Nothing. As you can see almost 99% of the comments are not about it but about Windows itself and unrelated questions. This is a very common phenomenon in HN.
Last December I bought a Asus Zenbook S14 with the Core 7 Ultra (lunar lake) and to be honest I'm loving windows + wsl, being able to have a premade ubuntu image configured with my building tools and just import and work on my balcuny for 9h is amazing. On top of that , although it's not the best gaming machine (far from that) I can still run a cs2 and Halo inifinity prety well :).
Some year ago I bought a Surface Pro 8 thinking it was the best hardware to run Windows on and holy hell was I wrong. Overheats in two seconds, performance is probably worse than my Steam Deck purchased years ago and the only way I can have it run relatively well is a barebones Linux install. Before that, I gave WSL(2) a try and besides giving me half the performance compared to running Linux the normal way and introducing various compatibility issues (although it's just a VM?!), a recent Windows update broke the WSL image on disk leading to a corrupted install, never managed to recover from that and gave up.
I can't wait for Ableton to (eventually) get their thumbs out of their asses and make Ableton work on Linux so I can dump Windows fully.
Written from my Linux X1 Carbon which also somehow magically works on my patio, don't ask me how.
The Zenbook S14 is a lovely machine, and you can get it with 32G and 120Hz OLED HDR display without the weight or bulk of a macbook pro.
I don't like Windows 11. WSL2 is just about an acceptable Linux, but I don't like how there's no memory ballooning. I had to disable all the sleeping network access mechanisms to make it not run out of battery when suspended. Windows 11 is ugly and unpleasant to use in large part because of the proliferation of different UI themes over the years, which they can't easily remove due to how third party software plugs into things - multiple control panels, multiple Explorer menus, etc.
As soon as there is a solid Linux implementation (ideally Debian-flavoured) with competent power management I will switch. That may be a long while off though.
I wonder about the complexity of improving the battery management on Linux. I understand that macOS is highly optimized and Windows is in the middle or closer to Linux? I am not talking about the Apple Silicon chips but at the OS level.
The WSL2 has been fantastic. It takes the unixy environment of a Mac and puts it on the Windows ecosystem my IT imposes. It fixes everything I hate about Windows by letting me avoid using Windows while using Windows.
It's a huge step up from Cygwin, too, since it's a proper Linux instead of just POSIX compatibility.
If you want a fun rabbit hole, look into how the WSL2 and 1 interact with Windows. WSL1 was a whole new shell around the NT Kernel. WSL2 is more of a VM, but using the Plan 9 (yes, that plan 9) filesystem implementation to talk with Windows.
Until it breaks. I watched a colleague have to reinstall his laptop the other day because whenever he opened a WSL terminal, nothing happened and it banged the CPU at 100% and wouldn’t even shut down.
My friend has Zephyrus G16 with Core 9 Ultra and 32GB RAM. This thing is abomination. It is enough to just open a browser for fans to start "drilling". It is struggling with the basics needed for studying - browser with many tabs, few Word documents, Excel, Teams. Word sometimes is a slideshow on larger documents. Typing is lagging like you press a key and a letter appear after few seconds and so on.
After using Macs M1 and M2 I can't see how people can buy these laptops. This is massively worse experience.
Standard PC experience these days. The very high end dell precision are just as bad. Getting an hour of battery life doing basic tasks after only 9 months.
Using a 2021 MBP M1 Pro MBP instead of the $3000 turd my outfit said I needed to use. It’s faster and doesn’t fuck up.
Really? Are you suggesting you getting solid 9h on full charge, while developing on Windows+wsl??
That's very hard to believe, but if that's true color me impressed.
I get no where near that (albeit older hardware).
I honestly think Windows with WSL is the best developer platform at the moment. Mac is great but software written for Linux is better integrated into Windows. I love Linux (particularly Debian, Fedora/RHEL, Qubes) for servers but Mac and Windows provide a more pleasant experience.
My first MS OS was DOS 2.x (forgot the exact point release...). I remember going to Costco as a kid and getting excited whenever a new version of DOS, and later Windows came out because each and every one of them was a true upgrade in every sense of the word. They built things for the users and it showed. I even got to beta test Windows 95 and was blown away when it came out. The last good OS MS released was Windows XP. After that the trend was clear. They were no-longer building stuff for users and instead were building for companies to take advantage of users. MS has completely lost my trust and I doubt they will ever get it back.
There’s an old joke that if you ask people to pinpoint the golden age of Saturday Night Live, they’ll give you an answer that coincides with whenever they were in high school. It’s less true now in the era of on-demand streaming of the entire backlog, but for the longest time people would simply remember when SNL was fresh and new and exciting.
