I stopped using Windows in 2015, and this was already an issue then. Actually, since Windows 8, released in August 2012… It's kinda unbelievable that Microsoft let this mess hangin in production...
I stopped using Windows in 2015, and this was already an issue then. Actually, since Windows 8, released in August 2012…
It's kinda unbelievable that Microsoft let this mess hangin in production for that long.
Their engineers are too busy integrating AI features nobody wants, Ads nobody wants, and features that will force people to buy new computers arbitrarily to finish this decade+ long endeavor. A...
Their engineers are too busy integrating AI features nobody wants, Ads nobody wants, and features that will force people to buy new computers arbitrarily to finish this decade+ long endeavor.
A month or two ago I bought a new MacBook, which is the second Mac I have ever purchased new. One thing that surprised me about the transition is how surprisingly durable the user profile is: copying over my profile with the migration tool was almost pain free and when it was done the new computer was effectively the same computer as my old one! I’m sure some settings may have been changed for the difference in hardware but I couldn’t tell you what.
Contrast this with my experiences with windows, where I have had to start from scratch every time. Granted I haven’t bothered with windows on real hardware for quite a while now, but each time I have tried to migrate computers I have had to deal with the locations of the settings changing with each version of Windows, so it’s like navigating a labyrinth.
While I don’t agree with a lot of changes in MacOS, the differences between the two operating systems frankly makes me wonder if Microsoft actually cares about serving the end user instead of trying to exploit them. While Apple does also exploit their users with their services, they feel a lot less intrusive than the ads Microsoft inserts all over their OS by default. All of the tiny adware-like bits that Microsoft incudes by default - backgrounds that tell you to look up the details on Bing, a ticker on the bottom, a giant slide-out pane if you accidentally mouse over the corner of the screen, the literal ads in the start menu and search, etc. literally give me a tiny burst of anxiety whenever I need to help my students with their personal computers.
There is a reason why Microsoft doesnt bother to get rid of the well-documented hole letting people activate Windows for free. Microsoft simply doesn’t see end users as their customers when it comes to Windows. It’s their big expensive ad platform.
Ive got a theory that Apple might just have developers which stick around for longer and better onboarding for those who don’t. At Microsoft, like most companies, the company I work for included,...
Ive got a theory that Apple might just have developers which stick around for longer and better onboarding for those who don’t.
At Microsoft, like most companies, the company I work for included, theres a revolving door of developers and no one creates onboarding instructions for their project because soon as they finish they’re on to the next new fancy. The only way to get promoted is to be working on the new fancy, because thats what management is looking at, so thats what all developers migrate towards. Getting stuck on such a legacy project is basically a punishment, since its career suicide.
Its possible that this project is taking so long because the developers are attempting to onboard themselves into code with no documentation and the recent invention of Claude Code maybe has begun to make this endeavor almost possible since you can give it access to an entire codebase and ask it to either tell you how it works or just write the feature you need by itself.
Also, job security! People often read a doc and rarely think to credit the author. Helpful senior engineer providing guidance on the other hand, lot more positive attention.
no one creates onboarding instructions for their project
Also, job security! People often read a doc and rarely think to credit the author. Helpful senior engineer providing guidance on the other hand, lot more positive attention.
Does Windows have an auto-setup based on OneDrive? On macOS, I don't even have an old Mac when setting a new up. I just log in my iCloud account and a couple minutes later it feels like home.
Does Windows have an auto-setup based on OneDrive? On macOS, I don't even have an old Mac when setting a new up. I just log in my iCloud account and a couple minutes later it feels like home.
As one of the techy people that most of my friends and family know, I sometimes get asked for recommendations on computers for various use case scenarios. It’s been a good decade since I...
As one of the techy people that most of my friends and family know, I sometimes get asked for recommendations on computers for various use case scenarios. It’s been a good decade since I recommended Windows for any reason other than “your company requires you to use Windows.”
For gaming, I always recommend my PC gamers learn the ins and outs of Steam and Linux, then move on to launchers like Lutris for non-Steam installation.
For casual use I now recommend folks pick up either an inexpensive used MacBook if they need to have a real computer, or just grab an iPad with a wireless Apple keyboard. (I still don’t recommend any of them that they buy the MacBook Neo simply because it has 8 GB of RAM and even with the processor that it has that’s just too little for the kind of tab heavy browsing most of these folks that I know of do.)
I cannot in good conscience recommend Windows to anyone for personal use. And frankly, I really would strongly encourage any company that’s looking at using Windows because they want to use Microsoft Word or Excel for their day-to-day business to consider just using the web versions of those programs from a Mac, Linux, or hell even a Chromebook computer, as the desktop versions of those apps are currently little more than wrappers for the web version anyway. Supposedly they’re getting away from that but so far that’s just talk.
I used to consider myself to be fairly platform agnostic. I have at least a decade of experience with three major operating system options (never used Chromebook), but I just can’t with Windows anymore. Too many bad decisions since at least Windows 7. They’ve lost my confidence.
As a side note, 8 GB of RAM for browsing, email, and light document work and photos — the use cases for the Neo — is good enough. I'm still using an Air M1 with 8 GB and can even edit 1080p video...
As a side note, 8 GB of RAM for browsing, email, and light document work and photos — the use cases for the Neo — is good enough. I'm still using an Air M1 with 8 GB and can even edit 1080p video on iMovie without hiccups. Of course 16 GB would be better, but I find surprising how much I can do (everything) with 8 GB to this day.
It's not really size of RAM that concerns me, it's Memory Pressure. My 16 GB M4 Mac mini spikes into yellow memory pressure if I get too tab-heavy in Safari, but when I use Firefox (my main...
It's not really size of RAM that concerns me, it's Memory Pressure. My 16 GB M4 Mac mini spikes into yellow memory pressure if I get too tab-heavy in Safari, but when I use Firefox (my main browser) it remains good. I don't even want to think what Google Chrome would do to these resources...
