Microsoft keeps insisting that it’s deeply committed to the quality of Windows 11
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The thing is though, AI depends heavily on developer tooling. It does not write machine code, generally speaking. And yet Microsoft have cut developer tooling to the bone (and then cut some more). So you have barely one person maintaining core tooling on which everything else depends.
When I say Microsoft is unserious about AI this is what I mean. They seem to want to chase the money but have zero clue about how to form a sustainable business around it. That said, Microsoft do have so much money and so much client inertia that they can keep going for a long time regardless of what they do.
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Committed to quality, like in how they keep obscuring settings in the Settings app without moving the functionality over from the Win98-era dialogs that are now five times harder to get to, because you wanted Settings, right? Did you want Settings? How about a Bing Search for Settings? Copilot recommends this for Settings. Would you like to make Edge your default browser? Earn Bing Rewards! Try Copilot today.
All this and you still have to find Audio Devices (in its Win98 dialog glory) to actually set the goddamn speaker configuration, because it'll randomly revert to stereo, because not only does Settings let you do very little in the way of useful things and get in the way of the thing you do want to find, the underlying functionality itself is brittle.
I'm gonna stop there because hoo boy after the week I've had arguing with a goddamn terrible Surface, I could burn my whole evening on this one rant, and it's too big and wide and beautiful a world not to leave space in my heart to rant about everything else
All this and you still have to find Audio Devices (in its Win98 dialog glory) to actually set the goddamn speaker configuration, because it'll randomly revert to stereo, because not only does Settings let you do very little in the way of useful things and get in the way of the thing you do want to find, the underlying functionality itself is brittle.
I'm gonna stop there because hoo boy after the week I've had arguing with a goddamn terrible Surface, I could burn my whole evening on this one rant, and it's too big and wide and beautiful a world not to leave space in my heart to rant about everything else
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checks watch Almost five years.
That's a lot of tech debt to work through, but I wish them luck with it.
That's a lot of tech debt to work through, but I wish them luck with it.
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Suggested B Headline:
Because one of them is actually right, and the other is propagandist corporate bullshit.
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Between now the end of their "commitment of quality", I fear there will be many more updates breaking things as they "move fast" to the end of that goal.
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My household has been Windows free for many years. Linux Mint is my preferred O/ S. Stable and fast.
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How about, Whoa, i can drag the task bar up so i can have another row so my apps don't overflow into a horrible overflow area where every Citrix app looks the same, just the Citrix icon.
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Nora Lenderbee
Ars Tribunus Militum
[From my Win-11 tweak notes: Disable CoPilot]
gpedit.msc group policies... Local computer policy User configuration Admin templates Windows components Windows Copilot (Policy) "Turn off Windows Copilot" enabled.
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It's embarrasing for Microsoft. It's lliterally the operating system, the way we're supposed to access files, but they have the worst way to do it (file explorer) and the answer is to hide options deeper and deeper in sub menus. How humiliating.
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Microsoft has built infrastructure allowing large corporations to manage huge fleets of PCs easily and effectively. They also have collaboration tools (Outlook email and calendaring, Teams, Onedrive, etc) that integrate very well with each other and with Microsoft's cloud IaaS and SaaS systems very well, right along with the ability to manage all these in one user profile along with the user's hardware and mobile apps. If you have thousands of employees, it becomes very difficult to manage an IT fleet at that scale. That's Microsoft's true "moat" that no one else is even close to touching.
I've Google Workspace and Microsoft Office both. Google's stuff is garbage compared to Microsoft's Office. Yes, the Office Apps are also degrading in quality - Outlook, which I live in for hours every day at work, has become really bloated and slow, and Copilot search is literally useless, yet the Calendaring, integration with Planner (which is great for group projects), and other features still make it the only game in town.
Teams has become better ever since they have ditched the Electron version of it. It's not GREAT, but it works fine - I have 4-5 meetings every day, including with multiple outside clients, and I've never had problems with it unlike Google Meet (browser-based, so any browser issues break it), WebEx (glitchy, slow), or Zoom (which used to be tight and light-weight but now is not).
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XSportSeeker
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Microsoft keeps insisting that it’s deeply committed to the quality of Windows 11 incompetent
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Exposé in Panther, Spotlight in Tiger.
On Windows, Aero Snap in Win7 was nice. Seemed like Windows finally understood what windows were for.
I told you, Microsoft, my neighbor hooks me up.
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Recall was the last straw for me. Sure, I use Windows at work plenty, but for home use not so much anymore.
One of my relatives recently asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. They are not terribly computer literate but they are comfortable with their iPhone. I could not think of a reason to even suggest a Windows laptop. This is coming from someone who has used Windows personally and professionally for over thirty years.
As a previous poster said, this will come back to bite them. I have to believe it already is.
