Microsoft is driving users away

As someone that’s been forced to reluctantly wear the ‘Windows sysadmin’ on and off for the past ~15 years due to circumstances beyond my control…this just sounds like the complaint of someone too lazy to learn PowerShell.

There is a difference between:

1. Updates have been applied (in the middle of your crucial thing). Reboot in 60 seconds. Fuck you if you think you can cancel haha.

2. Updates for the following packages are available. Apply: Now or later.

Windows is #1. Linux is #2.

Linux does it right. Sometimes, you're in the middle of something, and delaying makes sense. But shutting down on a 3d print job, or in the middle of a game session fucking sucks. And, I absolutely despise software with "Mothership knows best" crap. (It's also why I despise Ubuntu's SNAP. Same shit.)

NO! It must always be up to a user to decide to update software. Not all updates work. Not all updates are improvements.

Because the promotional systems in these gargantuan orgs fundamentally value shipping over maintenance.

For the longest time, I was a die-hard MS guy, fully immersed in their ecosystem. From my Surface Pro to the Lumia Windows Phone, I embraced every facet of their landscape. It was like the stars had aligned perfectly, granting me a seamless and efficient workflow across all my devices. But then, as if the planets themselves shifted out of harmony, everything fell apart and now we are here.

We get these slivers of full-integration from time to time. We see it today with the Vision Pro. It's not hard to imagine what could be! But I'm not counting on it anytime soon.

The fact is that Windows 8.1 was far better that the shit hole that Windows 10/11 has become. Windows 7 was the last great Windows. Windows 8.1 was the last decent/good Windows.

> The backlash against Windows 8 from purists who hated anything mobile

I think that you're being a bit uncharitable here. The issue wasn't "purists who hate mobile". The issue is that what makes a good mobile UI is worlds apart from what makes a good desktop UI. You can't combine the two without making one or both use cases worse.

The pushback was due to Windows 8 being terrible on the desktop.

Microsoft's mistake was in trying to make One UI To Rule Them All rather than having different UIs for different form factors.

See: basically the entirety of web design nowadays.

The answer is stuff like ChromeBooks and Steam Decks.

The classic desktop open source/free software ecosystem that people are thinking of when they say “Linux” is driven by a technical community, so the types of problems that will be solved are the ones that bother technical people, not non-technical ones. There’s some overlap of course, (everyone wants the fonts and colors in their terminals to look nice, right?) but it is just a side effect of the fact that technical people are also people.

> it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS

There are tradeoffs. Linux's advantage is that it's not an adware platform, or a walled garden. For my money, I don't care about extra performance or stability, it all works well enough for me.

Of course, that doesn't help if your particular application doesn't work on Linux, you're out of luck. I just don't think it's a worthwhile goal, to try to attract those people to Linux. If they want to fight for it themselves, great! But there's not much benefit for those of us who are already happy on Linux, to work to attract anyone else.

> Linux is good enough, but in terms of stability and performance for user applications, it sucks compared to Windows and MacOS.

/me shakes head in disbelief. How can one persons experience be so different to mine? Everything is faster / small under Linux - the file system, the graphics, the size of a base OS install with GUI and brower is literally 1/10th of Windows. Windows taking seconds to respond to a click on the start button (I presume so it can fetch the ads) was the final straw for me.

As for stability, I watched co-workers come in in the morning and find their dev environment was broken due an overnight Microsoft update, and just accept the 30 delay while they fixed it as routine, unavoidable, "it's just how things are". But for one, an update that broke things so badly he needed an OS reinstall to drive him to having a "fuck it, I'm going to Debian" moment. That is rare though.

Meanwhile, I've never experienced unwanted downtime from any Debian security patch. OS upgrades are a different matter, but they only happen once in two years, and you have at least another 2 years to get around to it. Or you can do it once every 4 years. Which isn't surprising. Debian is used by a lot of servers around the globe. Stable is the name of the game, uptimes in years aren't uncommon.

I think most people eventually figure out hardware that works fine under Linux. Granted, nvidia is still a sore point, and it doesn't really have a viable alternative for some important scenarios. But in the end, it's usually not that hard to make work, many (millions?) people do it. It might not be slick, but it's fine. And Intel iGPU support is basically flawless if you have more modest needs.

Can't comment on the problems you have had. My own experience has been almost without issue for many years now, using Fedora. YMMV.

Gaming and pro audio plugins are the reasons for me to keep Windows bootable.