And that's… fine? I mean, as long as your computer doesn't lag, what's the problem? I never open Activity Monitor because I don't need. My 8 GB of RAM plus whatever swaps it needs handle my usage...
And that's… fine? I mean, as long as your computer doesn't lag, what's the problem? I never open Activity Monitor because I don't need. My 8 GB of RAM plus whatever swaps it needs handle my usage like a champ.
(Curiously, I find Firefox a bigger resource hog than Safari.)
I think for me, the concern is mostly that a lot of people still insist upon using Chrome, and Chrome is a resource goblin. I’m just concerned that Google is going to continue to refuse to...
I think for me, the concern is mostly that a lot of people still insist upon using Chrome, and Chrome is a resource goblin. I’m just concerned that Google is going to continue to refuse to optimize their browser for Mac, which is going to give people the idea that the MacBook Neo is slower than it actually is. I will say that when I do recommend people pick up a a Mac for any reason. I also tell them that they should consider either using Safari or switching to Firefox. They don’t listen to me, but I do suggest it.
It honestly bewilders me that people don’t realize how bad chrome is. People who are more technically minded are often quick to handwave the insane memory usage. I bought a very early Chromebook...
It honestly bewilders me that people don’t realize how bad chrome is. People who are more technically minded are often quick to handwave the insane memory usage.
I bought a very early Chromebook and because I wanted to run Linux apps on it I installed crouton. Even though Firefox had a bad reputation at the time for being slow, and even with running it with the extra weight of another desktop environment running on top of ChromeOS’s, Firefox was still notably faster than Chrome.
Fast forward to today and Chrome has even more bloat than ever before, including a bunch of APIs that probably shouldn’t even be in a web browser.
Our computers are so unbelievably fast and powerful. But we don’t realize that because our software is so bloated.
I’ve been with Firefox as my primary browser almost since launch. There was a brief period of about five years, I kind of forget when but I believe it would’ve been around 2013 to 2018 maybe as...
I’ve been with Firefox as my primary browser almost since launch. There was a brief period of about five years, I kind of forget when but I believe it would’ve been around 2013 to 2018 maybe as late as 2019 where I did actually run Chrome as my primary because it was genuinely more feature rich, faster, leaner, and more stable than Firefox.
And then somewhere around the end of that time period, Chrome took some kind of a turn where they screwed up or removed something that worked fine before (this so perfectly describes everything about Google that I genuinely cannot remember what it was that made me so upset), and I just threw up my hands one day said “screw it“, migrated back to Firefox and I haven’t looked back since.
I’ve tried some other browsers since then, Zen was a big one for about the last year for me, for instance, but I always find myself coming back to good ol’ Firefox. Mozilla never really seems to fully lose their way. They certainly do get sidetracked. But never quite lost.
Minor gripes Firefox has properly fixed tab rollover expanding to allow you to see the titles of the tabs. Firefox doesn’t have tab duplicating when I create a new window; I just get a fresh new...
Minor gripes
Firefox has properly fixed tab rollover expanding to allow you to see the titles of the tabs.
Firefox doesn’t have tab duplicating when I create a new window; I just get a fresh new window without having to do anything special
Firefox is less opinionated, Zen knows what it wants and enforces it
I've read a lot that macOS handles memory swaps a lot better, especially in the Apple Silicon era, making 8GB not feel as limiting, though swap can obviously only go so far.
I've read a lot that macOS handles memory swaps a lot better, especially in the Apple Silicon era, making 8GB not feel as limiting, though swap can obviously only go so far.
Years ago, they started doing things like memory compression, and "race to zero" scheduling (operations get batched up into bursts to return to idle power consumption quicker). They were pretty...
Years ago, they started doing things like memory compression, and "race to zero" scheduling (operations get batched up into bursts to return to idle power consumption quicker). They were pretty early to NVMe storage too, before the m.2 form factor was even fully settled, iirc, and they do some fancy stuff with prioritizing what gets swapped...and are fairly aggressive about it.
The memory pressure in Activity Monitor is the best indication of resource usage, especially since the OS will cache things an try to keep the RAM full at all times.
I am convinced that the only thing keeping windows alive today is inertia. Most people need a browser. That can be done on any OS today. Any other needs you may have can be solved online in the...
I am convinced that the only thing keeping windows alive today is inertia.
Most people need a browser. That can be done on any OS today.
Any other needs you may have can be solved online in the browser.
Yeah, mostly that's true for sure. There are a few folks at work that use Windows outside the job because "it's the best" but that's honestly like 2 of the team, the rest of us either use Mac or...
Yeah, mostly that's true for sure. There are a few folks at work that use Windows outside the job because "it's the best" but that's honestly like 2 of the team, the rest of us either use Mac or Linux, and the younger guys all use their phones and iPads for everything offline. And why not? I turn to my iPad Mini a lot as well, because it has a Pencil Pro that I can doodle with.
The program my university applied to in order to get Microsoft services to its students recently downgraded the entire tier to exclude the desktop applications for Office. Now attempting to use...
The program my university applied to in order to get Microsoft services to its students recently downgraded the entire tier to exclude the desktop applications for Office. Now attempting to use the desktop applications will prompt me to use the web versions.
It might be the biggest middle finger a tech company has given me after Google clawing back their free storage after promising an eternally expanding amount.
To be completely honest, I haven’t found Excel to be a compelling choice for most of my spreadsheet needs ever. Usually when I think to myself “I could put this in a spreadsheet“ I think about the...
To be completely honest, I haven’t found Excel to be a compelling choice for most of my spreadsheet needs ever. Usually when I think to myself “I could put this in a spreadsheet“ I think about the form of the data and the presentation of the data a little bit harder and I find something else that works better for that use case. And I just despise Microsoft Word. I don’t use it in any of my formatting or editing even on my work computer. When it comes time to present stuff to other people, I will go ahead and use it, but I type everything up in notepad and just use Word to format and spellcheck. If it’s an actual presentation, like a PowerPoint presentation, I’ll often just skip the Word document altogether. There are other, better choices for all of the Microsoft suite these days.