One of my relatives recently asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. They are not terribly computer literate but they are comfortable with their iPhone. I could not think of a reason to even suggest a Windows laptop. This is coming from someone who has used Windows personally and professionally for over thirty years.
As a previous poster said, this will come back to bite them. I have to believe it already is.
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My Wife is on Mac OS on a MacBook Air but my son won't leave Windows any time soon unfortunately. For his gaming he still plays some games with anti-cheat stuff that just doesn't work on Linux. Not his primary games right not but still games he's not willing to give up access to. I'm happy to not be interested in playing those games so they aren't a roadblock for me and not a fan of the anti cheat stuff even on windows. I could definitely see those games being hold outs on the Linux side of things as realistically there's nothing the community can do to get them running correctly.
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Enshittification is built into end stage capitalism, just like unemployment, endless boom and bust cycles, and habitat destruction. Products are designed backwards, beginning with marketing potential and addressing utility only incidentally, if at all. In terms of our economic system, the sole reason we do anything at all is to sell it. There is no intrinsic value in such a system – only a price tag.
Having defined the meaning of life as consumption, this is inevitable. We and are environment are a chemical reaction, and the conservation of matter applies. We as a species alter everything we swallow, then (often immediately) excrete it. You can't eat everything without also shitting on everything. We call this "profit," though in the last analysis, it profits very few.
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Just give me the Windows 7 UI with Windows 11 back end. Call it Microsoft Classic and be done.
I don't hate Windows 11, but they seemed to change some things just to change them, not to make it better, and some things actually make it worse.
I don't hate Windows 11, but they seemed to change some things just to change them, not to make it better, and some things actually make it worse.
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I second Aero snap. Love the added snap it bar on windows 11
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Realistically speaking, Linux is accessible to a very modest minority of the people who want to use a computer. Yes, they could learn; no, they won't. Much of this is that Linux isn't marketed in any usual sense, whereas its alternatives spend billions annually lying to the general public. In terms of scams, "it just works" and its variants are right up there with believing that any idiot who can acquire a gun is part of "a well regulated militia." It never has, does not now, and never will just work. "It" requires attention, study, understanding, and maintenance, and nearly all attempts to reduce this overhead result in greater complexity and therefore greater overhead.
Some of us are old. Microsoft has been a horror since its inception, and Apple has long since followed it down the rabbit hole of greed that goes nowhere but into the marketing sewer. Both are now to information technology what AT&T was once to telephony: stultifying enemies of innovation and utility. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are regarded as among the greatest genius/heroes of their age. Linus Torvalds is at best a footnote, and never mind that the internet runs on his work. This is capitalism: a system where every thought, feeling, idea, molecule, and erg has a price tag, and nothing has any intrinsic value, including life itself.
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I kind'a have to disagree - I'm pretty sure we're way past the post where "anything at all" is not nearly enough.
The whole "a step in the right direction" works when you made a mistake...maybe two, so you take a step back and do the right thing...when you ran a marathon in the opposite direction - you better do a LOT more than just a step if you want to gain back what you lost over the last few years.
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I have to use Win11 at work - it was that or Mac, and since I had 0 relevant Mac experience (last use was a horrid experience in 1993), I decided on a Lenovo with Win11. Without Hotkey desktop_switcher, PowerToys to keep the machine from auto-lock (for some reason, there's a problem with the IT setting, and without it, it locks itself within 45 seconds on inactivity when it's supposed to be 10 minutes), and lately, Alt-Drag, it would be barely usable, having adjusted to KDE desktop for most things at home.
Win10 will be the last windows version for our HTPC and gaming machines, then Bazzite (will probably investigate later this year for at least one machine), etc..
Win10 will be the last windows version for our HTPC and gaming machines, then Bazzite (will probably investigate later this year for at least one machine), etc..
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Wide-screen monitors. Why would I ever want to use valuable vertical real estate?
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Apple releases a dirt cheap, "good enough" laptop.
A week later MS yells, again, "WE'RE GOING TO MAKE WINDOWS LESS SHITTY!!!!"
Yeah, too late. My last reason to stay on Windows was my CAD software, and the M5 should run it faster and with less crap than Windows.
A week later MS yells, again, "WE'RE GOING TO MAKE WINDOWS LESS SHITTY!!!!"
Yeah, too late. My last reason to stay on Windows was my CAD software, and the M5 should run it faster and with less crap than Windows.
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Utterly by chance, last night I happened to watch a YouTube video by a lady who's been getting into Linux for the last year or two, that decided to do a "Let's try installing Windows 11, just to see how that goes, and see how I feel about it now that I can fumble along in Linux about as well as I did in Windows 10" type of review.
She found -- after she finally managed to get rid of all the bloat, the ads, Recall, and the AI -- that it (Windows 11) was not bad, and all-in-all she mostly liked it fine... but based on her description the process, and basically not having touched Windows at all since Windows 7, I found her account rather horrifying.