Funnily enough, I see the same thing playing out with computers, operating systems, the internet, and video games. People identify the peak as some time when they were younger and it was all new and exciting. Everything was downhill since then.
Talk to younger people and they’ll already tell you that Windows 10 was actually the GOAT and they won’t comprehend any fascination with Windows XP. That was the junky old OS they had to deal with on old computers once.
What seems to be happening (to me) is roughly every other generation MS makes massive changes to the OS which most people hate for being different, then they release a new version of the OS which is just basically polishing those features, maybe walking a couple back, and that becomes the "beloved" version of windows.
People hated Vista, and loved 7. Yet 7 was really just vista with a bit of polish. What changed is when 7 came out the average computer capabilities had gone up significantly.
People hated 8, but loved 10. The only real difference between the two is MS dropping the weird tablet mode that nobody wanted/asked for.
People currently hate 11, I suspect 12 will be loved mostly because MS will back off a bit on some of the new innovative UI changes and advertising everywhere.
That’s been noted but doesn’t change the fact that tech products have become increasingly user-hostile over the last two decades, while QA spending is way down.
Personally I thought the first twenty-five years of SNL were great, and it is good recently.
I'm reminded of how much people hated it when it came out. Post Vista it was widely liked. A lot of people are also nostalgic of 7 now. I wonder if we'll have a batch of people nostalgic for 10 or 11 in a decade in the same vein. I doubt it, but who knows. The old rule was "every other release is loved/hated", which held until at least 10 (8 was hated, 10 was somewhat accepted). I also remember that 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows".
Windows XP was a downer for many when it came out because it wasn't Windows 98SE++ (and Windows ME was a flop) - it was Windows 2000 with a "fisher price" skin.
For those in the know, that was great. Windows XP + classic theme + drivers (even if you had to find the W2k drivers) was incredibly stable and performant.
But it took a few years for games to catch up and get the updates, and so for the "tech oriented" crowd (which were often gamers), it took a bit to catch on.
But its longevity is a tribute to how "good it was" and how hard it was to improve from it. Vista introduced more stability at the expense of requiring new drivers, so they re-released Vista a few years later as 7 (there's really no major differences between Vista and 7 except a few years of upgrades to drivers and hardware).
The five years between XP and Vista certainly didn't help matters, either. If you wait that long, you better be willing to support it for decades. Windows XP's last update was 18 years after it was shipped.
Don't think I've ever encounter someone that didn't become nostalgic for 10 after having to switch to 11. So many pointless UI changes, and just like with 8 none of them are necessary to force the user to use beyond some incessant need to dictate how users do things on the part of Microsoft.
I still use 7 on my offline pcs. Its still such a fantastic operating system and I don't see us getting another like it from ms. I'm one of those nostalgia folks who can't move on. People are certainly feeling the same way 10 to 11.
That rule can always be gamed too, heh. I felt it went 8 bad, 8.1 good, 10 bad. Then 11 broke the pattern.
I really have not seen anything material since windows 7 that would meet the bar of major improvement. Windows 7 with bug & security fixes, adding support for new hardware standards and SW developments, and feature evolution would be superior to what we have today IMO. Prior to win7 all the revolutionary "coming next" things either became impractical or were dropped.
I have a desktop that still runs all tripe-A games and is my main development machine running win10 that MS says is a boat anchor come the fall; this will be my last windows machine.
Microsoft has been pretty good to me as a developer (despite some of the technologies intentionally designed to do nothing but distract and consume attention) but the consumer side is a pathological shit-show and appears to really hate people (or at least love money more). MS looks a lot like the White House these days.
I knew someone who hated it and would instead install windows 2000 on everything. And he would do so claiming defiance of Microsoft for ruining the most perfect operating system only for money. Then when 7 came out he proclaimed he would never use a new windows again and remain on 2000 forever. I never really got why he was so upset. For me I didn’t like the interface that was in vista or in windows 8. But it wasn’t ever the end of the world. And this was all in the context of playing games! He didn’t develop software or anything. He also hated steam.
> They were no-longer building stuff for users and instead were building for companies to take advantage of users.
This may be netlore at this point, but IIRC, a big reason why XP pushed for product keys was for cancelled experiments with subscription pricing (or at least updates for paying customers only). That plug was pulled before launch due to lack of widespread broadband infrastructure for the downloads. Continuous updates are a nightmare enabled by modern CDNs and cable.
> The last good OS MS released was Windows XP. After that the trend was clear. They were no-longer building stuff for users and instead were building for companies to take advantage of users.
What was wrong with Windows 7? Windows Vista was poorly designed but it wasn't intentionally user-hostile. I don't remember the bloatware and design gimmicks starting until Windows 8.