Spreadsheets are lovely for data exploration and WYSIWYG transformations. Excel does a lot to mess with those assumptions due to things like the hyperlink function being totally separate from...
Spreadsheets are lovely for data exploration and WYSIWYG transformations. Excel does a lot to mess with those assumptions due to things like the hyperlink function being totally separate from hyperlinking a cell with the hyperlink shortcut.
It's not much better on the enterprise side as well and they're not putting the effort in to maintain their dominance (except shoving AI everywhere), relying on inertia as the default enterprise...
It's not much better on the enterprise side as well and they're not putting the effort in to maintain their dominance (except shoving AI everywhere), relying on inertia as the default enterprise option. Our company uses Azure not by choice (telco that hooks pipes into cloud provider networks) and Github Enterprise for in-house development. The market that I'm sure Microsoft wants to retain even if they flushed all their consumer goodwill into the toilet.
Constantly rearranging admin UIs, leaving the online documentation outdated with references to previous names and versions (RIP the MSDN documentation), letting vendors and partners piggyback on their email domain to bombard customers with upsells (the ones coming from v-*@microsoft.com), "Premium Support" that feels more like priority boarding instead of actual premium service like it was decades ago before they outsourced it to partners.
Following Conway's law, it screams a massive behemoth of an organization with extreme silos just doing their own thing and occasionally being told to half-heartedly integrate to the whole, ending up with (in the McDonald CEO's words) "product". It's not an integrated collective solution laser focused to solve specific problems, it's just loosely bolted on things grouped together by marketing that deemed "we're selling these together now".
I phrase it to curious coworkers and other sysadmins pondering the same things with a fun question: what's the "Active Directory in the Cloud" service for Microsoft called? Azure AD? Entra? Microsoft Graph? Bits of all of them? What will be called in 6 months if marketing gets tired of the name again?
I occasionally ponder how many billions of dollars of lost productivity and man-hours has been collectively wasted because of one company's inane software decisions that heavily impact the majority of businesses across the world.
IIRC it's something like Entra Identity Services. I know this because I decided on a whim to study to take the AZ-900 exam and they were too lazy to fix their educational videos on it to reflect...
IIRC it's something like Entra Identity Services.
I know this because I decided on a whim to study to take the AZ-900 exam and they were too lazy to fix their educational videos on it to reflect the change of name, and I'm amazed that I even remembered the Entra name because it's just that incredibly stupid.
But no, the stupidest name change Microsoft has made, in my opinion, is making their private social network product from Yammer to Viva Engage, a move which has single-handedly encouraged me to never actually engage with it.
I'm waiting for Teams to be renamed or replaced, because MS has a habit over the past 20 years of doing that to their chat and messaging services (remember MSN messenger, messenger, Lync, and...
I phrase it to curious coworkers and other sysadmins pondering the same things with a fun question: what's the "Active Directory in the Cloud" service for Microsoft called? Azure AD? Entra? Microsoft Graph? Bits of all of them? What will be called in 6 months if marketing gets tired of the name again?
I'm waiting for Teams to be renamed or replaced, because MS has a habit over the past 20 years of doing that to their chat and messaging services (remember MSN messenger, messenger, Lync, and Skype for Business?).
I was always so annoyed whenever more functions were migrated out of Control Panel, only to have the Settings menu redirect to Control Panel randomly. I'm using the Windows 10 LTSC build which is...
I was always so annoyed whenever more functions were migrated out of Control Panel, only to have the Settings menu redirect to Control Panel randomly.
I'm using the Windows 10 LTSC build which is nice as things won't change and then once the support window ends, I can just shift over to Linux. The only annoying thing is that I've run into some input related jank since switching to this build and I can't tell the issues are with specific drivers for my keyboard and mouse (or the keyboard/trackpad for my laptop) or if I'm having some input errors due to an actual issue with the keyboard on my laptop.
I remember before I worked in IT full-time that I'd be fully invested in spending hours diving in to something like this and getting it fixed. Now I just work around it to do the few life admin things that are much easier done on my personal computer. If it stops me from playing games or becomes bothersome I just turn off my computer and go read a book or do something else.
It's a strange choice that MS is making. Rapid enshittification only works if you have a high level of lock in. Social media apps rely on the network effect, Google relies on market dominance....
It's a strange choice that MS is making. Rapid enshittification only works if you have a high level of lock in. Social media apps rely on the network effect, Google relies on market dominance. Microsoft relies on enterprise inertia and OEM deals.
But I don't think that's going to be enough in the long term. They'll likely hold onto their enterprise dominance for quite a while longer but if they start to bleed consumers the whole empire could come, slowly, crashing down. They've been losing the tech crowd for a long time already.
Their strategy seems to be to capture the LLM agent market in both enterprise and development but I don't see any indication this is working. At best they're positioning themselves as middleware, which is a tenuous place to be for a company their size. Even if they're successful they won't have any kind of moat. They don't have a modern equivalent to the Office suite on the horizon and things are changing too fast for anyone to have a safe bet on what that would even look like. It's unlikely to look like Copilot! And very likely to come from the model providers, which MS has so far failed to become.
They have their cloud and datacenters, where they're second place. If they start to lose their enterprise pipeline into that ecosystem, Google is well prepared to take their spot.
It's not shocking anymore to see big successful companies make dumb moves, but MS seems particularly out of touch with reality at the moment. It's too bad because Bing is the only realistic competitor to Google search. DuckDuckGo you say? That's essentially Bing in privacy mode.
I chart my significant negative experiences with Windows starting with Windows 8. I know Microsoft has all kinds of issues these days, they are pushing Copilot too much, they implement annoying...
I chart my significant negative experiences with Windows starting with Windows 8. I know Microsoft has all kinds of issues these days, they are pushing Copilot too much, they implement annoying advertising in the OS, the audacity to try to force people into Microsoft accounts when they don't want them, and surely much much more. I've read enough stories about the management of Microsoft to believe it's not a great place to work. The bloat of the company itself is much like many companies these days.
