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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

This whole article is just a description of this YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT4vDfA_4NI

This video is substance-less, they hooked up Wireshark, watched packets fly past, most of which were DNS lookups, then described domains as if that is meaningful in itself. Most of the traffic is generated by Windows 11 widgets[0], which I'd suggest disabling either way.

Do I like what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11? Actually, no, I'm pretty unhappy with it. But I hate how lazy most of these critiques are. They do so much irrefutably bad stuff, this is the best you can come up with?

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/stay-up-to-date-...

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> then described domains as if that is meaningful in itself

It would be one thing if it was all MSFT domains, but scorecardresearch.com is pretty terrifying from a data sovereignty perspective.

> which I'd suggest disabling either way.

This isn't alarming because of how it affects tech-savvy users, it's alarming because of how it affects average people.

The widgets are a [bad] wrapper on bing.com. bing.com uses those analytics products.

Yes, it should be disabled by default, just like a lot of unacceptable practices on Windows 11. Just don't need to shoot a video with Wireshark running and talk through DNS lookups to get to that critique.

The video was useful and informative.

> Just don't need to shoot a video with Wireshark running and talk through DNS lookups to get to that critique.

Or, you could do that. Why shouldn't that be done again?

Probably because the only reason why you would do that is to bait Clicks and confuse non-tech people? Nobody would care to make news out of it if all you said was "windows is basically doing the same thing google does, or any of the most popular websites for that matter"

Popular websites don't get to co-opt my computing device before I am able to establish policies about what behaviour I find acceptable.

Google doesn't run my computer.

I would care…

I honestly don’t believe that an OS should go poking around the internet at all without doing something I specifically told it to.

I’m currently upset with fedora because I can’t figure out how to turn off the automatic update feature, honestly I haven’t tried too hard, and all that is doing is connecting to servers that I would do anyways just on my own timeframe.

If it started sending out every detail of my computing sessions, like TFA is claiming and you are defending, it would be off my computer as fast as I could download another distribution.

I deal with google’s shenanigans with using chrome but that’s my choice, I downloaded the repo data, approved the signing keys and installed it manually.

Tech community treats Microsoft since Balmer with kids gloves, like it's some sort of non-profit organization for saving the planet.

Where do you come up with this information?

Just look at the weekly anti-Microsoft articles around here, including this one you're commenting on.

This place can be quite bipolar. I actually quit HN for a long period over the "second coming of Microsoft" when the entire HN crowd was crowing of Satya's ascent into grand hegemon position because the sycophantry was making me wretch. My comments about the same old Microsoft were downvoted to oblivion and any dissident voices squashed. The US tech community spoke and would not listen to warnings.

And here we are, back at ground zero.

From my perspective it's the younger (and/or less mature) tech community that do this, and even then that's just sychophancy posts on reddit or elsewhere about how amazing C# is and you're a dumb-dumb for using anything that isn't C# etc.

Those of us with longer teeth treat MS just the same as any org: We don't trust a single one of them.

The young whippersnappers will learn with experience.

I think you're right on the mark there. I'm jaded and cynical enough to know what's going to hurt me and what's going to pay the bills and that's where my interest stops. 20 years of C# and 35 years of Unix now :(

Worshipping any vendor is quite frankly a bit sad.

I tend to avoid having to solve problems now. If I do it tends to go somewhere vendor neutral like python on whatever platform happens to be lying around and not annoying me at the time.

They're right about C#, it's an amazing language because it's solid + steals the good parts from other languages. The best choice I ever made was switching from Java/PHP to C# back in the early 2000s.

I absolutely hate Microsoft for what they've done to Windows and Office - both of these were fantastic products for desktop users 20 years ago but nowadays they're either a bloated mess (Office) or spyware.

We really need to see PC gaming move completely away from it.

They still are good products. If you stick your fingers in you ears and forget about the bad bits. It's like living in a garden shed which has been painted nicely inside. You can live a happy existence with a bit of ignorance.

So I'm miserable.

Looking for things to dislike makes you miserable.

Yes you're right. Unfortunately while using things for like I keep standing in the poop on the shed carpet.

Counter point: Ignoring the bits you don't like when they present themselves is deluding one's self.

C# is the language I would have to be held at gunpoint to learn, personally.

But why? Because it comes from Microsoft? The other poster was right - the language itself is excellent.