However, recently Windows started to take more than 15 minutes for booting (except for sometimes, when it takes only 3 seconds as if to mock me), and none of the 30 suggestions or so I've tried could fix this big. Since the advice in such cases is always to re-install everything (nevermind 100+ audio plugins with proprietary DRM I'd need to re-install), I'm thinking more than twice before booting into Windows these days. I don't have much time for gaming anyway, and will probably just give up my audio plugins at some point.

My own experience with an AMD GPU and gaming on Linux, has been awesome for the last few years. I don't touch Windows to play any game, except Fornite

been using linux as a daily driver for years now. like since 2009.

gaming on it is fine, and the nvidia binary blog was never a problem, even with the basically-alpha-test software that is Fedora.

currently very stable with AMD hardware. playing CP2077 at ultra high with no issues.

the only real challenge I've had is a grad school course or two that have niche software that required Windows, and that was solvable via a Windows VM.

People who want to run Linux buy hardware and laptops that support Linux. The user you're replying to specifically said they don't care to evangelize the benefits because it works great for them.

Replying with an example of a Nvidia card and Ubuntu Snaps doesn't really address them because they're in all likelihood running compatible hardware with a distro that works for them.

Please continue to use other OSes with the blessing of the rest of us Linux users. No one is forcing you or trying to convince you otherwise.

I have a few desktops of various vintage in my stable, and one with an Nvidia GPU is effectively totally unstable. Driver updates often break things (one display at 1024x768), the machine often fails to wake from sleep; sometimes it'll wake with one display no longer working (requiring reboot), and various other issues.

I lack the patience to try and troubleshoot it most of the time and primarily use another machine. Usefulness is limited when I can't count on "simple" things like waking from sleep in working state, IME.

Yeah, i'm not a fan of Ubuntu either. But if Linux isn't for you, that's great. I don't think any of us should work to convince you otherwise. We're fine. You're fine. No problem.

P.S. Chromebook is Linux under the hood.

Try Kubuntu. It's far better than Windows. I can't say anything compared against OSX, as I don't touch it.

How not? I have used it on about 5 devices in the last few years and it has worked out of the box every time.

I don't think this is the point, and many other technologists, including past myself, doesn't seem to get it.

Much to technologists dismay, people's technology choices doesn't really involve the technology itself. The thought process is more similar to choosing a car for its color. This is what large enterprises realize, and which is why they shift focus away from the product or service itself, to how the product or service gets into the users hands. Apple is chosen by the people, so they focus on UX, image, status, on being an aspirational product. Microsoft has a different focus, it's businesses, government, education. They aim to be infrastructure, a public service that's proprietary.

What is common is that all of them is that they all build a moat. Consciously making it hard for people to switch. Microsoft does this by making its services and formats into standards, but not opening up the standard itself, and also making it hellishly complex. So now, if you want to interface with your government, you can send your document in docx. And what views and edits docx is MS Office. And what platform that runs on is Windows. That's it, and that's why the OP article is sensationalist. Microsoft is not driving away people by making their lives more complex, the people have nowhere to go, and they are often not the ones choosing Microsoft in the first place.

"You've run out of flags! Click here to go to the Minesweeper Store, or wait an additional 2:29 minutes"

I can't even believe I'm saying this: but all joking aside, I MIGHT be inclined to buy a cosmetic skin for smiley if they offered it.

Oh… I see… That’s a convincing argument. Well, in such case I see no other option but to use Windows. (/s)

I don't know what average means in this context but my experience is that linux printer setup is far easier than windows.

CUPS has come a long way over the years.

> What about getting wifi going out of the box?

It's 2024. WiFi even works out of the box on Debian now.

> Or Bluetooth?

Getting some random device to connect to Bluetooth is a lottery - on both Windows and Linux. It's a horrible standard. That said, it usually works on both.

> In Linux… ???? Where do you even go?

If we are talking about printers and one of bigger Linux desktop environments, a little red triangle in the notification area usually.

Yes, it will be different to where a Windows user will expect to find it. But given the dance you have to perform between the old control panel, the new settings app, and having to google to find devmgmt.msc I would hope it is different. Windows is no longer has the nice consistent management UI of the XP days. Modern windows is the mess you get after decades of organic growth with very little cleanup. I can just imagine the public derision an open source developer would receive if they delivered something as bad as that.

>It's my operating system.

I think part of the problem is that it seems like an internal (corporate) push (shift?) to view it as only a "licensed" product that you're using, rather than as something you "own" on your machine.