Why are boomers so stubborn and adamant about things they form opinions of and won't change their mind, even when they're wrong? Is it a lack of intelligence? Or too much pride? Both?
I'm genuinely curious why anyone would download a beta of Windows... can someone enlighten me?
I can think of one scenario only - You have a desktop app or drivers that you want to ensure will work in the upcoming non-beta, so getting a head start would be good I suppose.
But for anyone else, why would you test software for free from a trillion dollar company that have a bit of a track record now of hostility towards users.
This isn't a troll, I'm a Windows 11 user myself. I am genuinely at a loss.
Edit: I'm being a dumbass (on first coffee as I write this), there's plenty of reasons why people would download a beta... I was thinking from my perspective only!
In addition to testing in advance that your own (hard|firm|soft)ware will work, some people will just want to get new features early and are willing to deal with the potential extra bugginess.
Yeah, this used to be me. I don't do it anymore but I used to spend a great deal of time playing with beta versions of Android, Windows, Firefox, and various iPod and Mac customization applications. I just enjoyed playing with the new features, figuring out how to break them, reporting those issues, and then helping get them fixed (even if I wasn't contributing code at the time). I don't have the time anymore, but it was one of my favorite activities when I was younger.
Yeah some hobbyists just like to try new features. I remember when Windows Longhorn (pre Vista) was in beta and I would download the ISO and burn a DVD just to try out the latest transparency effects and the sidebar lol.
I'd usually bow out at this point but if you've ever been on any Windows/Microsoft-related subreddit, there are many many people that download these betas.
I did it once, many years ago, for Windows 10 and my printer started printing out garbage in multiple pages no matter what you printed. At that time I used the printer quite frequently. I'd had no issues until then.
I remember checking to see if printer issues were a thing in that build and they weren't listed.
Sometimes there are new features that are interesting or useful. For example, before Windows 11 launched x64 emulation support for ARM CPUs was only available as an insider preview build for Windows 10.
The Insider program was initially created to combat leaks by just making every build public. At first they really listened to feedback when Gabriel Aul led the program - after he left, it became a joke (they tried hard to make "ninja cat" a thing) and the "unloved child". Microsoft doesn't know what to do with it, testers can't test anything and provide feedback since 1) MS ignores it 2) it has a literal roulette built in where features get (de-)activated upon reboot. They reopened the beta program for Windows 10 a year ago (to backport some Windows 11 features like Copilot?) and closed it after a few months.
I've been in the insider beta program since the beginning and I don't really have a good reason other than I live on the edge
To be honest the multiple times a week updates requiring restart (which is the entire point) are the biggest drawback. I rarely encounter bugs in my daily work.
I imagine content creators would be likely to download a Windows beta if it included any new or interesting features so they can try it out and share that information with their followers. This includes both written and video content.
How about opening Explorer windows in less than a second (or at least 5)?
Or being able to customize the Explorer context menu. They were on the right track by pushing the old context menu into a separate second menu. But they should allow the user to select what shows in the primary menu instead of the seemingly random stuff that shows there.
Yeah my Amiga 500 from 1987 was faster at that lol
Ps I do absolutely hate the split of the context menu in two parts because many frequent operations have now become two clicks instead of one. Luckily it can be switched off at home but sadly not on my work laptop. I didn't imagine any power user would be happy with what change.
On the admin side it's gotten worse. Working in IT and having to support Windows 11 through Active Directory is a nightmare now. MS has removed almost all admin control in favor of user choice forcing us into workarounds and hacks to get most things working. It also seems evident they would like Active Directory to go away in favor of their cloud options which are horrible slow and clunky.
> having to support Windows 11 through Active Directory is a nightmare now. MS has removed almost all admin control in favor of user choice
What does that mean - group policy has many fewer policies? Why would Microsoft do that - it is only used in organizations with IT departments, and they definitely want to automate and lock down configuration.
now what _I_ want, is to be able to resize the taskbar again.
also, I would prefer win11 didn't disable just about everything I had configured, particularly preview for file types.
and - I dont know how they did it, but basic file explorer view feels much slower than win10,on the same machine.
given that file explorer is basically all windows boils down to, i am not happy that they tske efforts to make it crappier.
and given that win95 was able to show a file grid in 1995, I wonder how they are able to screw that up, 30 years later?
I'd settle for having the real taskbar shown in Teams screen sharing instead of having the time rolled back to the time Teams started, or something.