I'm fluent in C#, TypeScript, Javascript, Java and Python. I'm pretty average in C/Go. Long ago I wrote a lot of Assembly, Pascal, Visual Basic and PHP.

Javascript/PHP are broken compared to C#. Python, Java and Go are verbose and clunky in comparison (although I appreciate being able to write self-contained native code in Go for so little fuss compared to C).

My hate is Python being used for anything outside scripting. Package management is archaic and broken, the quality of libraries is mediocre and the language stewardship has been poor. Particularly the way the 2.x > 3.x migration was handled. I'm still bitter about that. It remains one of the few ecosystems where picking up a project older than 6 months is playing a game of Russian Roulette as to whether you get it working within a week of messing around with broken code and dependencies.

Just in case that maybe interested to you. Currently (with nightlies) using NativeAOT + C# you would be able to have approximate same as Go. Even fully statically linking executable. And given that MS working on making apps have less size, gopefully it would be comparable to Go in app size.

Nice! I was following the AOT compiler years ago after Joe Duffy announced it. Good to see that they're continuing with the good work :)

Whether they are right or wrong is largely immaterial (fwiw, I enjoy C# and it has been my bread-and-butter language since ~2005) but I'm not tribal about it like some get. Posts about actual oddities (DateTime), bad design (LINQ + IEnumerable<T> = default interface implementations), or attempts to implement something common from another tool (e.g., list comprehensions) will get you derision and contempt for daring to question the holy C# on /r/csharp and even StackOverflow.

By extension there is a similar toxicity around Visual Studio, and MSSQL somewhat, too. Frequent "Why would you want to use ReSharper!?" or "Rider???? You need to get an employer that can afford Visual Studio." etc.

The community on twitter - where most of alt.net moved - is fantastic. It's the main reason I still use twitter. Surprised that people use reddit for coding and stack overflow for discussion.

Unfortunately there is also the side you're talking about. There are a lot of people who are stuck in the mud, and also a lot of people who are just fed up with baseless religious hate from the Python/Javascript crowd and who have never bothered trying those languages (and thus know that it's just projection) and lash out.

The thing is - just look at the work MS do. For years JSON serialisation sucked so we all used NewtonSoft. Now the framework handles JSON properly. So there's hope yet for things such the Date API learning from Noda - and when it does it's miles ahead of any language where people are dumb enough to use an int32 linked to an arbitrary epoch (from one specific OS variant) to represent date/time.

>Posts about actual oddities (DateTime)

You mean local time zone? Just use UTC everywhere, nothing else will ever work no matter how you design it. DateTimeOffset miiight work too, but you'll extract UTC from it to do anything meaningful anyway, so it may as well be UTC all the way down.

> Just use UTC everywhere

No can do, and frankly is a _very_ reductive stock response.

Anyone working with Date Times more than even months into the future will have pain. Politics will mess you up. You've made a reservation for 16:00 at that fancy pants restaurant with a 6 month waiting list. But now the government have decided that Daylight Savings are too much hassle, and suddenly your 16:00 reservation is off by an hour (or whatever the DS shift is for your region.)

Then there is industry specific scenarios - logistics for example. They know the plane is landing at 18:00, but we haven't confirmed the TZ yet. Not because the airport doesn't know what timezone it is, but because the carrier hasn't confirmed which airport they are landing at. They just know it's at 18:00. DateTime is utterly terrible with "unknown"

If you want to express an unknown moment of time, no time zone will help you. Also the reminder service specifically doesn't need to be precise to the second. If you forgot your plane and got a reminder about it 1 hour before departure, will you be happy that your reminder is so accurate?

You're one of today's lucky ten thousand!

https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...

Way off-topic, but I'm curious about how you approach unit testing.

Coming from Java into a C# job, I'm used to mocking downstream dependencies, and even POJOs in some cases, that a class depends on. C# has stuff like Moq, but you _have to_ wrap everything with an interface to mock it since C# seals by default.

Meanwhile, in JVM land, you can use Kotlin, which still seals classes by default, but allows test compiles to open classes by default so you can still mock them.

Every C# thread I read suggests wrapping all concrete implementations with an interface like I'm coding in the 90's for the sake of decent tests, or they talk about how my code must be written poorly for me to be in this situation. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to get _some_ testing into this code I've inherited.

https://www.typemock.com/ solves this problem.

Also, C# doesn't seal anything by default. The methods are non-virtual by default, but that's a very different thing, and there's a good reason for it when it comes to libraries and versioning.

