It's so out of touch, people hate it.
People want a simple, clean, minimal, consistent OS that does not have anyone's interests first except the user. Windows 11 is a very, very long way from this.
Honestly Windows 95 is closer to ideal than Windows 11.
The state of Windows is: disaster.
On the other hand YouTube tries to serve me content I want so maybe thats just the algo talking.
However, they will continue to use it so MS does not need to worry about them.
I've no idea about leaders as those do not write here much. As for "influencers" - my golden rule is to research subject I am having doubts about and pay zero attention to what so called "influencers" say.
Provided I only largely use my PC for gaming.
...and you're mostly right.
Valve has made Linux gaming a thing. So, even normies are trying it…
As everyone points out when talking about Linux usability, it's fine for your grampa who just uses the email client and browser, but those users are switching to tablets, en masse, anyway. It's obviously fine for technically savvy users who are willing to deal with the periodic breakage or other hassle.
Importantly, It's just a bad experience for users who require hardware, software or something else that tablets don't facilitate, but aren't interested in looking through stack overflow posts and reddit threads to see why the 6 year old tutorial for getting their video editing software to work doesn't apply to the distro they just installed because they couldn't figure out how to install their video card drivers on the other distro. And why does that program they used to use to control their firewall not change anything anymore (which to them just looks like the firewall doesn't work, so they can never research their way out of the problem?) And how do I [insert the bazillion other problems that are non-issues for people with the background knowledge, but for everyone else, frustrating, time-wasting brick walls that probably cost them more in lost billable time than multiple copies of Windows 11 Pro.]
I've been using Linux since the 90s but I still don't use it for a lot of my media work. It's just too much of a PITA when I just need to satisfy my use case, which has nothing to do with the OS.
Even the commercial distros like RHEL are just, comparatively... janky. I really wish it was easier to integrate more interface design expertise into FOSS development. The workflows are just super different. This is why commercial products have product managers that can objectively balance and coordinate the efforts between design and development. I think we've gotten to a point where more of the FOSS crowd sees the benefit of competent expert UI designers, but making that practically useful is a tough nut to crack.
I wonder how much research went into Windows 11, or 10 or 8 for that matter, and to what ends that research was made.
Now, the same way Windows serves Microsoft’s AI investments, Apple serves a nebulous corporate goal for inimitable (read: too unpredictable/unreliable for competitors to copy) Liquid [Gl]ass user interfaces at the expense of clarity, and launch speed at the expense of stability.
I’m not sure if Steve Jobs would have complained about the market capitalization - but he certainly would have executed product improvements more cleanly.
It’s not yet the year of Linux on desktop, I don’t think - but we get closer every year.
For me it is. I was already considering going back to Linux for a while, and MacOS Tahoe pushed me over the fence. Got a Thinkpad with Linux as a replacement for my MacBook some months ago and don’t regret it yet.
It is if you want it to be. For me it was 1996 - been doing great on Linux since then.
my pc is not even that old, its ryzen 9 5900x with rtx 3080 and 32gb ram. however it is sluggish compared to my m1 pro macbook pro
That day is today (assuming you don't play games with kernel anti-cheat).
When Windows 2000 rolled around and I saw how stable it was, I went out and bought it to put on my gaming PC. Another friend from work laughed at me and told me how terrible "Windows NT" was for running games until he saw how smooth Starcraft ran on it.
Yeah, Windows 95/98/ME were terrible.
PS - Yes, Skeuomoric concepts age out, like Floppy Disk-Save Icons, but the concept still has merit. It can help "ground" the experience.
> “We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven’t been upgraded,” said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell’s slice of machines.
And that's ignoring the 500 million that can't upgrade due to TPM requirements or whatever.
https://www.theverge.com/news/831364/dell-windows-11-upgrade...
1. Microsoft doesn't make their money from Windows anymore. They make their money from services, like Azure and whatever they are calling their web-based Office this week. Windows is now mostly a telemetry-collection system for them, not a product.
2. People who hate Windows don't have a choice. Regular people are issued a PC and its OS from their employer, and can't change it. Consumers who buy low-end laptops for school or hobbies aren't going to pay twice as much for a Mac. And outside of HN, a vanishingly small number of people are even aware of Linux or other FOSS alternatives, much less have the ability to install and use it.
I'm hoping now that Microsoft seems like they might get serious about kicking people out of the kernel after the cloudstrike incident, kernel level anticheat may go away which will pave the way for Linux to completely take over.
I am trying it out today first and then reinstalling it with Linux. It seems its fully supported out of the box except the cam and fingerprint scanner: cam I never use, fingerprint scanner would be nice but I hear it is basically impossible to get working if not supported (and it is not).
I don't even use any advanced config, just bare-minimum config for the system, enough (project-specific things handled by nix).
The actual design of the Windows internals has mostly remained unchanged and continues to be improved. This is not much different than Linux being a design from the 70s. The critical bugs in Windows are due to newer additions to that base -- not the base itself.
But what everyone really hates is the "modern" technology has been piled on top of that Windows NT legacy not the legacy itself.