When I dare I dream of proper renaming experience inside of a OneDrive folder, without overriding me while typing. But that must be too much for the developers nowadays, unbearable difficulty! Me the humble servant of MS might must shut up.
let's not even open the conversation on Teams. The fact that so many businesses (including my employer) run their fundamental activities on such a piece of shit BLOWS MY MIND. I'm sure there's some cool tech and lots of smart MS developers who are proud of contributions or features, but I don't think I'd put on my resume that I was focused on Teams. It's loathed by a lot of people and at best tolerated by the rest. Nobody would voluntarily inflict Teams on people they care about.
Someone had the smart idea to re-write the taskbar and when they did, they did the modern take where they tried to strip every feature they didn't think was important enough to stop someone from buying the upgrade. Over the last 3 years a hand full of features have come back but even those re-implementations have been a poor replication at best.
I'd put a dollar on it being due to tracking mouse behavior — if they want to cheaply track clicks & movement for the sake of advertisers, their surveillance needs to be as low-powered as possible.
It hasn't been possible for ages. I haven't tried on 11 but on 10 you can switch your region to somewhere in the EU and that will allow you to delete the folders. I couldn't get the actual uninstaller to run, and I'm not sure if it will come back in the next update after the region has been switched back, but this is the only method I found that worked.
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but you can right-click the taskbar, click taskbar settings, and under the "Taskbar behaviors" tab there's a "Taskbar alignment" drop down with options "Left" and "Center.
This does not move the taskbar. This aligns the icons on the taskbar, which stays at the bottom of the screen.
Their best bet is to use the relatively reputable ExplorerPatcher. However, using ExplorerPatcher requires fiddling with your antivirus settings and weakening your PC's security, so maybe trying to live with the new normal is better?
That controls whether the Start button, for opening the Start menu, is on the left of your taskbar like previous versions of Windows, or in the middle of your taskbar. The middle is the current default.
Really wish M$ work harder to attract me and other Mac user back to Windows. The PC hardware saw great improvements and continue to move in right directions. It is now up to the software / Windows to show what the are capable of.
I manage the Windows 11 desktop system of my parents. The interruptions, feeding of click-bait news, trying to force Edge, Bing, OneDrive and other online services, tons of overt and covert telemetry, the older parts of Windows visible like a sore thumb... All of these things push me away and away from Microsoft every day.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm happy with my Linux desktops and Mac laptops. They're interoperable, using Macs are trouble free 99.99% of the time, and my Linux desktops just work.
It's a simple way to declutter windows 10 and or 11, build custom stripped install images, install useful utilities and dev environs, etc.
For any that care to look under the hood (and there are a number) it's open and transparent and a good way to get that Windows VM image for hosted OS's, gameplay, Qubes OS, etc.
They lost me a year ago for forever. The OS is just too hostile, annoying and pushy. What was the last drop is Edge and that awful Home Page plus the news/widget things. I would not mind any of them but enabling by default is just not right.
It is incredible that how smoother the macOS experience is using a Macbook Pro M2 - it is not perfect at all, every OS have it's own annoyances but the OS is not working against me any more
Yup, we could argue that it's not even targeted towards power users. It's just a total bloat of useless shit and a ton of Microsoft-controlled settings and features all over your OS.
The promotions/ads and tracking that happens with every other screen on the OS just make it look very cheap and unprofessional. It's so stupid that Microsoft could not come up with a developer-focused version of Windows meant for Enterprises, with all the bloat that's targeted for other things just removed.
Just yesterday, I ordered a mac for me the first time in my life because I lost hope of PC hardware ever catching up to the convenience and stability of a mac. This is from a person who likes Windows and especially Linux much more than MacOS.
WSL is really great, and I loved the fact Microsoft moved towards being more developer friendly and bringing all great tools and utilities to the Modern Windows (10 and above).
But..... the predatory nature of Windows and the half-ass revisions done to the UI elements, with decades-old applications with the legacy UI that can still be accessed directly, makes Windows a mess. To add to this, The hold that Microsoft has on Windows is so nasty that it keeps overriding settings like default browsers and applications, to favor Microsoft-built apps like Edge, along with the heavy telemetry just leads this platform to be a mess.
It is not a clean system at all, and even sometimes pales in comparison to Linux Desktop, let alone OSX.
Be aware macOS is not the paragon of stability you hope it is. I've lost hope on all the OSes, actually. Nothing just works anymore unless it's an iPhone or an iPad.
I have a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 (actually 2 of them, long story) because I _have_ to have a stylus, and don't find the trifecta of: iPad, MacBook, and Apple Pencil a workable option (and the "tick" of the Apple Pencil being touched to the screen and the need to keep yet another battery charged would drive me nuts).