I can forgive some aspects of bloat and what not of Windows if they weren't doing all the wrong things elsewhere. Because at least in the case of much of Windows bloat, I expect that it's in part coming from an effort to support all the various hardware and software that has relied on Windows for years and years. This article even says that's part of why the control panel migration is taking so long.
“We’re doing it carefully because there are a lot of different network and printer devices & drivers we need to make sure we don’t break in the process,” explains March Rogers, partner director of design at Microsoft.
On the one hand, supporting so many things made Windows more sticky, everything people bought and used worked on Windows and rarely worked on anything else.
On the other hand, starting with Windows 8 in particular, I feel that Microsoft decided to leverage the stickiness of Windows to bolster other business segments that they failed on. They dropped the ball hard with Windows Phone, consequently I'd argue that resulted in them dropping the ball significantly on touch screen interfaces entirely which meant they failed to create a Windows tablet market, and that also cut them out on hybrid/2-in-1s for awhile until they launched the Surface many years later. Windows 8 was the start of this process, the shoehorning of a user interface into desktop/traditional laptop space when that UI was designed for and made sense on touchscreen devices because they failed to address the market earlier in a better way.
This is also around the start of the Microsoft Store, Microsoft accounts, and the attempt to position their desktop OS to capture significant revenue streams in a way that Android and iOS do. Of course they didn't push the Microsoft Store too hard because of the pushback, legacy issues and regulation issues that could have potentially come from that, but the other routes they took were smaller steps trying to make up for that.
I do wonder if Microsoft's business model for Windows wasn't scalable in the long run, how do you support an ever growing series of hardware and software for longer periods of time with a one-time license purchase. Even if you increase the price of the license, at some point it just becomes too much to be competitive. In all likelihood, they probably needed to find a way to separate the business of supporting legacy hardware and software while also developing a fresher OS that wasn't bound to all of that, and kept developing an OS people wanted to use instead of developing an OS that people felt obligated to use. This way the price would be lower for people that didn't care about legacy support.
I think the issue, at its core, is that Windows development stopped caring about the user experience. This started with 8 and has been declining ever since.
I think the issue, at its core, is that Windows development stopped caring about the user experience. This started with 8 and has been declining ever since.
I would strongly disagree with your assertion that Microsoft stopped caring about UX with Windows 8. If anything they were trying to push the UX into a brave new paradigm. Frankly, I think that...
I would strongly disagree with your assertion that Microsoft stopped caring about UX with Windows 8. If anything they were trying to push the UX into a brave new paradigm. Frankly, I think that Windows 10 was a major step backward by throwing out Metro instead of leaving it as an option. It essentially marked an abandonment of touch screen computing using Windows.
Yes, Windows 8 was rough, but with 8.1 Microsoft had it nailed down quite nicely.
Fair enough. I found Windows 8 (even 8.1, if I remember correctly) to have an unpleasant user experience compared to 7, but perhaps that's because it was touch focussed
Fair enough. I found Windows 8 (even 8.1, if I remember correctly) to have an unpleasant user experience compared to 7, but perhaps that's because it was touch focussed
Yeah, I'd have paid a subscription to keep using Windows 95 for a long time after they started pushing newer versions. A subscription OS is way better than an enshittifying mess of ads and dark...
Yeah, I'd have paid a subscription to keep using Windows 95 for a long time after they started pushing newer versions. A subscription OS is way better than an enshittifying mess of ads and dark patterns.
My rule of thumb is, to the greatest extent possible, use every other version of windows. 95 - a mess 98 - good ME - a mess 2000/xp - good Vista - a mess Windows 7 - good Windows 8 - a mess...
My rule of thumb is, to the greatest extent possible, use every other version of windows.
95 - a mess
98 - good
ME - a mess
2000/xp - good
Vista - a mess
Windows 7 - good
Windows 8 - a mess
Windows 10 - good
By this reckoning, windows 11 will be a mess and Windows Chinchilla (or whatever they call what comes after 11) will probably be okay.
My working theory is that from the success of a good release, Microsoft tries something "innovative" that nobody really wants. Product managers invent problems to solve in the hopes of triggering some kind of gold rush user migration. Of course, they never suceed because fundamentally if an OS is doing well, you should not notice it all.
All this causes enterprise customers (who never migrated to the odd version) to start making noise. Microsoft then locks those product managers up in whatever vault they keep them in and goes back to their core value proposition, which is being a boring but scalable business OS.
The cycle was a bit skewed with Windows 10 because they kept it around for so long. Also, Windows 11 is basically just a rename of the perennial Windows 10 update. Other than changing the start menu and adding AI, it's less of an update than usual. So the pattern may finally break down.
Who knows. I may tell my grandchildren (via neural implant) that I lived through the rise and fall of Microsoft Windows.
I think 10 completely shattered the rule already. 10 was almost universally hated when it arrived (the whole forced update scandal), and - as far as I can tell - has never been designed with any...
I think 10 completely shattered the rule already. 10 was almost universally hated when it arrived (the whole forced update scandal), and - as far as I can tell - has never been designed with any focus on user experience. I can't think of a change from 7 -> 10 that I'd consider an improvement, I think basically every major change that I can think of made Windows worse (settings obfuscation, Cortana shoved in, ads ads ads, the notification system). Wait, one exception, Defender is great and modern computers not needing external antivirus is a boon
Unfortunately there are important non-UX improvements from Windows 7 to 10, otherwise a lot more people would have happily remained in 7. Some examples: Networking that actually works. People...
Unfortunately there are important non-UX improvements from Windows 7 to 10, otherwise a lot more people would have happily remained in 7. Some examples:
Networking that actually works. People often fail to remember how many headaches Windows 7's byzantine "homegroups" and opaque settings caused on a regular basis. It was hard to understand what the OS was actually doing or why it was actually failing to connect (often, it was for no good reason).
High performance Direct2D-based window rendering. Windows' actual windows used to be a lot slower and jankier, often ceasing to render or crashing. This is still true for certain applications using the APIs Windows was pushing around that era.