When I was young I kinda liked them too. From the windows 3.11 / Win95 days until the end of Windows 2000 (let's forget Windows ME ever happened please). When office was already as capable as it is now and visual basic Kickstarted new rapid development.

Of course back then they were already full into megalomaniac mode with their attempt at having MSN (Microsoft Network) replace the open internet. No it was not just a news service then. However we all laughed them away.

These days I'm more cynical. And I hate telemetry and spyware which really wasn't a thing in those days for lack of always-on connectivity.

So, is it just my age or are things really worse?

No, I think things are also worse but you have to understand there is a generation coming of age that never experienced paying for an operating system or really even paying any kind of substantial price for software of any kind. To them it would absolutely be worse to pay for software but not have it harvest your data. Most people aren't very cognizant of the data harvesting.

For a 1995 era vision, you can make a reasoned case for MSN. The competition was not necessarily the Open Internet, it was AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve.

The walled-garden platform did offer some benefits, particularly when you've got an audience new to the medium. This was an era before ubiquitous search, so the fact everything was in a single navigable heirarchy was more valuable. (Remember, this is also back when Yahoo was valuable as a directory.)

Since there was a single gatekeeper, you could promise a safer, more accountable and family-friendly environment for the social channels. Again, appealing to new users.

There may also have been potential for more exclusive content; if the walled-garden clients offered richer media (or the services better kickback) than what can be provided by a normal 1995 HTML tag-soup site running through an early IE or Netscape, it would be worth partnering with them.

I'm actually surprised that the walled gardens went down without a fight. They could have stayed around presenting themselves as a "premium over-the-top channel" style offering-- you can get the same basic internet as everyone else, but for just $5 more, all this extra. I can recall my parents were willing to pay $25/month for AOL when generic dialup was in the $10-15 range to remain part of specific communities inside the walled garden. AOL did an incredibly poor job pivoting as people moved to broadband-- I can recall there was a package to use their propriatery offerings with an external ISP, but it was expensive, until one day it was free because they realized they needed to keep their portal/email audience from imploding totally.

They've certainly managed to rehabilitate their public image. Not gonna lie I'm very impressed by Satya's leadership in that respect. I would probably prefer old Microsoft that was transparently evil though, license fees are more honest than data harvesting. Of course we know now that the license fee strategy simply isn't viable given what happened to IBM, so I doubt we ever see a change of course.

Microsoft is a big place. Lately, the tech community is probably focusing more on their improvements to .NET (which now works on non windows PCs) rather than their OS product line.

Um, every .Net Core developer I know, which is quite a few at multiple companies, are still doing everything on Windows and Visual Studio classic. Windows is still a massive concern for the tech community and most of those people seem to absolutely dislike windows 11 to the point they're all using Macs at home. Even our windows-centric SQL Server DBAs have macs at home.

No one is going to buy corporate Macs though because Windows and Office is the best corporate dystopia for the compliance check boxers.

There’s literally another thread on the front page right now where one of the top commenters is taking about using macOS for this. A snarky “Um,” at the beginning of your comment doesn’t negate the fact that it sounds like you’re embedded in corporate hell, which doesn’t represent everyone making software.

yes I use it on macOS as well. I'm writing this on my Mac.

I am an active independent user group member. This isn't just about startups and big tech who are actually fairly low on seat counts. There are huge numbers lots of us corporate dystopias using this stack. On Windows. And you'll have never heard of any of us.

I think some of us aren't having as bad a time as others. The trick is to carefully select technologies and pay attention to what you actually need to operate. Blindly diving 100% into the Microsoft offering hellscape is definitely going to be a bad time.

I use .NET/VS/Windows/etc throughout. I recognize products like Azure and SQL Server are a potential trap. So, I use .NET6+ but with SQLite and minimal AspNetCore projects instead of SQL Server and IIS. I could deploy our product to Linux with a few tweaks (i.e. drop System.Drawing image conversion laziness).

At work, we are a Windows-only shop for the most part. My daily driver is still a Windows PC. I have an M1 mbp I use around the house, but I generally dont get emotionally invested in exactly who vended my OS/machine. I chase the UX. I have zero loyalties to trademarks either way. Other factors are give or take depending on moon phases. If the machine feels good and fast, I use it. I don't fight it anymore. There are bigger problems in my mind.