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edit: Having read the comments now, let me also note that she had some very nice things to say about the Windows11 DeBloat powershell script.
edit 2: for clarity
She found -- after she finally managed to get rid of all the bloat, the ads, Recall, and the AI -- that it (Windows 11) was not bad, and all-in-all she mostly liked it fine... but based on her description the process, and basically not having touched Windows at all since Windows 7, I found her account rather horrifying.
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edit: Having read the comments now, let me also note that she had some very nice things to say about the Windows11 DeBloat powershell script.
edit 2: for clarity
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I can help with that! This is the current layout of my workspace, my center monitor is very wide. There is a ton of wasted space because I can't dock the taskbar on the left side of my center monitor where it used to be on Windows 10. MS finally fixing this and restoring the classic behavior will be a very welcome development to users such as myself.
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Windows Vista was great!
There were so many more-than-decent, used computers available -- cheap --, that ran any "user-friendly" Linux distro like a demon (especially all the "Vista Ready" PCs that turned out to be not actually "Vista ready" in practice, when Vista was finally released). Even if you had to throw in a more Linux-compatible graphics card and bluetooth, it was well worth the trouble.
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UX-wise, there are still things I like way better about Explorer than Finder. It is getting somehow both full of cruft and less functional over time though.
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For those too young to remember, there was a time when we Windows users looked forward to updates. They fixed bugs and added cool new features that we found useful. User interface changes increased ease of use and intuitiveness...if that's a word. Browser improvements, Office improvements. yada yada yada. I'm not sure what year is all turned to $%$! but we now dread updates. This isn't just a Microsoft thing...it's a tech bro thing.
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Then watch them manage to “fix” it by only letting you pin it to the left edge of the left-most monitor. It’s always the monkey paw with this lot.
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Sorry, Microsoft.
I switched to Linux (Bazzite) full time a few months ago. You can have a small portion of one of my SSD’s, but I don’t trust you. At all.
(Not sorry.)
I switched to Linux (Bazzite) full time a few months ago. You can have a small portion of one of my SSD’s, but I don’t trust you. At all.
(Not sorry.)
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Notepad.exe hung (infinite spinner, no close response, required Task Manager force kill) for the first ever time in my lifetime.
It was some network stall, and I blame it on CoPilot.
And I have been using Notepad since Windows version 3.0 in 1991 the one before 3.1!
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QuarterSwede
Ars Praetorian
The nail in the Windows coffin for me was realizing that the file transfer dialog window is largely slowing down the process. On the same hardware and dual booting into Debian moving the same file was instant. On Windows it dutifully showed me its move dialog window with its fancy speed graph … which is literally doesn’t need to do.
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internet2000
Ars Centurion
I wonder if this mea culpa note is at least in part a response to the MacBook Neo. Microsoft has to understand consumers have actual choices now, between Chromebooks and Macs, to get a computer that doesn't nag.
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Fun fact, a W11 quality update is currently bricking my 2 yr old Asus laptop. Every time it installs, my laptop gets stuck in a death spiral where it locks up some seconds after windows boots. They did.... something... that's breaking my video drivers. At first I thought it was a virus, but nope. It's just Windows.
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Andrew Cunningham said:
According to The Large Book of Clichés, the appropriate one for today is "Actions speak louder than words."
Sometimes I eat at restaurants and I wish them well so leave feedback. (There are also the few rare meals where I can't stop thinking about them months later.) If I leave feedback for a small restaurant (say where 1-2 people do all the cooking) and when I return a month or two later, have found no improvement, then I abandon them.
It's far easier to declare that you'll change rather than actually changing so I'm immediately sceptical when people announce future improvements in such a fashion because too many times, the improvements never materialise.
Along those lines, I know Ars readers lately have been irritated that I've been overusing images and smilies. I promise to do better in future.
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I suspect this is actually a common pattern for much-beloved power user features that get removed or changed in popular software.
Developers frequently fall into the trap of assuming their telemetry is returning a representative sample, but there's a very strong correlation between "turning off telemetry" and "changing the defaults" in the user population.
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Nah, people shouldn't have to buy a product to replace a previously-functional one.
To add features that aren't useful to the common user? Sure. There's a lot of things I'll do that someone like my mom won't.
Buy it for mom because the built-in file explorer doesn't work well anymore for exploring files? No.
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Disclosure as always - I work for Microsoft.
I know it's probably not a real answer to your complaint, but Windows does have a newer file system that supports CoW. It's ReFS. However, and I suspect this is the problem, it's not supported as the boot volume, only for data. (For example, ReFS is the foundation of Dev Drive.) Recently, we did announce support for ReFS Boot for Windows Server in the Insider program.
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