Audio routing. I remember (hopefully correctly) that this was something they added late in the development cycle after strong user demand. Sure, they then went on to make Windows Update reset all audio settings every single time it does anything, but it's nice to have to ability to plug audio input and output devices on a per-application basis.
Default drivers is a big thing. I had to reinstall plenty of home PCs around the time of Vista, 7, and 8. I almost universally preferred 8 for generally having out of the box network drivers...
Default drivers is a big thing. I had to reinstall plenty of home PCs around the time of Vista, 7, and 8. I almost universally preferred 8 for generally having out of the box network drivers rather than having to schlep a flash drive with that particular driver for that particular model.
You forgot Windows 98SE, Second Edition, because originally Windows 98 was a hot mess and such a colossal screw-up that Microsoft had to release a wholly new version to fix all the problems....
You forgot Windows 98SE, Second Edition, because originally Windows 98 was a hot mess and such a colossal screw-up that Microsoft had to release a wholly new version to fix all the problems. Windows 98 SE was released, of course, the 10th of June, 1999.
Edit: I may be mistaken about 98SE fixing screw-ups of Windows 98, it may be that it was just a huge improvement that they wanted to roll out while they were pushing future alignment with NT, because right after this they released Windows 2000 Pro, which was NT 5.0, and the next NT release was 5.1, aka Windows XP 32-bit edition, which introduced the concept of Home and Pro varieties.
It came right around the time home PCs came down in price to be a thing people universally had in their homes while still being shipped with ridiculously low specs, particularly RAM was abysmally...
It came right around the time home PCs came down in price to be a thing people universally had in their homes while still being shipped with ridiculously low specs, particularly RAM was abysmally provisioned but the hard disks were underperforming too. Vista chewed through RAM with its widgets and would swap until the hard disk choked and then blue screened your average home pc while idling.
They cleaned it up over time but the general UX for your average user sucked beans.
IIRC a big part of the hate for Vista stemmed from under-specced PCs being sold as "Vista ready", when the OS actually needed substantially more RAM and/or compute than what was being shipped by...
IIRC a big part of the hate for Vista stemmed from under-specced PCs being sold as "Vista ready", when the OS actually needed substantially more RAM and/or compute than what was being shipped by the OEMs. If you had the hardware for it, it was more or less okay. Still a little buggy and the UAC was over-zealous, but you could use it to get things done.
It really was not. It was hot garbage when it launched. Because it had higher base specs it introduced the “experience index” benchmark to illustrate how well your computer could run with Vista,...
It really was not. It was hot garbage when it launched. Because it had higher base specs it introduced the “experience index” benchmark to illustrate how well your computer could run with Vista, and famously it would get so slow over time it would actually downgrade you.
Even basic operations were slower for seemingly no reason. If you copied a file with Explorer it would be noticeably slower than using the copy command from the CLI.
On top of that Microsoft really fucked gamers over by forcing DirectX 10 to be a vista exclusive, so a great number of hugely important new rendering techniques were locked behind a system that would reduce performance for those games just from the vista tax. Microsoft also famously lied about the visual improvements in very blatant ways, offering poorly doctored screenshots to demonstrate the difference in rendering. Seriously, I remember they showed a DX9 comparison shot that they just cut the contrast and brightness.
Vista did have some good ideas behind it and eventually they got it to be good, but that point is when Vista turned from Windows 6.0 to Windows 6.1 - which Microsoft branded Windows 7.
I stopped using Windows in 2015, and this was already an issue then. Actually, since Windows 8, released in August 2012…
It's kinda unbelievable that Microsoft let this mess hangin in production for that long.
Their engineers are too busy integrating AI features nobody wants, Ads nobody wants, and features that will force people to buy new computers arbitrarily to finish this decade+ long endeavor.
A month or two ago I bought a new MacBook, which is the second Mac I have ever purchased new. One thing that surprised me about the transition is how surprisingly durable the user profile is: copying over my profile with the migration tool was almost pain free and when it was done the new computer was effectively the same computer as my old one! I’m sure some settings may have been changed for the difference in hardware but I couldn’t tell you what.
Contrast this with my experiences with windows, where I have had to start from scratch every time. Granted I haven’t bothered with windows on real hardware for quite a while now, but each time I have tried to migrate computers I have had to deal with the locations of the settings changing with each version of Windows, so it’s like navigating a labyrinth.
While I don’t agree with a lot of changes in MacOS, the differences between the two operating systems frankly makes me wonder if Microsoft actually cares about serving the end user instead of trying to exploit them. While Apple does also exploit their users with their services, they feel a lot less intrusive than the ads Microsoft inserts all over their OS by default. All of the tiny adware-like bits that Microsoft incudes by default - backgrounds that tell you to look up the details on Bing, a ticker on the bottom, a giant slide-out pane if you accidentally mouse over the corner of the screen, the literal ads in the start menu and search, etc. literally give me a tiny burst of anxiety whenever I need to help my students with their personal computers.
There is a reason why Microsoft doesnt bother to get rid of the well-documented hole letting people activate Windows for free. Microsoft simply doesn’t see end users as their customers when it comes to Windows. It’s their big expensive ad platform.
Ive got a theory that Apple might just have developers which stick around for longer and better onboarding for those who don’t.
At Microsoft, like most companies, the company I work for included, theres a revolving door of developers and no one creates onboarding instructions for their project because soon as they finish they’re on to the next new fancy. The only way to get promoted is to be working on the new fancy, because thats what management is looking at, so thats what all developers migrate towards. Getting stuck on such a legacy project is basically a punishment, since its career suicide.
Its possible that this project is taking so long because the developers are attempting to onboard themselves into code with no documentation and the recent invention of Claude Code maybe has begun to make this endeavor almost possible since you can give it access to an entire codebase and ask it to either tell you how it works or just write the feature you need by itself.
Also, job security! People often read a doc and rarely think to credit the author. Helpful senior engineer providing guidance on the other hand, lot more positive attention.
