Microsoft makes it easier for Windows Insider testers to get new features
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The industry I work in is dominated by a giant cloud platform, and that's what our company uses for our clients. They quite literally got rid of their QA department a few years ago - one of the people on my team used to work for that department and was axed - and they rely on us to be their bug testers, and it's absolutely infuriating. I spend so much time creating tickets about their various bugs and UI/UX nonsense that I've long thought I should tell my employer that they should get said software company to pay some of my salary.
And look, I'm not a real software developer, but I know there's the concept of "dogfooding," and I'm confident that if they had actual people living in their software and seeing the inconsistencies and the bugs, they'd be better equipped to make their thing better. But they don't. And I'm in hell.
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For anyone who is still holding out hope that they're serious about this....
I highly recommend reading this: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
Aside from AI, Azure is their top priority and this is how they manage it, I shudder to think how the Windows side of things is looking these days.
I highly recommend reading this: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
Aside from AI, Azure is their top priority and this is how they manage it, I shudder to think how the Windows side of things is looking these days.
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As someone doing beta testing with MS products as far back as one could?
No thanks. Done. My house has been moving to linux over how bloody hostile things have been becoming.
You ignored every bit of feedback you guys didn't like during the insider program as your precious metrics said we were wrong.
No thanks. Done. My house has been moving to linux over how bloody hostile things have been becoming.
You ignored every bit of feedback you guys didn't like during the insider program as your precious metrics said we were wrong.
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The usual tech person reaction to Windows reminds me of switching to Linux in my university days. I was a proud nerd for a few weeks until I casually talked about it with my CS professor and he said "you are using Linux with a desktop environment??? Ewwww! You might as well go back to Windows or buy a Playstation. GUIs are just for silly games and people who can't type."
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More lies. This is what, the 8th time they've said they're newly committed to quality and things just kept getting worse?
There is absolutely no way for them to prioritize quality while being all in on AI and they're all in on AI until Slopya says otherwise.
There is absolutely no way for them to prioritize quality while being all in on AI and they're all in on AI until Slopya says otherwise.
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The decision to cut the testing budget was when things started to go downhill fast for MS, org wide. The company I loved started to die on that day, although it didn't become outwardly evident for a few years.
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Thankfully, they can now use copilot to generate increasingly damaging bugs faster with no pesky QA people to slow them down.
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What's the phrase? They should be taken seriously not literally. There used to be many hard core MS fans, partisans, apologists, clamping down, now the Linux posts go routinely unchallenged. Whether you agree with the posts or not, they're a symptom.
I'm glad Microsoft noticed that Windows and its users exist, because I'm stuck with it at work. But the whole approach is wrong. While MS was never perfect, they used to respond to consensus from their 'partners' who were invested in their success. They weren't consistent but they didn't mean to be consistent, they meant to please a large user base with backwards compatibility and the most options to keep things running.
Then they pivoted under Nadella, and suddenly their users became a hurdle to clear to satisfy investor agendas built around buzz and good vibes and chat app strategies. Microsoft became comfortable removing things without benefit to users or any long term plan. Azure was going to replace IT shops and people noticed. They sacrificed for the cloud and AI without an exit strategy for their old business, which continues on, zombie-like.
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20 years after adding multi-threading to Excel still not added to Word making big files sloooooow. Instead the put billions into crappy copilot.
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Remember back in the day when upgrading your OS basically required a fresh reformat, otherwise all sorts of issues would arise? I thought we'd moved past that around Windows 8.
Now my work PC has Windows 11 and Explorer crashes once per week, while things like the Snipping Tool work by shortcut one single time, and then never again afterwards until the PC is rebooted. It's absolute garbage.
And Copilot is by far the worst of the LLMs. The only advantage it has is to IT departments because it's pre-installed and most companies are already beholden to the Sharepoint/Azure environment. But it is absolutely terrible for users.
If I had my druthers, my work PC would be back on Windows 10 and I'd be using Claude.
Now my work PC has Windows 11 and Explorer crashes once per week, while things like the Snipping Tool work by shortcut one single time, and then never again afterwards until the PC is rebooted. It's absolute garbage.
And Copilot is by far the worst of the LLMs. The only advantage it has is to IT departments because it's pre-installed and most companies are already beholden to the Sharepoint/Azure environment. But it is absolutely terrible for users.
If I had my druthers, my work PC would be back on Windows 10 and I'd be using Claude.
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The funny thing about this is that early on the pivot was so good for cross platform adoption. We were all praising Nadella for implementing an official version of office on iOS.
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If you really want to go further back, the Windows NT 3.51 was the most stable; I ran that on multiple servers back in the day and never had a problem. Their UI sucked until they grafted the newer Win95 UI but they did not fuck up the underlying architecture.
If I recall, that was probably towards the end of Dave Cutler's era.