> non-profit organization

No edition of Windows is free. This is the very reasonable expectation that if you pay for a product, then you are not the product.

I haven't paid anything since Windows 8. Win 10 and 11 have been given to me for free.

When you use an OS that collects massive amounts of your data to use against you it means you'll be paying for it for the rest of your life. Windows 10 and 11 might be the most expensive pieces of software you've ever not really owned.

you are the product, and they are not giving you away for free

Have you purchased a Windows computer in that time period? The cost of a Windows license is hidden in the overall cost of the machine.

> Win 10 and 11

Windows is just Windows at this point. You are still using the Windows 8 license that your purchased. The version numbers are nothing more than a measurement of how brazen Microsoft is getting.

Show me where I can get a legal copy of Windows that is free to install on a pristine machine and I'll concede that it is free.

Microsoft have simply added a subscription fee to Windows, where you are the subscription fee.

> Win 10 and 11 have been given to me for free.

Have been? You didn't have to have an already licensed Windows installation to upgrade? You _exchanged_ your older license for the newer one for free; you didn't get one extra for free.

When you purchase a complete, new computer, the windows license is included in price (OEM). If you build your computer from parts or when you spin a new VM, you have to get a new license. Windows 10/11 Home (OEM) is about 120 EUR + VAT, Pro (OEM) about 160 EUR + VAT. That's quite a far cry from free.

Really? I feel like the tech community just ignores them because they've become irrelevant. Even Azure is essentially a backup for people who don't trust only relying on AWS, and haven't yet been bitten by out of date documentation and bugs that "Yes we know about that", but mysteriously there's nothing online about it at all

Tech might be in an AWS and Macbook bubble but outside of it, the enterprise world is very, very heavily Microsoft. You will need to pry Excel out of the cold, dead hands of everyone who is even peripheral to finance. Similarly, Outlook has its devotees - yeah it's a bloated mess, but it's what the execs know and want.

So that means you're deploying Office. And if you're deploying Office, you're deploying Office 365, and so that means everyone's on Azure anyway, so there's your identity management and vendor lockin.

Yeah, Microsoft is not sexy in the eyes of devs. But they are the dominant platform in just about every industry that's not-tech.

Do you mean Nadella? Ballmer caught more flack than any big tech CEO (until possibly Musk, if he counts).

     get https://github.com/stevenblack/hosts

There are components of windows that completely bypass the hosts file so it can 'phone home'.

Sadly this no longer works for Microsoft domains. Had Windows Defender mark my host file as having a 'severe' issue just because I copy pasted a list of Microsoft telemetry domains (1). Everything worked perfectly fine before that update.

(1) https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-h...

I use DNSCrypt (SimpleDNSCrypt in Windows). It has extra features like wildcards for blocking subdomains. It doesn't touch your hosts file so it should bypass that.

Unbound works fine in Windows.

Taking the risk of (fairly) being accused of whataboutism - I'm not sure what the alternatives are - Macs are just as brazenly collect date about you in the background to the point that like in Windows, the data collection bogs down the computer so that the user experience suffers noticeably.

I'm also fairly certain even vanilla Android is a privacy nightmare, and when you add in the preinstalled vendor trash, it becomes 1000x worse.

The only option that exists right now afaik is Linux, and in my experience daily driving Linux on a production/development machine is a nightmare.

Let's say I'm a politician at a restaurant. I just want to eat. But even without opening the menu, you've had the chef call every person in town to let them know you're here.

It's just, gross.

That's not what's happening. that's not even a good analogy.

A better analogy would be this:

let's say I'm a politician at a restaurant. I just want to eat. But, without even opening the menu, the waiter needs to know that I'm there so they can bring the menu to me and greet me. They also bring water in case I am thirsty right now.

BY FAR (if not entirely) this is what Windows does. Do you need updates? Are you an Autopilot machine used in the enterprise? Do any of your installed applications need updates from the Windows Store?

These are all normal things, but people who don't understand how Windows handles these things consider them all spyware. None of them seem to be aware that you can install a telemetry viewer application and see everything sent to Microsoft from your PC if you're so concerned with what is being collected. You can also, from that application, delete the stuff Microsoft has collected about you from that machine. They go straight to "oh I can get views if I complain about Microsoft and sound very offended by it!" So, that's what they do.

It's just annoying.

Which actor in your analogy is scorecardresearch.com?

The hidden camera in the waiter's tie.