I'd give my interest in Hell for a successor to the Axiotron ModBook, and if the Wacom Movink 13 had a screen resolution to compeat w/ the 3K OLED on my GB3, I'd give up on having a battery and have it and a Mac Mini, so that I could get back to something like to my NeXT Cube w/ Wacom ArtZ (which was paired w/ an NCR-3125 running PenPoint for portability).
So yeah, the hardware on the Windows side is better suited to some folks, and I agree that the software really, really needs work. Things I miss:
- Miller Column File Browser
- Services
- emacs shortcuts when using a keyboard
- TeXshop and other Cocoa apps
Things which annoy me on Windows
- the need to keep Settings open and toggle how the stylus behaves
- not being able to select text in most web browsers (Firefox and derivatives at least still have a working configuration for allowing this)
- the need to manage various settings to keep ads and Copilot from intruding
That said, having a Wacom One paired w/ my MacBook works pretty well, it's just not something I can use away from my desk.
Forget about it, Windows 11 is chock full of "telemetry" to train MS/"OpenAI"/Copilot models to predict user behavior (that is, to make you obsolete) and ads. At some point, MS management has decided it is more lucrative for MSFT stock in times of AI craze to turn Windows against its users. It didn't have to become like this, and while I've never been a Windows person, it's sad to see Windows go. I've just recently setup probably my last Windows 10 tablet/"convertible" (that will remain on Windows 10, just made sure to install Windows 11 in addition/in a dual boot setup so I don't risk a drama going forward when it eventually needs 11), and the tablet features Windows 8 had and to a lesser degree Windows 10 still has were not half-bad and even had "soul"; I wish MS hadn't given totally up on mobile, tablets in education, etc.
I switch back and forth with a Windows workstation because some very expensive software I use is Windows-only.
The default installation is annoying, but I can go from a clean install to having the annoying widgets cleaned up in a few minutes (hint: Try right clicking on anything you don’t want to see. If that doesn’t work, Google it and you’ll find a lot of solutions)
To my surprise, I’ve found my Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking. I basically never reboot except for updates. Meanwhile, my high spec Mac seems to bog down with a lot of multitasking over the course of a week. Reboot fixes it. I find myself wishing for the stability and consistency of the Windows machine, which is not something I ever expected.
> Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking
This has been true since the NT4 days where you could make that spinning rust beg for mercy under a heavily used page file and NT would never fall over.
macOS will complain fairly quickly after it's swap space runs out. And if you read /r/macos or /r/mac, you'll see that happens with innocuous programs as well as 1st party Apple apps like Pages/Music. There's a memory leak in userland across a wide variety of apps in macOS right now.
Not so fast. I really like the form factor of the Surface Pro and appreciate that a proper PC build runs circles around Macs for gaming - but features like nano-texture displays on the MacBook Pro from Apple is yet another hardware improvement that are, for me, now table stakes. I would not consider daily driving a Windows laptop without that.
As for software, WSL2 is a step forward, but it's hard to beat a true native environment on my Mac. It's the modern version of "it just works" in the Mac vs PC debate.
I'll bite: after writing and using komorebi[1], it's very painful for me to go back to using software like yabai or aerospace - macOS programmatic UI interactions are just too slow, while on Windows they feel comparatively instant.
All of this is made possible for me as a developer by the excellent work Microsoft has done in providing Win32 bindings for Rust. If only Apple would provide the same.
I reckon it depends on what kind of experience you want from your OS: there may be a variant that works for you already.
Take me for example. I want my OS to GTFO of my way. It's a toolbox, like the one a carpenter would carry around. I use the applications on it (the saw, hammer, nails etc.), not the OS itself (the carpenter toolbox).
In my case, the Enterprise LTO (or whatever it's called) is almost exactly what I need but the consumer variants are constantly trying to "help" me with shit I don't want.
You use windows because you have to not because you want to. I was a Mac only user for decades but now run Mac laptops and Windows towers just to use Nvidia cards for 3D, CUDA simulation and processing and AI.
Ended up getting back into PC games too as a side effect so that keeps me on the windows side too but if it wasn’t for Adobe and Cinema4D being windows I’d use Linux.
Crazy using both because some things on windows, file browsing, file manipulation, image thumbnails, unzipping, copying etc are all so dog slow compared to Mac yet when you run something like Octane Render you truly see what the same hardware is capable of. It’s kinda sickening.
> Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA.
They got laid off in 2014. MS relies more on insiders, early update roll outs, automated testing.
I'm still on Windows 10 so can't comment on the state of 11, but I feel like I see a good number of headlines about botched updates. The recent 24h2 screwed up users that had Ubisoft software installed and caused them to pause roll out.
In October an update caused systems to get into a bluescreen loop requiring a rollback.
The fact that they're pushing people to 11 this year and stopping 10, when 11 is still having "teething" issues is not good.