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Wow, there's a blast from the past - I loved the OS but getting it work on a Novell Network was a chore.
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Under the hood there's been quite a big move to componentisation, but it's still not really very well exposed anywhere, which seems like an obvious miss about a big complaint power users have. You can uninstall an incredible amount of stuff via PowerShell, and that's increasingly supported by screens four clicks deep somewhere in Settings.
I think it's a great example of the real problem which is Windows hasn't had an actual product exec managing mass-market Windows as a thing since W11 first came along. The worst of the bad engineering decisions get reversed because of the back pressure from corporates who have to manage EUD estates but there's really been no other control for bad decisions at all.
There was basically no way to even have the conversation about what's shit for someone who buys a laptop and doesn't even understand what an OS or operating environment is.
Even now, with the scales allegedly falling from Microsoft's eyes, the immediate roadmap for Windows is mostly fixing bad engineering. We got an announcement about a new kernel backlog just before this one, so presumably unpicking debt in there is partly what's driving the idea of splitting Canary into two (or splitting the H releases into two if you want to look at it that way.)
So so the Windows 11 experience for the great unwashed is probably going to take a decade to get back to where it was, especially since people now just pay their bills and do their taxes on a mobile app. If Microsoft are still interested in the laptop market at all, which isn't actually a given here, they'll be shitting themselves about the new cheap just good enough Mac.
And they're only taking Copilot out because of the much bigger pan-Microsoft and indeed pan-market backlash - not really anything to do with retail users of Windows at all. It just happens to be one place they presented it and now need to unpresent it.
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Same here...the sole remaining use of my Windows 11 partition is being able to use Steam Link on my Meta Quest 3 to plaz HL:Alyx.
For whatever reason, Steam VR seems to be broken on Steam OS. As soon as this is fixed, I don't need Windows anymore.
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More likely it’s Marketing and other non-technical senior staff puppeting the engineers and/or AI agents.
Nothing enshittifies a company or product faster than an out of control Marketing department, or a freshly minted MBA who does not believe engineering has value.
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Old notepad is still there. Just uninstall the newer version from the Microsoft store.
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Right after those cuts, they cut everyone with ux/UI design knowledge. I mean really, how hard is it to put a few buttons and a combo box on the page guys?
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vedekhaliwell
Ars Praetorian
I quit making my Windows 11 drive boot up, and when I use the PC it boots into Zorin Pro. Otherwise I use my M4 Mac Mini for everything other than old school gaming.
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A good move would be to fire everyone who had anything to do with the downfall that started with 11. Most importantly Satya Nadella.
But that won't happen because it's been obvious from the start that those who decided a hostile attitude towards customers would pay off bigly have a lót of say in the company.
And that is why every single 'fix' just oozes 'too little too late': those responsible don't WANT to fix things, they want to keep going.
I'm assuming that resisting that cabal is a shortcut to 'the door'.
A bunch of wildly overpaid asshats is destroying the company that made me love computing and I don't like it one bit.
But that won't happen because it's been obvious from the start that those who decided a hostile attitude towards customers would pay off bigly have a lót of say in the company.
And that is why every single 'fix' just oozes 'too little too late': those responsible don't WANT to fix things, they want to keep going.
I'm assuming that resisting that cabal is a shortcut to 'the door'.
A bunch of wildly overpaid asshats is destroying the company that made me love computing and I don't like it one bit.
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Edubfromktown
Ars Praetorian
"Windows quality" is a textbook oxymoron. They keep releasing updates that are bricking devices. Three times in the past 6 months if I recall correctly.
At home it has been OS X and macOS for many years on the desktop and Linux servers.
I don't deal with Windoze in the enterprise other than keeping tabs on Rubrik backup/resiliency data going to Azure infrastructure and having to muck around with ADFS occasionally when dev's are spinning up something new.
At home it has been OS X and macOS for many years on the desktop and Linux servers.
I don't deal with Windoze in the enterprise other than keeping tabs on Rubrik backup/resiliency data going to Azure infrastructure and having to muck around with ADFS occasionally when dev's are spinning up something new.
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Think about the way a functional society would use that money. Helping end homelessness. Paying the populace fair wages so they can live thriving lives. Fixing the climate crisis that continues to escalate, with increasingly weird and dangerous weather events all over the world. Buying the Amazon rainforest and protecting it from destruction and exploitation. Healthcare for everyone who needs it. That kind of thing
Instead, our society doesn’t tax these corporations and they flush it down the toilet
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I worked for MS for a decade and even I am unclear they can real focus on quality. Culturally they have focused on output not quality for most of their existence. It’s been like this for at least the 25 years I have circled MS. None of the rewards are setup to drive quality and as such high flying devs and managers don’t focus on it because shipping a feature is the metric that gets reward, it shipping quality. Getting to quality takes much more effort and is boring to most devs and pms.