I find myself having to use the old control panel dialogs less and less -- but I'm also happy that they are still there.
I wrote a bit about this in an old comment:
> They have a lot of staff turnover too, and each generation of new SDE has less of a clue how the old stuff worked. So when they're tasked with replacing the old stuff, they don't understand what it does, and the rewrite ends up doing less.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472300
Also, a little bit after I left, they eliminated the SDET role. I have memories of encountering many SDETs who didn't know what they were doing. But the good ones kept the developers honest. Getting rid of a parallel org structure dedicated to testing for regressions etc. would certainly seem like a good explanation for a quality dip.
But many people who use Windows wouldn't want to move to a considerably new platform like macOS, which works quite differently. There is Linux, but then there are compatibility issues and driver issues and other things that are not great for the casual average user.
It feels like Windows could have been better off without being free, but being something like a buy once, keep forever solution, like the good old days. Today it has just turned into a complete toxic pit of mess that tracks you in every little thing you do and works against you to make sure that it maximizes profits for Microsoft and its partners. The usability is completely destroyed, alas.
The app is similar to what’s going in on windows.
Where that becomes frustrating is when you have a computer that isn’t well supported by Linux, things don’t work, battery is bad, you have to look up for ways to fix them and so on.
But if the « driver » support was as good as on windows, people could switch in 2 seconds.
My university computers ran Ubuntu, we were not computer nerd but civil engineering yet everyone adapted very quick.
All the rubbish from the last 20 years - ads, OneDrive, Copilot, Office upsells, Candy Crush in the start menu - it can just disappear, leaving a pretty stable system that hasn't actually changed much.
Apart from the awful control panels, anything else you don't like is probably replaceable. I really love startallback.com which brings back the regular start menu and lots of other little fixes.
Obviously everyone deserves a computer that doesn't try to sell to them CONSTANTLY, and I wish Windows were better out of the box. But it doesn't take much adjustment to get there.
You could also sail the seven seas and run an AutoKMS script, though that might (and probably will) include some malware.
Linux desktop environments remind me what TempleOS would look like if it was designed by committee.
Only difference is on Windows nobody wants those "features".
Same goes for day one Windows 10 (they probably didn't touch the relevant parts). I remember having to deal with a Windows 10 machine on an HDD, and it was mostly fine after it booted, but even clean installs on more recent version are just horrible. There's probably been some optimisation done which works fine on SSDs but just thrash HDDs, and HDDs as boot drives just aren't a thing anymore (within margin of error), so it didn't matter.
The fact that they've managed to throw so much bloat on top that even SSDs start struggling though, that really is something.
Probably also vibe tested.
I am led to believe from marketing that A.I. has all the answers and with Microsoft having the greatest A.I. don't they have all the answers?
I apologize in advance for my dumb.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46761061
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750358
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46656998
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011569
etc
WSL is a far better developer environment in Windows even for dotnet based development. I use it at work. It is fine.
Windows OS on the other hand is a mess. There are dedicated keyboard shortcut (win + c), keyboard buttons, buttons on desktop for copilot. Copilot is almost on every Microsoft software. I'm not getting the appeal of copilot at all.
Also, I have a personal gripe with a non-standard way of placing the Fn key - first of all, why keep it close to Ctrl, why? and on top of that, Lenovo & Microsoft and every other manufacturer have them in different positions on the keyboard.
Personally, I've worked pretty hard over the last few years to make sure that I can easily switch to a different OS. This means avoiding relying on Mac and Windows apps as much as possible, and most importantly having all of my data in portable formats that do not tie me to any specific software.
timpera•1h ago
tokyobreakfast•59m ago
timpera•57m ago
belval•55m ago
timpera•51m ago
jatari•43m ago
For instance, how do you change the key repeat delay in the modern UI? I have looked and I actually can't find a way to change it. I have to use control panel.
Just looking at the modern UI is an eyesore, there is so much empty space, a menu that should be a 600x400 rectangle takes up the entire screen. The information density is comically low. I have to scroll up and down this giant monitor sized list to find the one thing I am looking for. It's horrendous.
tokyobreakfast•37m ago
tokyobreakfast•43m ago
Settings is a slow, bloated mess, as you stated elsewhere missing many settings, and was in general designed by schizophrenics.
A primary reason for the sorry state of software today is the absolutely delusional priority that software should be "pretty" vs it being functional.
Send all the UI/UX wizards packing, give them a Starbucks apron where IMO they belong, and watch software usability and customer satisfaction improve over the next 5 years.
Telaneo•56m ago
They've been 'transitioning' away from the old control panel since Windows 8, and they're still nowhere near done. On the contrary, when I do find myself on a Windows machine, I just jump straight to the old settings rather than jump through the hoops of the new settings, since I don't have any confidence in the new settings to do anything when I need them to (honourable mention to Windows update. That's worked mostly fine for me, other than the two times it broke and just refused to update anything until I did some manual fix. All it needs now is an 'Never update automatically. Only update manually' button, but I don't expect Microslop to understand what consent is quite yet).
jasonjayr•36m ago
bberrry•54m ago
Koffiepoeder•46m ago
poolnoodle•49m ago