Does Windows have an auto-setup based on OneDrive? On macOS, I don't even have an old Mac when setting a new up. I just log in my iCloud account and a couple minutes later it feels like home.
For Windows users, the first thing that comes to our mind on setup is how to stop OneDrive from being automatically set up.
As one of the techy people that most of my friends and family know, I sometimes get asked for recommendations on computers for various use case scenarios. It’s been a good decade since I recommended Windows for any reason other than “your company requires you to use Windows.”
For gaming, I always recommend my PC gamers learn the ins and outs of Steam and Linux, then move on to launchers like Lutris for non-Steam installation.
For casual use I now recommend folks pick up either an inexpensive used MacBook if they need to have a real computer, or just grab an iPad with a wireless Apple keyboard. (I still don’t recommend any of them that they buy the MacBook Neo simply because it has 8 GB of RAM and even with the processor that it has that’s just too little for the kind of tab heavy browsing most of these folks that I know of do.)
I cannot in good conscience recommend Windows to anyone for personal use. And frankly, I really would strongly encourage any company that’s looking at using Windows because they want to use Microsoft Word or Excel for their day-to-day business to consider just using the web versions of those programs from a Mac, Linux, or hell even a Chromebook computer, as the desktop versions of those apps are currently little more than wrappers for the web version anyway. Supposedly they’re getting away from that but so far that’s just talk.
I used to consider myself to be fairly platform agnostic. I have at least a decade of experience with three major operating system options (never used Chromebook), but I just can’t with Windows anymore. Too many bad decisions since at least Windows 7. They’ve lost my confidence.
As a side note, 8 GB of RAM for browsing, email, and light document work and photos — the use cases for the Neo — is good enough. I'm still using an Air M1 with 8 GB and can even edit 1080p video on iMovie without hiccups. Of course 16 GB would be better, but I find surprising how much I can do (everything) with 8 GB to this day.
It's not really size of RAM that concerns me, it's Memory Pressure. My 16 GB M4 Mac mini spikes into yellow memory pressure if I get too tab-heavy in Safari, but when I use Firefox (my main browser) it remains good. I don't even want to think what Google Chrome would do to these resources...
And that's… fine? I mean, as long as your computer doesn't lag, what's the problem? I never open Activity Monitor because I don't need. My 8 GB of RAM plus whatever swaps it needs handle my usage like a champ.
(Curiously, I find Firefox a bigger resource hog than Safari.)
I think for me, the concern is mostly that a lot of people still insist upon using Chrome, and Chrome is a resource goblin. I’m just concerned that Google is going to continue to refuse to optimize their browser for Mac, which is going to give people the idea that the MacBook Neo is slower than it actually is. I will say that when I do recommend people pick up a a Mac for any reason. I also tell them that they should consider either using Safari or switching to Firefox. They don’t listen to me, but I do suggest it.
It honestly bewilders me that people don’t realize how bad chrome is. People who are more technically minded are often quick to handwave the insane memory usage.
I bought a very early Chromebook and because I wanted to run Linux apps on it I installed crouton. Even though Firefox had a bad reputation at the time for being slow, and even with running it with the extra weight of another desktop environment running on top of ChromeOS’s, Firefox was still notably faster than Chrome.
Fast forward to today and Chrome has even more bloat than ever before, including a bunch of APIs that probably shouldn’t even be in a web browser.
Our computers are so unbelievably fast and powerful. But we don’t realize that because our software is so bloated.
I’ve been with Firefox as my primary browser almost since launch. There was a brief period of about five years, I kind of forget when but I believe it would’ve been around 2013 to 2018 maybe as late as 2019 where I did actually run Chrome as my primary because it was genuinely more feature rich, faster, leaner, and more stable than Firefox.
And then somewhere around the end of that time period, Chrome took some kind of a turn where they screwed up or removed something that worked fine before (this so perfectly describes everything about Google that I genuinely cannot remember what it was that made me so upset), and I just threw up my hands one day said “screw it“, migrated back to Firefox and I haven’t looked back since.
I’ve tried some other browsers since then, Zen was a big one for about the last year for me, for instance, but I always find myself coming back to good ol’ Firefox. Mozilla never really seems to fully lose their way. They certainly do get sidetracked. But never quite lost.
I'm curious why you switched from Zen back to Firefox?
Minor gripes
I've read a lot that macOS handles memory swaps a lot better, especially in the Apple Silicon era, making 8GB not feel as limiting, though swap can obviously only go so far.
Years ago, they started doing things like memory compression, and "race to zero" scheduling (operations get batched up into bursts to return to idle power consumption quicker). They were pretty early to NVMe storage too, before the m.2 form factor was even fully settled, iirc, and they do some fancy stuff with prioritizing what gets swapped...and are fairly aggressive about it.
The memory pressure in Activity Monitor is the best indication of resource usage, especially since the OS will cache things an try to keep the RAM full at all times.
I am convinced that the only thing keeping windows alive today is inertia.
Most people need a browser. That can be done on any OS today.
Any other needs you may have can be solved online in the browser.
Yeah, mostly that's true for sure. There are a few folks at work that use Windows outside the job because "it's the best" but that's honestly like 2 of the team, the rest of us either use Mac or Linux, and the younger guys all use their phones and iPads for everything offline. And why not? I turn to my iPad Mini a lot as well, because it has a Pencil Pro that I can doodle with.
Yeah there's a reason why some people call the web browser the modern operating system. It's kind of amazing what's possible in a browser nowadays.
The web versions are missing a shocking number of features, and I've found them more buggy. I'd rather use Google Docs and Sheets.
The program my university applied to in order to get Microsoft services to its students recently downgraded the entire tier to exclude the desktop applications for Office. Now attempting to use the desktop applications will prompt me to use the web versions.
It might be the biggest middle finger a tech company has given me after Google clawing back their free storage after promising an eternally expanding amount.