Win 98 was basically perfect imo... Everything about that UI was simple and predictable. Menus were descriptive and information dense. No unnecessary widgets and fancy UI.
If you're looking for pure productivity then Win 98 was great. XP and 7 were great too, but they had more unnecessary UI junk while becoming overly minimalistic where it matters. I strongly disagreed with removing the "Start" button and replacing it with the four squares button for example. And presumably they only did that because some UI dude thought it looked better... It's not like modern screens don't have room for the text.
Kind of insane that the right-click menu took about 2 seconds to show up after right-clicking on the desktop. I don't know if it was ever fixed, but that was my impression after trying to understand Windows 10.
With some customisations from the default settings the Windows 10 start menu works best for me, better than Windows 7, better than Windows 11.
Scrollable folder view on the left, pane of shortcuts on the right. Sure they're the panels from Windows 8 but they work really well. I can right click on most icons on the panel and either open a document or go into a specific configuration easily and directly. For example Terminal and Putty.
Back then, when I was using Windows my Start Menu was empty, I just used Search all the time. Of course, you have to disable all the other search features like web search and suggestions etc.
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I can't wait for Ableton to (eventually) get their thumbs out of their asses and make Ableton work on Linux so I can dump Windows fully.
Written from my Linux X1 Carbon which also somehow magically works on my patio, don't ask me how.
I don't like Windows 11. WSL2 is just about an acceptable Linux, but I don't like how there's no memory ballooning. I had to disable all the sleeping network access mechanisms to make it not run out of battery when suspended. Windows 11 is ugly and unpleasant to use in large part because of the proliferation of different UI themes over the years, which they can't easily remove due to how third party software plugs into things - multiple control panels, multiple Explorer menus, etc.
As soon as there is a solid Linux implementation (ideally Debian-flavoured) with competent power management I will switch. That may be a long while off though.
I'm running it on the latest zenbook S14, on the ultra 7. Great battery life, and no problems entering/exiting sleep mode.
It's a huge step up from Cygwin, too, since it's a proper Linux instead of just POSIX compatibility.
If you want a fun rabbit hole, look into how the WSL2 and 1 interact with Windows. WSL1 was a whole new shell around the NT Kernel. WSL2 is more of a VM, but using the Plan 9 (yes, that plan 9) filesystem implementation to talk with Windows.
Have seen that a few times from different people.
It fixes the forced reboots? Or are these a thing of the past?
Windows 7 was my turning point, moving away from dual boot, something I have been doing since installing Slackware 2.0 on that 1995's summer.
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After using Macs M1 and M2 I can't see how people can buy these laptops. This is massively worse experience.
Using a 2021 MBP M1 Pro MBP instead of the $3000 turd my outfit said I needed to use. It’s faster and doesn’t fuck up.
Funnily enough, I see the same thing playing out with computers, operating systems, the internet, and video games. People identify the peak as some time when they were younger and it was all new and exciting. Everything was downhill since then.
Talk to younger people and they’ll already tell you that Windows 10 was actually the GOAT and they won’t comprehend any fascination with Windows XP. That was the junky old OS they had to deal with on old computers once.
People hated Vista, and loved 7. Yet 7 was really just vista with a bit of polish. What changed is when 7 came out the average computer capabilities had gone up significantly.
People hated 8, but loved 10. The only real difference between the two is MS dropping the weird tablet mode that nobody wanted/asked for.
People currently hate 11, I suspect 12 will be loved mostly because MS will back off a bit on some of the new innovative UI changes and advertising everywhere.
Personally I thought the first twenty-five years of SNL were great, and it is good recently.
I'm reminded of how much people hated it when it came out. Post Vista it was widely liked. A lot of people are also nostalgic of 7 now. I wonder if we'll have a batch of people nostalgic for 10 or 11 in a decade in the same vein. I doubt it, but who knows. The old rule was "every other release is loved/hated", which held until at least 10 (8 was hated, 10 was somewhat accepted). I also remember that 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows".
For those in the know, that was great. Windows XP + classic theme + drivers (even if you had to find the W2k drivers) was incredibly stable and performant.
But it took a few years for games to catch up and get the updates, and so for the "tech oriented" crowd (which were often gamers), it took a bit to catch on.
But its longevity is a tribute to how "good it was" and how hard it was to improve from it. Vista introduced more stability at the expense of requiring new drivers, so they re-released Vista a few years later as 7 (there's really no major differences between Vista and 7 except a few years of upgrades to drivers and hardware).
The five years between XP and Vista certainly didn't help matters, either. If you wait that long, you better be willing to support it for decades. Windows XP's last update was 18 years after it was shipped.