Do we know that request originated from the OS and not some other app the user had installed?

They used a "fresh install" so default everything.

that means nothing. fresh install of a custom image? fresh install of what ISO image? insider build or release build? maybe the DNS server being used by default is being hijacked, or the ISO they created, if they created one, has an app installed by the ISO creation tool which made it. not all of those are legit.

I set up a VM and installed Windows 11 Home on it and captured all traffic after initial setup and a reboot. I saw nothing going to any non-microsoft domain.

They download the iso from Microsoft website and installed it.

tell me that comes from Windows and is not the result of a redirect that some app's HTTP request encountered and I'll try to find an answer.

when I boot up a Win11 Home VM and capture all traffic, I don't see any traffic to that host at all, so I can't tell you where that comes from.

The app you're talking about is called Diagnostic Data Viewer [1].

However, your statement is not correct. It's true that most system diagnostics / telemetry flow through this application; however, that's only one part of the network requests going out of your system.

There are network requests being made every time you type a character in the start menu (whether or not you have web search enabled). That is not considered telemetry so it does not show up in the Diagnostic Data Viewer. It is also not possible to disable it (there were various group policy and registry settings that worked at some point in time, none of them do any more on latest versions of Windows 11).

Similarly, when the "recommended" container of the start menu refreshes itself, it does a lot of network traffic, none of which is recorded in DDV. And of course, any applications that come with the system but are not core OS (OneDrive, Office, Store, Xbox, Cortana, Explorer, etc.) will send their own telemetry (and other network requests) which do not go through DDV.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic...

if you turn off typing and inking in privacy settings, does the start menu stuff stop?

No, not the last time I checked this (a few months ago).

Your waiter is calling every Tom Dick & Harry to just wait. I'd say if everything requires a phone call, you've already lost me as a customer. Your analogy is worse, if we're...y'know. Doing that.

Weird how Windows XP managed to be a perfectly usable operating system without doing any of those things...

I don't think you can fairly compare XP and Windows 11 given how much more Windows 11 does than XP. even just looking at enterprise management alone, XP is uncontrollable by comparison. forget all the end-user features that didn't exist in Windows XP.

might as well compare Win11 to MS-DOS if you're thinking along those lines.

Indeed, these lame comparisons are just as bad today as I remember them over 20 years ago when I was a young lad and Windows XP launched and everyone hated it thinking it would bomb (including me) because "why do I need this bloated OS with a colorful paintjob when Win98 does everything just fine?"

It's pretty hilarious to see history repeat itself at every new Windows launch. Rinse and repeat.

"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!"

For a regular home user, what does Win11 do that WinXP couldn't? Everything I can think of (drivers, screen res, multiple monitors) is incremental improvements to what we already had, I can't think of a feature they've introduced since XP than I want.

edit: This is probably too glib; certainly more recent Windowses are superior for application developers, which end users benefit from indirectly. It's the user-facing parts of the OS that seemed to have gone in the other direction.

> "Everything I can think of (drivers, screen res, multiple monitors) is incremental improvements to what we already had"

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? (Besides, they're just improvements on what we had before so they don't count).

Apart from the drivers, screen res, multiple monitors, virtual desktops, Windows Defender, updated DirectX, newer hardware support, hypervisor isolated secure password store, app store, WiFi, audio stack with per-program volume control, OCR engine, voice recognition engine, Cortana, online backup and file and settings sync, touch UI and the $8Bn/year Surface line it enabled, improved security, hypervisor backed WSL Ubuntu and Android engines, Windows Sandbox, SSD TRIM support, Bitlocker full disk encryption, ClearType and improved fonts for screen reading, GPU accelerated compositor, face recognition biometric login, QR codes on BSODs, all of...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#New_or_changed_f...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_11

... what have Microsoft added or changed in Windows since XP? btw I don't even use windows and I didn't want any of those things anyway.

Right, the problem is the difference between the DirectX/hardware support stuff on that list and the Cortana/app store stuff - I want the first part, and will pay for it, but I'm complaining that getting stuck with the second part is part of the price.

On the other hand, we have...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...

That isn't really "the other hand". The claim I was rejecting was "Microsoft haven't done any development on Windows since XP". I say they have, and you also say they have.

There are zero features I need from Windows 11 that Windows XP didn't already have. The only reason I'm not still running XP is that security vulnerabilities in it are no longer being fixed.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows.