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It wasn’t even that good then!
Hopefully it does cause some competition, because as a Mac user, I’m upset to see Apple’s software quality plummet. Some days I feel like I’m using Windows 98 with all the weird bugs, glitches, and crashes on Mac OS
And it feels like Apple’s engineers don’t really care because they can point to the extremely vocal user dissatisfaction with Windows and say “See, we’re still doing better than they are.”
I was seriously considering trying Windows out again before I noticed how much everyone hates it these days
You mean there’s a backlash against AI entirely?
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Value isn’t money, it’s not fungible and not money you can spend. They didn’t literally loose any money and it isn’t money that could buy anything. That’s not how any of this works.
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I installed the Win10 LTSC 2019 as a VM on my Linux box this week, just to see how setting up VMs works really, and it's so nice I'm thinking of dual booting it.
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dear Micro$oft,
I've come to realize your new CEO is just a greedy, self absorbed, pile of lies, obfuscation, and the most lowdown sneaky crap around; shoot, yer as disgusting as trump and his cronies.
May you lose your job, lose your money and sink that crap company. You killed a half decent OS, just cos you wanted to grift your customers. That, is the sign of a very ignorant and willfully odious, CEO.
I've come to realize your new CEO is just a greedy, self absorbed, pile of lies, obfuscation, and the most lowdown sneaky crap around; shoot, yer as disgusting as trump and his cronies.
May you lose your job, lose your money and sink that crap company. You killed a half decent OS, just cos you wanted to grift your customers. That, is the sign of a very ignorant and willfully odious, CEO.
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To me a lot of it comes down to whether we're feeling friction against the defaults vs a true lack of customization.
I understand that not every user is going to want the same default behavior and at the end of the day a software company needs to pick "something." I am even patient when that "something" isn't to my tastes...as long as their is a path to change it. And especially if that path represent a historic user workflow.
We can reasonably assume the rationale for that behvior. They're probably trying to keep users from losing files and they want people to use (and eventually pay for) OneDrive. I don't think either of those goals are inherently bad but clearly they don't align with how you or I use windows. So we should be able to change them. Change them easily, and have those changes stay put. Maybe if it gets reset from a Win10-11 (major version) migration that sucks but a dot update shouldn't touch them.
OneDrive is a bit like...have you ever tried to eradicate bamboo from a garden? It's insidious because the way the bamboo "sleeps" underground, totally unseen but storing enough energy to fight you again later. To eradicate bamboo you commit yourselves either do a massive undertaking (i.e. bring a backhoe and tear everything out 18 inches deep), a war of attrition where you need to diligently fight the bamboo little-by-little for the better part of a decade, or finally you just say, "Fuck it, guess I'm a bamboo farmer now."
In our OneDrive analogy those options would be roughly akin to switching to Linux, dedicating yourself to a decade of registry edits (like I am), or just giving in and using OneDrive even though you don't want to.
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The downvotes on anything mentioning Linux is insane. Please stop tying your identity/world view to technology companies. It's not healthy.
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micro$oft windblows SuXor! iz u LiNuX!
That's' what the majority of the comment sound like. It's unproductive
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I may be unduly biased as a Linux user myself, but that's not how the majority read to me. Many include useful anecdotes and personal experience, too. Anyway, Microsoft themselves have admitted that Windows sucks, so I can hardly blame people for agreeing with them. What surprises me a bit is the sheer number of Linux users we apparently have around here now. I left the Windows camp over six years ago now, and there were certainly others even at that time, but multiple people commenting on this article have made the switch in the last year or so, and I'm gratified to see an alternative—any alternative—to Windows work out for them.
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Already docked my ship with the penguin. Way too little and way too late for me. Currently rocking bazzite as I don't want to sys admin my daily driver.
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Once the "the early preview releases" started bricking various VM's I have I started exiting the program. It's takes months - EG more the 3 - to disentangle a system from "Advanced Preview". I'm still not sure if there is a real "undue" button or exit hatch, other then blowing it off and starting over. Make sure you have a solid "go back plan" when your adventure into the whole beta program goes sideways for your use case.
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Not if you still use Windows 10, that is the stable version (ever wondered why the large majority was still using 10 even when 11 existed, here is the reason). Since Windows 7, the next Windows was always t he beta release for testing (on the users), so Windows 10 was a total catastrophic disaster, while Windows 7 was the most used. Now that 11 is the new one, IT is the disaster and has all the problems. But yeah, I'm a Linux user too (I only use Windows on a single system) and have switched to Linux a long time ago and it is a waaaaaaaay better more stable, secure, modular, efficient OS than Windows.
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GOLD
ABSOLUTE POETIC SAGE GOLD
I just realized I work with bamboo farmers now.
Emperors new file system.
They took the blue pill.
Is it ethical to yank their shunts now?!
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