We saw a bit of this with licensing and product validation. Now, we're seeing it with changes driven by internal (e.g.: corporate command chain) drives. They "need" this data but there's no open transparency about why they need it, where it's housed, who has access, what positive changes this data has driven (if at all), etc.

Back during the Watson or WER (Windows Error Reporting) days, that was the only "telemetry" that the company needed and they got by on quite a few versions of the OS without needing more.

I don't have an answer - but I do know that if my work didn't require Windows, I'd be happy to never see another Windows desktop again.

The absolutely insane pattern of making people click "back" after seeing an email/password login screen to create an account without logging in...

The problem with this logic is that users _are_ pounding sand: to macos and ipados, which has been steadily ticking up.

If the alternative is bash then I don't just like powershell, I love it from the bottom of my heart.

The main issue with powershell is its name. It would have been better named powerscript. It’s not really a shell but a much more powerful script language along the lines of Perl or PHP.

Ehh debatable. Just two different philosophies. I do think objects > text.

> It is it an object, or not an object.

It is always an object. Strings, arrays, paths, the registry—everything can be manipulated as an object.

Um, to be fair, "-eq" is also an operator in bash.

> How about operators? They make ZERO sense (-eq). […] I'll stick with zsh or bash.

Ah yes. Bash, and its highly intuitive `if /usr/bin/\[ 5 -eq "5" ']'; then :; fi` comparison operators.

Huh... Everything is a object. But that object might be a string. And you don't have to know, you can ask.

I get that when everything is text, it becomes simpler to reason about. But you also have to do a lot of maneuvering to get information out of it. PS tries to give you more power.

My main gripe with ps is command discoverability: I don't know who thought that the "verb-subject" would be a good idea, because if I type "get-" and tab to auto complete, how the hell will I find the command about networking I want?

The learning curve also sucks, but I don't think it's worse than bash. I do remember spending six months with a bash manual tab open in my desktop back when I was starting Linux development.

There are also other crazy advantages ps have over bash, like the native ability to understand cmdlets and their parameters, powerful scripting capabilities with decent support for loops, conditionals etc.

And I don't event know what to tell you about the operators... They were copied from POSIX, so complaing about then is complaing about bash & co.

Finally, PowerShell also let's you access all of the dotnet namespace. This allows you to do a lot of stuff, because you would literally be programing instead of scripting.

PowerShell on *nix is a hellscape realm I wasn't previously aware of.

don't even get me started on PS.

try this PS script out

  clear
  function Get-Strings1 {
    @('hello')
  }
  
  function Get-Strings2 {
    @('hello', 'world!')
  }
  
  (Get-Strings1).Length
  (Get-Strings2).Length

OUTPUT:

  5
  2

You see, PS will strip away the array for 1-element arrays. (Get-Strings1).Length is 5 because you're really calling Length on the string and not the array (the array doesn't exist at that point). As you can see with (Get-Strings2).Length, if there is more than 1 element it will not do this.

and you'll watch different features crash into each other in bizarre ways. For example, everything is an object but if that's the case how do you output log statements to the console since it's also a shell?

PS is hosted, the default PS host will print out whatever reaches the "top". Think of your PS code as the "first function" with it's own set of returns. The host will print out whatever your code "returns", but this is consistent all the way down the chain.

  clear
  function Get-Strings3 {
    (Do-Stuff)
    return 'hello'
  }
  
  function Do-Stuff {
    Write-Output 'haha'
  }
  
  (Get-Strings3).Length

OUTPUT:

  2

So your returns can be polluted by downstream function calls, including calls into packages that you don't easily have access to the source for. So you'll eventually start writing defensively.

(Do-Stuff) | Out-Null # throws away anything coming out of the function call

And consider what we've demonstrated here. That PS will happily remove arrays based upon runtime state and happily add them based upon runtime state.

If you're confused about why this still happens even though this version uses the return keyword, remember it's PS which means any silly, preconceived notions you have are out the window.

returns does two things.

1. Write-Output

2. Ends execution of the function

If you remove the return keyword it will have the exact behavior it did previously because it's the last statement in the function. And yes, that's how easy it is to accidentally write something to the output and thus turn your return value into an array.

Since I'm on a roll, 1 last example.

  clear
  
  $arr = @($null, 'hello')
  
  $isNull = $arr -eq $null
  
  $isNull.GetType()

OUTPUT:

  IsPublic IsSerial Name                                     BaseType
  -------- -------- ----                                     --------
  True     True     Object[]                                 System.Array

How is the equality operator (-eq) returning an array?

