Macs are too expensive for the same performance/ram, and Linux still can't run proper creative software.

Macs are circling down the same drain.

Games

Because they suck.

I use a blend of Windows, MacOS, iOS and Linux.

Each is good at its own thing. I don't understand the game of picking exactly one hill to die on.

I spend about 60% of my time on Apple operating systems, and 40% elsewhere. Windows really does suck from a UX perspective, but if you are trying to make money doing things professionally with a computer, it's hard to beat. Running outlook and office on Mac just doesn't hit the same way.

macOS sucks! you need a ton of third party tools and customizations to make it sane for basic things like window management. It's no better than Windows with regards of ammount of tweaking needed for power users.

And it scans every executable and command run and sends a hash to motherbase. I don't know how people put up with this. There's probably some dangerous way to disable that like, let me guess, disabling SIP...

And it sucks at gaming.

Linux on the other hand is great for power users!

Because Windows works just fine for me.

I'm a dev, I don't game. No issues.

Why people find this hard to believe is kind of puzzling to be honest. As if everyone's experience simply HAS to match your own.

Beating is a normal English idiom. While I do sympathize with anyone suffering from abuse, I highly doubt anyone is actually suffering from use of the word.

Enough with the memes.

Reading the article without Firefox's reader mode is a pain. Maybe it's a secret plan of Mozilla to promote their browser.

The other thing is availability of alternatives.

Most standard users simply dont have an option. Mac Neo brought Apple into a lower price range, but requires a new device. Linux is there (and frankly fantastic at this point) but good luck getting the average person through the setup process.

I think managers were promoted for infecting their features with Copilot, and developers for infecting them with React, and here we are.

OneDrive managers on the other hand are one step away from inventing some way of adding a gacha mechanic.

> It’s quite common for companies to work their way up to the line of the most user hostile version of their product that users will tolerate.

this is in general how the market for pretty much everything works (sometimes 'users' are replaced by 'the regulator', but it doesn't matter too much).

lesson in there is 'majority of users don't care nearly as much as you think', usually.

The only way this get better is if the user gets to choose between an OS with ads, lock-in, telemetry etc. and then one with none of that.

As it is now, buying a laptop in a store is a "pick your poison" situation.

I find Teams is often simply picked because of cost reasons.

A lot of companies are paying for office and teams comes bundled with it. Why pay extra when its included?

Am I the only one who prefers Teams to the Slack/Zoom combo?

Completely agree. Not just govt, but everyone who interacts with govt, especially DoW. Meetings are on DoD teams. Proposals and updates must be Powerpoint. Memos in word. Windows to connect to some networks.

We tried not using Office or Windows. Ended up needing a laptop with Windows and Office anyway.

Note to MS Product Manager: this should not be a success story. I was once your biggest cheerleader, now I am so desperate to get away from you that I am starting to look at Google as my savior.

We could say that Microsoft never lost its way in that regard, it has always been predatory.

Where it lost its way however is Microsoft actually cared about Windows, it was their flagship product after all. It was terrible in some aspects, but also excellent in some others. I particular, they took compatibility very seriously, which is far from an easy task in the wild PC ecosystem. They were also quite good in the UI/UX department. The Office suite was unmatched too, I tried a few alternative, none of them came close.

Now, they completely broke their UI/UX, and that's not just the ads, forced Copilot stuff, etc... It is pure incompetence. They still have good compatibility, but it is not as impressive of a feat as it once was, as apps today are naturally more portable because of all the abstraction layers (performance be damned, but that's another story). The traditional Office suite is still good, but they are in the process of sabotaging it with web-based apps that remove tons of features without actually simplifying anything.

It's a bit baffling to me that people are talking about Microsoft "losing their way" as if they ever operated differently. They have always been user-hostile if it increased next quarter's outlook. There's a clear continuing thread from the Halloween files ("DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run") in the 90's via antitrust probes in the 00s, the handling of Skype and Teams in the 10s, and now Copilot -- and that's ignoring all the mishandling on the business side of things (e.g. forcing Dynamics cloud migrations, Power Platform in a permanent state of unworthiness, the customary rug pulling via user license changes, constantly renaming products).

Microsoft being good to their customers is the anomaly, not the other way around.

I don't really see that happening here.

Microsoft doesn't have any trust to lose, and they won't be gaining any by this move.

That is the one advantage they have in all of this. Their public image is as bad as it can get.

This is one of the areas that annoy me due to how limp microsoft is with the requirements...

Either give a solid set of requirements that let a dev assume things about a windows 11 system (good hardware security, in particular), or fuck off entirely.

have you thought about switching to another OS?

Funny thing: I wanted to try out Copilot to help with creating a starting point for a diagram in Visio.

Copilot isn't in Visio (at least in the subscription my work pays for).

I used Copilot's chat interface instead, and it is unable to generate a diagram in the Visio .vsdx format; it tried, failed, tried to fix it, failed.

Sigh.

I don't think the fix is released yet, except for Insider builds.

no, the big news is that finally they have the intention to do it