This. 2000 was perfect. No bloat except solitaire and minesweeper. Fast and stable <3

This ^^^ I miss Windows XP. I was one of the last holdouts, forced off because XP lost security updates and apps just wouldn't install on it anymore.

is that security vulnerabilities in it are no longer being fixed.

Are there? MS even released a fix quite recently for it.

On the other hand, I bet there are plenty more vulnerabilities in Windows 11 that still haven't been discovered yet.

> On the other hand, I bet there are plenty more vulnerabilities in Windows 11 that still haven't been discovered yet.

There probably are, but I'd rather have a bunch of vulnerabilities that nobody knows about yet, and that will be patched once people do learn, than slightly fewer vulnerabilities that everyone is constantly trying to exploit and that will be there forever.

and that will be there forever.

Don't be so certain --- the enthusiast community will fix them if they're important enough, even more so if they're ones that "everyone is constantly trying to exploit". Also, no one who knows what they're doing is going to be facing the Internet without a NAT or firewall that blocks incoming connections by default.

That means vendors should be legally forced to publish source code of any software they abandon / stoped providing support. Hope this will happen soon. Regarding Windows XP, full source code has been leaked already (not SP3 but close to recent).

The vast majority of security issues with XP (and some with 7) are architectural. E.g.: you can't fix some security vulnerability relating to GDI on XP without essentially replacing it with Vista/7's DWM. Conversely, 7 has a few security weaknesses compared to 8/8.1 due to missing kernel security features that are, essentially, a binary diff between 7 & 8 rather than a small patch.

"Updates" for XP POS Edition and the like are mostly support filler and don't bring it up to the same security level as a modern OS. I.e.: There's still a bunch of logical vulnerabilities present.

Local "vulnerabilities", if that's what you're referring to, are really not.

Privilege escalation is definitely a vulnerability, the same way you'd consider a Docker escape a vulnerability.

Can you give specific examples of these sorts of vulnerabilities?

Well XP didn't have HiDPI. I would have missed that with my 4K screen at 200% scaling. Even though they still screw it up to this very day.

Honest question - what features does Windows 11 have that I would want? I've never tried Windows 11, but I already hate how invasive Windows 10 is. What is your definition of "better" because if I weren't forced to upgrade to play modern games I would have never bought 10 (and I hate it even after years of using it and spending countless hours tweaking it to suck less but it still fucking sucks balls).

I feel like every time I "upgrade" Windows I hate it. And that hatred doesn't go away, it just gets normalized.

By better they mean it enables them to be more controlling and invasive in their employees' actions and personal lives.

so far the two features I would lack in older versions would be:

- “copy file path” in the context menu

- More Window tiling options

"Copy as Path" is definitely available in Win10, and probably older, just hidden under the Shift-RightClick context menu.

Windows keeps taking away useful features too though so either way you lose.

They took it away a long time ago, but i missed the option to arbitrarily arrange icons in folders (as you can on the desktop). It used to be very easy to sort through lots of files by moving them into piles of icons and then moving the piles into folders for example.

Also the ability to move items in the taskbar wherever you want. (for example, I want one of 8 open notepad documents moved to the end of the taskbar next to one of the 6 browser windows while all other notepad and browser windows are on the other side)

I don't know what you want, you might be happy with MSDOS for all I know. But Windows 11 has support for the 6ghz spectrum for WiFi 6(e) and WSLg support for doing ML/Cuda in WSL. Those are both of high interest to me. Otherwise Win 11 feels like a large step backwards.

I am curious, what games do not work on Windows 7 any more ?

Any games requiring directx 12.

Except WoW because Windows 7 is still popular in China and WoW is still not banned in China. Money talks, Dx 12 walks.

I am pretty sure that WoW, a game from 2004, doesn't require DirectX 12 ? (Heck, even with engine upgrades, they probably still support DirectX 9 ?)

>Blizzard added DirectX 12 support for their award-winning World of Warcraft game on Windows 10 in late 2018. This release received a warm welcome from gamers: thanks to DirectX 12 features such as multi-threading, WoW gamers experienced substantial framerate improvement. After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available.

>At Microsoft, we make every effort to respond to customer feedback, so when we received this feedback from Blizzard and other developers, we decided to act on it. Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have ported the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. This unblocks developers who want to take full advantage of the latest improvements in D3D12 while still supporting customers on older operating systems

This doesn't say that Blizzard was about to abandon support for DirectX versions earlier than 12.

wow! nice

A2DP AAC support was my reason to upgrade. I hate taskbar.