To be completely honest, I haven’t found Excel to be a compelling choice for most of my spreadsheet needs ever. Usually when I think to myself “I could put this in a spreadsheet“ I think about the form of the data and the presentation of the data a little bit harder and I find something else that works better for that use case. And I just despise Microsoft Word. I don’t use it in any of my formatting or editing even on my work computer. When it comes time to present stuff to other people, I will go ahead and use it, but I type everything up in notepad and just use Word to format and spellcheck. If it’s an actual presentation, like a PowerPoint presentation, I’ll often just skip the Word document altogether. There are other, better choices for all of the Microsoft suite these days.
Spreadsheets are lovely for data exploration and WYSIWYG transformations. Excel does a lot to mess with those assumptions due to things like the hyperlink function being totally separate from hyperlinking a cell with the hyperlink shortcut.
It's not much better on the enterprise side as well and they're not putting the effort in to maintain their dominance (except shoving AI everywhere), relying on inertia as the default enterprise option. Our company uses Azure not by choice (telco that hooks pipes into cloud provider networks) and Github Enterprise for in-house development. The market that I'm sure Microsoft wants to retain even if they flushed all their consumer goodwill into the toilet.
Constantly rearranging admin UIs, leaving the online documentation outdated with references to previous names and versions (RIP the MSDN documentation), letting vendors and partners piggyback on their email domain to bombard customers with upsells (the ones coming from
v-*@microsoft.com), "Premium Support" that feels more like priority boarding instead of actual premium service like it was decades ago before they outsourced it to partners.Following Conway's law, it screams a massive behemoth of an organization with extreme silos just doing their own thing and occasionally being told to half-heartedly integrate to the whole, ending up with (in the McDonald CEO's words) "product". It's not an integrated collective solution laser focused to solve specific problems, it's just loosely bolted on things grouped together by marketing that deemed "we're selling these together now".
I phrase it to curious coworkers and other sysadmins pondering the same things with a fun question: what's the "Active Directory in the Cloud" service for Microsoft called? Azure AD? Entra? Microsoft Graph? Bits of all of them? What will be called in 6 months if marketing gets tired of the name again?
I occasionally ponder how many billions of dollars of lost productivity and man-hours has been collectively wasted because of one company's inane software decisions that heavily impact the majority of businesses across the world.
Viva Insights Copilot Identity Service
IIRC it's something like Entra Identity Services.
I know this because I decided on a whim to study to take the AZ-900 exam and they were too lazy to fix their educational videos on it to reflect the change of name, and I'm amazed that I even remembered the Entra name because it's just that incredibly stupid.
But no, the stupidest name change Microsoft has made, in my opinion, is making their private social network product from Yammer to Viva Engage, a move which has single-handedly encouraged me to never actually engage with it.
I'm waiting for Teams to be renamed or replaced, because MS has a habit over the past 20 years of doing that to their chat and messaging services (remember MSN messenger, messenger, Lync, and Skype for Business?).
I was always so annoyed whenever more functions were migrated out of Control Panel, only to have the Settings menu redirect to Control Panel randomly.
I'm using the Windows 10 LTSC build which is nice as things won't change and then once the support window ends, I can just shift over to Linux. The only annoying thing is that I've run into some input related jank since switching to this build and I can't tell the issues are with specific drivers for my keyboard and mouse (or the keyboard/trackpad for my laptop) or if I'm having some input errors due to an actual issue with the keyboard on my laptop.
I remember before I worked in IT full-time that I'd be fully invested in spending hours diving in to something like this and getting it fixed. Now I just work around it to do the few life admin things that are much easier done on my personal computer. If it stops me from playing games or becomes bothersome I just turn off my computer and go read a book or do something else.
It's a strange choice that MS is making. Rapid enshittification only works if you have a high level of lock in. Social media apps rely on the network effect, Google relies on market dominance. Microsoft relies on enterprise inertia and OEM deals.
But I don't think that's going to be enough in the long term. They'll likely hold onto their enterprise dominance for quite a while longer but if they start to bleed consumers the whole empire could come, slowly, crashing down. They've been losing the tech crowd for a long time already.
Their strategy seems to be to capture the LLM agent market in both enterprise and development but I don't see any indication this is working. At best they're positioning themselves as middleware, which is a tenuous place to be for a company their size. Even if they're successful they won't have any kind of moat. They don't have a modern equivalent to the Office suite on the horizon and things are changing too fast for anyone to have a safe bet on what that would even look like. It's unlikely to look like Copilot! And very likely to come from the model providers, which MS has so far failed to become.
They have their cloud and datacenters, where they're second place. If they start to lose their enterprise pipeline into that ecosystem, Google is well prepared to take their spot.
It's not shocking anymore to see big successful companies make dumb moves, but MS seems particularly out of touch with reality at the moment. It's too bad because Bing is the only realistic competitor to Google search. DuckDuckGo you say? That's essentially Bing in privacy mode.
I chart my significant negative experiences with Windows starting with Windows 8. I know Microsoft has all kinds of issues these days, they are pushing Copilot too much, they implement annoying advertising in the OS, the audacity to try to force people into Microsoft accounts when they don't want them, and surely much much more. I've read enough stories about the management of Microsoft to believe it's not a great place to work. The bloat of the company itself is much like many companies these days.
I can forgive some aspects of bloat and what not of Windows if they weren't doing all the wrong things elsewhere. Because at least in the case of much of Windows bloat, I expect that it's in part coming from an effort to support all the various hardware and software that has relied on Windows for years and years. This article even says that's part of why the control panel migration is taking so long.
On the one hand, supporting so many things made Windows more sticky, everything people bought and used worked on Windows and rarely worked on anything else.
On the other hand, starting with Windows 8 in particular, I feel that Microsoft decided to leverage the stickiness of Windows to bolster other business segments that they failed on. They dropped the ball hard with Windows Phone, consequently I'd argue that resulted in them dropping the ball significantly on touch screen interfaces entirely which meant they failed to create a Windows tablet market, and that also cut them out on hybrid/2-in-1s for awhile until they launched the Surface many years later. Windows 8 was the start of this process, the shoehorning of a user interface into desktop/traditional laptop space when that UI was designed for and made sense on touchscreen devices because they failed to address the market earlier in a better way.
