundamental problem with Mac is paying through the nose for hard drive space, ram, and multiple display capabilities. However, like you say, Microsoft is driving users away with their terrible choices like forcing me bing and actively adding spyware to my machine, but they are far from the only ones doing it. Other legacy software makers like Intuit are actively sabotaging their software and the enshittification continues.
Microsoft drove me away circa 2006 with the complete dumpster fire approach to device drivers (at the time anyway, I don't know about today) where every hardware vendor can do whatever the hell they want, distribute their driver however the hell they want, sign it or not sign it, etc.
I had spent a pretty penny building a beefy gaming PC and the Windows XP installer would have this selective amnesia about device drivers that weren't signed. A very important driver provided by the motherboard OEM (nVidia) would be cheerfully accepted by the Windows XP installer at the beginning but then after the initial reboot during installation, the driver wouldn't work and would not be considered acceptable by the installer anymore. I was left with a ≈$3,000 (in early 2000s money) PC that could not complete the Windows XP installation. After a few days of hitting my head on this I drove to the nearest Apple Store and bought a MacBook and never looked back.
To this day I am still somewhat livid / grossed out with the entire PC ecosystem and it's lack of any kind of standards, platform conventions, and the general flea market / down market vibe of the available hardware (new motherboards in 2024 STILL have an ocean of USB-A ports instead of USB-C or Thunderbolt!).
There is a lot that Apple could improve on, particularly it would be nice if they loosened up a bit when it comes to what kinds of apps they permit on the App Store. But I immensely enjoy that I haven't had to give a flying dripping shit about device drivers for almost 20 years now. I don't have wonder if something will work when I plug it in. It just does. I sort of get why it's popular in enterprise settings, I don't understand why people put themselves through the misery that Windows seems to insist upon for its end users.
there's a 'More devices and printer settings' button that opens that Devices and Printers window, located in Bluetooth & Devices > Devices section in Settings. so, they're definitely not hiding it. and there's a Printers & scanners section in settings as well.
this is ridiculous. just rambling for the sake of rambling, having an out for windows lol. and seemingly (looking at post text alone) not even trying to actually find it, but in the video he even clicks that button and opens it, and yet makes up a more complicated "solution" for it, saying they "hide that button sometimes" which just does not make sense. it's just there. literally not hidden. so that's just a made up problem.
Isnt this the MS playbook 101? Bad windows version everyone hates but exiting the ecosystem is hard . Juat when people start getting fed up they release the new same as the old version and everyone buys it. They make billions and people are happy until the next release
Every single time I wake up my computer from sleep the Edge browser opens up in full screen. I have as many Edge settings disable as possible, Chrome is my default browser, and there are no keyboard shortcuts that could possibly open it.
It doesn't matter if I press the spacebar, click my mouse, etc. No matter how the PC awakes, Edge launches itself in full view on top of the other apps.
It's blatantly aggravating stuff like this that pisses me off even more than spying telemetry.
If I'm not mistaken, tasks defined in Task Scheduler can be set to run at system wake, so maybe look at your tasks... I'd be worried about something configured to load a URL (i.e. call home) on every system wake.
OK, that's one user. But clearly he is still using Windows. Microsoft has not "lost" him. He is just complaining. He even provides a solution re: printing for other Windows users that implies his readers are still using it, too.
"Microsoft is in a panic from the continued loss of it's user base."
Is there no need to present any evidence of this statement's veracity.
Perhaps some evidence has been published of which I am unaware.
Where can we view the data.