From my anecdotal experience, Windows 11 works faster on the same work PC I used (up-to-date) Windows 10 on. And I didn't clean install, so it's not that kind of placebo.

What features would the average user miss out on? I'd go back to win7 in a heartbeat if I could, and I really don't remember a great difference between XP and 7 to begin with.

> XP is uncontrollable by comparison.

You could have an Active Directory domain full of Windows XP machines in 2001.

> I don't think you can fairly compare XP and Windows 11 given how much more Windows 11 does than XP

Considering how much work it took to get wrangle 10 LTSE into a usable Win environment I'd much prefer the simple OS that stayed out of my hair than one that "does so much more" I didn't ask for.

I hope someday software is regulated as tightly as other consumer goods. Abusing one's position as the issuer of security updates to force choices, undesired changes, and bloat down user's throats shouldn't be possible; users should have the option to separate the two.

I'm aware that that seems like a tall ask given the state of "modern" software development, but that's its own can of worms.

And yet, XP was a bloated pile of bugs when it was launched. It required a massive 64 MB of RAM and used much more CPU than Windows 2000.

Now Win 11 is a data hog... It's great for collecting and transmitting personal user data and ads... Fair trade. You never really notice unless you work off of a hotspot that has a data cap on it though, so there's that.

> Do you need updates? [...] Do any of your installed applications need updates from the Windows Store?

If the checking for updates for anything is happening without my consent, that's bad.

> None of them seem to be aware that you can install a telemetry viewer application

Or, more likely, they don't trust it.

Updates happen when I say they happen, not before.

you are why windows updates are now forced.

because you will not update until forced in most situations.

you simply are not aware of every security fix or vulnerability found, and therefore can't know when you should update.

in the early 2000s there a few very large profile windows viruses that spread like crazy, despite patches being released months or years earlier. the viruses took out networks across the globe and caused considerable mayhem for days.

congress had hearings and several tech companies testified, including Microsoft. congress wanted to know why users weren't forced to update their computers, and Microsoft said that they can't control what their users do.

congress blamed Microsoft for users not patching their systems.

so this happened a few more times and Windows Update was improved continuously going forward.

now you're forced to update, because people who thought they knew all about security failed to update when they should have.

now, users blame Microsoft for forcing them to patch their systems.

I blame Microsoft for requiring reboots for updates and making those reboots destructive to my state. If I could go to bed at night and know that everything will be where I left it in the morning, that would be fine. I can't, so I take extraordinary measures to ensure that my computer remains under my control. Up until fairly recently it rebooted while under active use; something which is never acceptable. No update ever made is that important.

It updates when I say it updates, and not a moment before. Congress and Microsoft can GFT if they don't like it.

well when you write your own operating system you can decide how that works, I guess.

If you choose to stop hiding icons in the notification area, windows will tell you days in advance of any forced reboot. It does for me, anyway. I don't know why the default is to hide icons down there, but it's probably because a lot of apps like to stay running for some reason and pollute the notification area.

If you unhide all icons there and occasionally glance down at it, you'll see when Windows wants you to reboot. It is only after days of you not interacting with that icon that the reboot is forced. That's how it's been for me, anyway.

You all just want to complain about Microsoft. None of you have anything of value to say. I wish you would all just admit that to yourselves.

The purpose of Windows is to support the staff I want to do on the computer, not to support Windows. There is a priority inversion here, refusing to acknowledge that does not make it go away. Neither does making excuses for Microsoft's user hostile design make it not hostile.

> "congress wanted to know why users weren't forced to update their computers"

That sounds made up. Happy to be proven wrong, but I doubt congress demanded to know why people aren't being forced to update Windows. It's too weirdly specific.

In the early 2000s, nobody was forced to do anything. Even for games, patches were uncommon because people bought the CD-ROM. If the game had bugs, the process of finding the patch, if it existed, was not accessible to most people.

well, it would be weirdly too specific if the conversation didn't lead to it, but it did.

"how did this happen?

> Bugs were found in windows systems which allowed this.

"can you not fix those?"

> we can.

"why didn't you fix them?"

> We did, the patches have been available for months in the worst case.

"then why are computers running your operating system still affected?"

> Because users have not downloaded and applied the patches.

"why not? are they not encouraged to do so?"