This is also around the start of the Microsoft Store, Microsoft accounts, and the attempt to position their desktop OS to capture significant revenue streams in a way that Android and iOS do. Of course they didn't push the Microsoft Store too hard because of the pushback, legacy issues and regulation issues that could have potentially come from that, but the other routes they took were smaller steps trying to make up for that.
I do wonder if Microsoft's business model for Windows wasn't scalable in the long run, how do you support an ever growing series of hardware and software for longer periods of time with a one-time license purchase. Even if you increase the price of the license, at some point it just becomes too much to be competitive. In all likelihood, they probably needed to find a way to separate the business of supporting legacy hardware and software while also developing a fresher OS that wasn't bound to all of that, and kept developing an OS people wanted to use instead of developing an OS that people felt obligated to use. This way the price would be lower for people that didn't care about legacy support.
I think the issue, at its core, is that Windows development stopped caring about the user experience. This started with 8 and has been declining ever since.
I would strongly disagree with your assertion that Microsoft stopped caring about UX with Windows 8. If anything they were trying to push the UX into a brave new paradigm. Frankly, I think that Windows 10 was a major step backward by throwing out Metro instead of leaving it as an option. It essentially marked an abandonment of touch screen computing using Windows.
Yes, Windows 8 was rough, but with 8.1 Microsoft had it nailed down quite nicely.
Fair enough. I found Windows 8 (even 8.1, if I remember correctly) to have an unpleasant user experience compared to 7, but perhaps that's because it was touch focussed
Yeah, I'd have paid a subscription to keep using Windows 95 for a long time after they started pushing newer versions. A subscription OS is way better than an enshittifying mess of ads and dark patterns.
My rule of thumb is, to the greatest extent possible, use every other version of windows.
95 - a mess
98 - good
ME - a mess
2000/xp - good
Vista - a mess
Windows 7 - good
Windows 8 - a mess
Windows 10 - good
By this reckoning, windows 11 will be a mess and Windows Chinchilla (or whatever they call what comes after 11) will probably be okay.
My working theory is that from the success of a good release, Microsoft tries something "innovative" that nobody really wants. Product managers invent problems to solve in the hopes of triggering some kind of gold rush user migration. Of course, they never suceed because fundamentally if an OS is doing well, you should not notice it all.
All this causes enterprise customers (who never migrated to the odd version) to start making noise. Microsoft then locks those product managers up in whatever vault they keep them in and goes back to their core value proposition, which is being a boring but scalable business OS.
The cycle was a bit skewed with Windows 10 because they kept it around for so long. Also, Windows 11 is basically just a rename of the perennial Windows 10 update. Other than changing the start menu and adding AI, it's less of an update than usual. So the pattern may finally break down.
Who knows. I may tell my grandchildren (via neural implant) that I lived through the rise and fall of Microsoft Windows.
I think 10 completely shattered the rule already. 10 was almost universally hated when it arrived (the whole forced update scandal), and - as far as I can tell - has never been designed with any focus on user experience. I can't think of a change from 7 -> 10 that I'd consider an improvement, I think basically every major change that I can think of made Windows worse (settings obfuscation, Cortana shoved in, ads ads ads, the notification system). Wait, one exception, Defender is great and modern computers not needing external antivirus is a boon
Unfortunately there are important non-UX improvements from Windows 7 to 10, otherwise a lot more people would have happily remained in 7. Some examples:
Default drivers is a big thing. I had to reinstall plenty of home PCs around the time of Vista, 7, and 8. I almost universally preferred 8 for generally having out of the box network drivers rather than having to schlep a flash drive with that particular driver for that particular model.
You forgot Windows 98SE, Second Edition, because originally Windows 98 was a hot mess and such a colossal screw-up that Microsoft had to release a wholly new version to fix all the problems. Windows 98 SE was released, of course, the 10th of June, 1999.
Edit: I may be mistaken about 98SE fixing screw-ups of Windows 98, it may be that it was just a huge improvement that they wanted to roll out while they were pushing future alignment with NT, because right after this they released Windows 2000 Pro, which was NT 5.0, and the next NT release was 5.1, aka Windows XP 32-bit edition, which introduced the concept of Home and Pro varieties.
I don't get hate of the Vista, it was ok OS at that time..
It came right around the time home PCs came down in price to be a thing people universally had in their homes while still being shipped with ridiculously low specs, particularly RAM was abysmally provisioned but the hard disks were underperforming too. Vista chewed through RAM with its widgets and would swap until the hard disk choked and then blue screened your average home pc while idling.
They cleaned it up over time but the general UX for your average user sucked beans.
IIRC a big part of the hate for Vista stemmed from under-specced PCs being sold as "Vista ready", when the OS actually needed substantially more RAM and/or compute than what was being shipped by the OEMs. If you had the hardware for it, it was more or less okay. Still a little buggy and the UAC was over-zealous, but you could use it to get things done.
It really was not. It was hot garbage when it launched. Because it had higher base specs it introduced the “experience index” benchmark to illustrate how well your computer could run with Vista, and famously it would get so slow over time it would actually downgrade you.
Even basic operations were slower for seemingly no reason. If you copied a file with Explorer it would be noticeably slower than using the copy command from the CLI.
On top of that Microsoft really fucked gamers over by forcing DirectX 10 to be a vista exclusive, so a great number of hugely important new rendering techniques were locked behind a system that would reduce performance for those games just from the vista tax. Microsoft also famously lied about the visual improvements in very blatant ways, offering poorly doctored screenshots to demonstrate the difference in rendering. Seriously, I remember they showed a DX9 comparison shot that they just cut the contrast and brightness.
Vista did have some good ideas behind it and eventually they got it to be good, but that point is when Vista turned from Windows 6.0 to Windows 6.1 - which Microsoft branded Windows 7.