That rule can always be gamed too, heh. I felt it went 8 bad, 8.1 good, 10 bad. Then 11 broke the pattern.
I have a desktop that still runs all tripe-A games and is my main development machine running win10 that MS says is a boat anchor come the fall; this will be my last windows machine.
Microsoft has been pretty good to me as a developer (despite some of the technologies intentionally designed to do nothing but distract and consume attention) but the consumer side is a pathological shit-show and appears to really hate people (or at least love money more). MS looks a lot like the White House these days.
This may be netlore at this point, but IIRC, a big reason why XP pushed for product keys was for cancelled experiments with subscription pricing (or at least updates for paying customers only). That plug was pulled before launch due to lack of widespread broadband infrastructure for the downloads. Continuous updates are a nightmare enabled by modern CDNs and cable.
What was wrong with Windows 7? Windows Vista was poorly designed but it wasn't intentionally user-hostile. I don't remember the bloatware and design gimmicks starting until Windows 8.
And installing the new version required 20+ 3.5 inch 'floppies'
3.1 was a white box. 95 was sky and clouds. 98 was more cloudy clouds. NT 4.0 was sky turning into space.
You can imagine my disappointment when ME and 2k were just white boxes.
Very tangential, but I had the same kind of intrigue for Maxis games where SIM was stylized as a colour and the game name with its own font.
Kick rocks, by the way.
I can think of one scenario only - You have a desktop app or drivers that you want to ensure will work in the upcoming non-beta, so getting a head start would be good I suppose.
But for anyone else, why would you test software for free from a trillion dollar company that have a bit of a track record now of hostility towards users.
This isn't a troll, I'm a Windows 11 user myself. I am genuinely at a loss.
Edit: I'm being a dumbass (on first coffee as I write this), there's plenty of reasons why people would download a beta... I was thinking from my perspective only!
(Unless there's some new feature you're really looking forward to. But I'm not aware of many of them.)
I did it once, many years ago, for Windows 10 and my printer started printing out garbage in multiple pages no matter what you printed. At that time I used the printer quite frequently. I'd had no issues until then.
I remember checking to see if printer issues were a thing in that build and they weren't listed.
That was it for me.
I remember that betas of Windows XP were amazing, mind-blowing for those who hadn't seen Windows 2000.
To be honest the multiple times a week updates requiring restart (which is the entire point) are the biggest drawback. I rarely encounter bugs in my daily work.
I know that Windows gets a hard (justified?) time for stability and whatnot these days but it's been pretty solid for me so I forget sometimes.
Or being able to customize the Explorer context menu. They were on the right track by pushing the old context menu into a separate second menu. But they should allow the user to select what shows in the primary menu instead of the seemingly random stuff that shows there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDUQrC5YxT0
FilePlot is very quick.
Ps I do absolutely hate the split of the context menu in two parts because many frequent operations have now become two clicks instead of one. Luckily it can be switched off at home but sadly not on my work laptop. I didn't imagine any power user would be happy with what change.
What does that mean - group policy has many fewer policies? Why would Microsoft do that - it is only used in organizations with IT departments, and they definitely want to automate and lock down configuration.
now what _I_ want, is to be able to resize the taskbar again.
also, I would prefer win11 didn't disable just about everything I had configured, particularly preview for file types. and - I dont know how they did it, but basic file explorer view feels much slower than win10,on the same machine. given that file explorer is basically all windows boils down to, i am not happy that they tske efforts to make it crappier. and given that win95 was able to show a file grid in 1995, I wonder how they are able to screw that up, 30 years later?
I'd settle for having the real taskbar shown in Teams screen sharing instead of having the time rolled back to the time Teams started, or something.
When I dare I dream of proper renaming experience inside of a OneDrive folder, without overriding me while typing. But that must be too much for the developers nowadays, unbearable difficulty! Me the humble servant of MS might must shut up.
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Their best bet is to use the relatively reputable ExplorerPatcher. However, using ExplorerPatcher requires fiddling with your antivirus settings and weakening your PC's security, so maybe trying to live with the new normal is better?
https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_11#/media/File:Windows...
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm happy with my Linux desktops and Mac laptops. They're interoperable, using Macs are trouble free 99.99% of the time, and my Linux desktops just work.
Life is good, at last.
It's a powershell GUI over power shell scripts overseen by one talented windows engineer with contributions from hundreds.
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
There are youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisTitusTech
It's a simple way to declutter windows 10 and or 11, build custom stripped install images, install useful utilities and dev environs, etc.
For any that care to look under the hood (and there are a number) it's open and transparent and a good way to get that Windows VM image for hosted OS's, gameplay, Qubes OS, etc.
https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
If you must, of course.
I stick to Linux.