> We make them available but a user must choose to do it.

"Why do you not force this? This seems like an easy way to address the issue of unpatched operating systems."

> We cannot control what the users of our operating systems do.

"Not good enough. Clearly your current stance is not sufficient given the state of the Internet right now."

> Ok.

========

Very much paraphrased, but that's how I remember it going. I watched the thing live on C-SPAN and I don't know if it was blogged about anywhere. Even then the internet hated Microsoft even though most of its users ran Windows.

> you are why windows updates are now forced

This is blatantly, flat out wrong. Even the implicit premise here is wrong.

It is not Microsoft’s prerogative to update my device. They don’t own my device. They don’t get to decide when I decide to install new software. That right exclusively belongs to me. Even congress doesn’t get to have a say in this. Users have private property rights. And this, what Microsoft is doing, is bordering illegality.

Unless it is matter of national security. Then, you put masks on, sit home, let your locations transferred to CIA/NSA, update your device, have a full body scan and go some other country to be killed at war.

I don't lose work because of an update, because I don't use windows.

I can't be why windows updates are forced, because I haven't used windows since 7. I can update a system package, a library or even a kernel without losing a process.

Tell me again why windows needs to force the user to update?

That said politician still has the choice to not use Windows.

It's more like the politician goes to a huge public event with livestreaming and everyone filming everything and then obviously everyone knows.

I am not defending Microsoft. I just don't get why people would use software they don't like or even trust.

The fact that the politician use or not Windows does not exempt that the behavior is dirty and gross.

> Windows 11 widgets[0], which I'd suggest disabling either way.

In case you were curious, apparently the full widget removal is via group policy.

gpedit.msc > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Widgets > Allow Widgets > {select Disabled} > {restart}

https://www.pdq.com/blog/how-to-remove-widgets-in-windows-11...

Per your own link, they can be disabled via Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Widgets.

All setting Local Policies does is force them off and stops the user from re-enabling them in the Settings (which is likely a good default for organizations).

You set the group policy or Microsoft will reenable it on the next update (which is not what the user wants).

Group policy isn't a guarantee either since at some point they can just stop respecting it. I watched this happen with telemetry in Windows 7. You used to be able to opt out of everything at one point in time.

Now you need a Microsoft account to register even non-365 versions of Office.

My general experience has been settings < registry << group policy.

Microsoft will update settings in an update at a PM's whim.

They may break registry key bindings due to code changes.

But they generally don't break gpo functionality, because this causes issues for $$$ enterprise customers.

Downside: Believe they cut group policy functionality in <Pro OS versions.

In non-Pro/Enterprise editions of Windows the software still generally (though not always) respects the registry keys in HKLM\Policies, they just remove the tools to configure local group policy and (obviously) you cannot join a domain to set them through AD. You can still use third-party tools like PolicyPlus combined with the freely available ADMX packs that Microsoft ships for installation into AD forests to set whatever the hell you want.

I actually prefer it this way; now the key is associated with my account and not a particular installation on a device.

Is this middlebrow dismissal really the top comment for an important discussion?

Do you really believe the geolocator and marketing pings you didn't ask for are just to say hello and immediately forgotten?

I remember when connecting Windows XP to the Internet resulted in a compromised system in < 90 seconds. That said, I agree it is a shallow look at things, I do bring up Windows machines on a network that white lists windows update servers and denies everything else. Yes it complains "The internet is unreliable" (not going to lie, it isn't Microsoft :-)).

I agree with you. I like it when people rip the thing to shreds for valid reasons, like this article:

https://itvision.altervista.org/why-windows-11-sucks.html

Excellent articles on Linux and other systems too, by the way, if you have the time.

It should be possible to disable many of these connections as documented here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/manage-con...

This is good info, but damn is it obnoxious that you'd have to do all of that to keep just some of the spying at bay

DNS lookups are themselves alarming no? Why would you resolve a hostname and not, like, use that IP for something? Maybe some argument of pre-emptive hostname resolution but even in Ubunutu you can turn off the chatty background OS DNS resolutions.

Yeh, I was skeptical of your comment but I checked the article and video and they are utterly pointless. No substantiation that any 3rd party is actually contacted (other than your ISP for resolving DNS). It would have taken literally seconds to demonstrate actual connections being made. For all I know, this is clickbait/misinformation - the author(s) made it impossible for me to know otherwise.

is it possible to disable them?

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