Microsoft keeps insisting that it’s deeply committed to the quality of Windows 11

"Reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points" is one of Microsoft's action items.

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[Stern]

Desktop notifications on Windows have always been dogshit (why do I need to manually dismiss them after handing whatever triggered the notification?), but incredibly Microsoft have managed to make them even worse. Just recently Windows has started regurgitating notifications which were triggered and dismissed several hours ago.

The general decline in quality started long before the AI fad, but while Microsoft have never been able to design anything that was not annoying, things generally worked, and I've never heard a good explanation for what changed. The company has been MBA-driven for god knows how long, so that's not the reason, at least by itself. Have all of the "old guard" left or been marginalized out?

 

[Stern]

And when it comes down to it, they still haven't implemented per app sandboxing as standard or dumped old insecure APIs. Windows is a very dated OS at this point and they're not doing much to fight tech debt.

Backwards compatibility is the only thing Windows has going for it, so that's never going to happen.

 

[Stern]

It's funny, all the Linux distros I've used came with free upgrades and none of them seemed to feel the need to shove advertising in my face.

Ubuntu advertise their "Pro" client at least once per day when starting a new shell, and almost every time when I run apt.

 

[Stern]

What does that look like? I run Ubuntu as well and I haven't noticed any advertisements for "Pro" clients?

When you start a shell and it lists the number of updates available, it also says how many ESM updates would be available with a Pro license, and when you list the available updates with apt, it lists them separately under "The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with 'esm-apps' enabled:"

It's not difficult to disable this in apt's config, but it's enabled by default.