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But..... the predatory nature of Windows and the half-ass revisions done to the UI elements, with decades-old applications with the legacy UI that can still be accessed directly, makes Windows a mess. To add to this, The hold that Microsoft has on Windows is so nasty that it keeps overriding settings like default browsers and applications, to favor Microsoft-built apps like Edge, along with the heavy telemetry just leads this platform to be a mess. It is not a clean system at all, and even sometimes pales in comparison to Linux Desktop, let alone OSX.
I'd give my interest in Hell for a successor to the Axiotron ModBook, and if the Wacom Movink 13 had a screen resolution to compeat w/ the 3K OLED on my GB3, I'd give up on having a battery and have it and a Mac Mini, so that I could get back to something like to my NeXT Cube w/ Wacom ArtZ (which was paired w/ an NCR-3125 running PenPoint for portability).
So yeah, the hardware on the Windows side is better suited to some folks, and I agree that the software really, really needs work. Things I miss:
- Miller Column File Browser
- Services
- emacs shortcuts when using a keyboard
- TeXshop and other Cocoa apps
Things which annoy me on Windows
- the need to keep Settings open and toggle how the stylus behaves
- not being able to select text in most web browsers (Firefox and derivatives at least still have a working configuration for allowing this)
- the need to manage various settings to keep ads and Copilot from intruding
That said, having a Wacom One paired w/ my MacBook works pretty well, it's just not something I can use away from my desk.
They did this in Windows 2000. Now Microsoft and Windows are only showing what they are _not_ capable of.
The default installation is annoying, but I can go from a clean install to having the annoying widgets cleaned up in a few minutes (hint: Try right clicking on anything you don’t want to see. If that doesn’t work, Google it and you’ll find a lot of solutions)
To my surprise, I’ve found my Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking. I basically never reboot except for updates. Meanwhile, my high spec Mac seems to bog down with a lot of multitasking over the course of a week. Reboot fixes it. I find myself wishing for the stability and consistency of the Windows machine, which is not something I ever expected.
This has been true since the NT4 days where you could make that spinning rust beg for mercy under a heavily used page file and NT would never fall over.
macOS will complain fairly quickly after it's swap space runs out. And if you read /r/macos or /r/mac, you'll see that happens with innocuous programs as well as 1st party Apple apps like Pages/Music. There's a memory leak in userland across a wide variety of apps in macOS right now.
As for software, WSL2 is a step forward, but it's hard to beat a true native environment on my Mac. It's the modern version of "it just works" in the Mac vs PC debate.
All of this is made possible for me as a developer by the excellent work Microsoft has done in providing Win32 bindings for Rust. If only Apple would provide the same.
[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
Take me for example. I want my OS to GTFO of my way. It's a toolbox, like the one a carpenter would carry around. I use the applications on it (the saw, hammer, nails etc.), not the OS itself (the carpenter toolbox).
In my case, the Enterprise LTO (or whatever it's called) is almost exactly what I need but the consumer variants are constantly trying to "help" me with shit I don't want.
Additionally I guess this weeks announcements prove the point Apple has given up to Windows and Linux mindshare, the composable desktop space.
Ended up getting back into PC games too as a side effect so that keeps me on the windows side too but if it wasn’t for Adobe and Cinema4D being windows I’d use Linux.
Crazy using both because some things on windows, file browsing, file manipulation, image thumbnails, unzipping, copying etc are all so dog slow compared to Mac yet when you run something like Octane Render you truly see what the same hardware is capable of. It’s kinda sickening.
Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA.
You are their QA!
They got laid off in 2014. MS relies more on insiders, early update roll outs, automated testing.
I'm still on Windows 10 so can't comment on the state of 11, but I feel like I see a good number of headlines about botched updates. The recent 24h2 screwed up users that had Ubisoft software installed and caused them to pause roll out.
In October an update caused systems to get into a bluescreen loop requiring a rollback.
The fact that they're pushing people to 11 this year and stopping 10, when 11 is still having "teething" issues is not good.
it is not even nostalgia, it just worked.
If you're looking for pure productivity then Win 98 was great. XP and 7 were great too, but they had more unnecessary UI junk while becoming overly minimalistic where it matters. I strongly disagreed with removing the "Start" button and replacing it with the four squares button for example. And presumably they only did that because some UI dude thought it looked better... It's not like modern screens don't have room for the text.
Also 98/2000 had a file search that actually worked, even if it was slow. XP added an animated dog to it.
Scrollable folder view on the left, pane of shortcuts on the right. Sure they're the panels from Windows 8 but they work really well. I can right click on most icons on the panel and either open a document or go into a specific configuration easily and directly. For example Terminal and Putty.