You see, PS has been lying to you all this time, arrays in PS aren't arrays. They're wrapper objects that pretend to be an array to give all sorts of cool magic. One of those magic things being it's propensity to forward function calls on the array wrapper to the elements themselves.

What it's actually doing is calling -eq on each element (think LINQ select) and returning a new array.

Which is useful, you can imagine having a list of COM objects with a name property, you can do a select on the name by just doing ".name" on the array wrapper itself. It has its uses.

BUT

you can't do that for any properties that are on the array (such as Length). Also, PS allows you to attach functions to objects at runtime, if you were truly evil you could attach a myriad of functions to an array object you handed back and laugh as the poor suckers using your code can't understand why calling .Name doesn't forward like it should.

----

I could go on and on and on about PS. I once built a VPS automation solution in PS. My (naive) thinking at the time was that the remoting capabilities for windows was useful so I may as well build it out in powershell. I maintained that solution for 5 years, 4.5 years in and I was _still_ getting surprised by interactions w/i PS.

Here's an exercise for the reader.

write a function that will successfully test an input parameter against null for everything. There's a solution.

You never used Perl I see.

You don't have to use grep.

You mean like the kennel and mesa driver they largely wrote?

i3 and Sway work great. UI isn't a failing in general. Just a particular type of discoverable UI that is needed to sell to non-technical users…

Chromebooks sell OK, right?

Because Window is, at its core, meant for average, everyday users. Not developers. Not power users.

And for the average user, all they care about is having a web browser and access to get the applications they need.

I really don't see the harm in the MS store being present. It offers them a user-friendly way to tell people to "just go here and install X" without having to walk them through anything more complicated.

Reminds me, recently removed a folder and explorer showed it still being there and you could click on it and see the files.

I'm suspicious that they're trying to move to 'one drive' for the whole file system and so need to cache everything for reasons. Performance and also the files on your drive might actually be only in the cloud. IE your hard drive is for local caching not for storing data long term. Means perhaps if you save a file to disk. And then later pull the drive and put it on another machine those files won't actually be there.

If true this bodes very poorly.

Phones dominate not because of screen size but because the operating systems they run are fundamentally more user friendly. iOS/Android were the first time experienced OS engineers were able to go back to the drawing board and rethink the whole stack from scratch. They learned a lot of lessons from what worked and what didn't on generalized desktop computers and were able to build something people prefer using.

That's a rare opportunity. I hope someone gets a chance to do it for professional workstation computing one day. The Windows codebase has IMHO reached end-of-life. The Linux community isn't going to stray far outside the bounds of the 1970s era UNIX design. Apple does OK but they can't/won't change the macOS UI in any meaningful way and not enough people write native Mac apps to justify trying to do anything interesting there. ChromeOS is basically just a large screen smartphone OS experience with some Linux virtualization on the side. We're caught in a local minima.

Can you share any anecdotes, or some more details? I've been watching this "app generation", and I've read Prensky's nonsense about "digital natives", so I'm always interested in concrete examples of how it's playing out. Thanks!

The netbook I kept referring to in some comments has finally died, a tablet has replaced it for all pratical travel purposes.

> unless they're into the latest video games.

The fact that there can exist sizable population of software engineers that are not into video game is disturbing in itself.

Huh? Any issues with YouTube on Linux?

I do not know what is niche here, but I added couple examples from latest upgrade.

Are they just not testing what some options do? If so, we might be better off just not giving those options.

iOS has a “feature” where wifi and Bluetooth will switch itself back on after a set period of time if you use control center to turn it off. If you use settings it behaves as you would expect.

A fair warning, but I similarly lost a secret after transferring to a new iPhone, even while using 3rd party password manager. Said manager likely used secure enclave and thus failed to work on new phone. Failure was very quiet, not even an error or anything, it just stopped generating codes.

I was able to restore it through external means, but this reinforced “have a non-proprietary backups” for me.

> Let's keep this factual.

I will give you benefit of the doubt that you personally never had them, but both are factual based on my experience.

If you are interested you should be able find previous HN threads with same exact symptoms from other people.

> To turn off Bluetooth, go to settings, select Bluetooth, and turn the toggle off. It will abide.

It will abide for a while, but the next software update will turn it back on. This happens every single update.

> Legit question: do you think there will ever be a new commercial desktop operating system...

Nope, no one is willing to put up the money for a long term investment.

If I had the billions, I'd fund an easily installable OS that can accept Windows hardware drivers (easier said than done...). Or the cheaper way would probably to fund a slick Linux distro that an average user isn't scared away, but I guess they already are slick enough nowadays?

I installed a Manjaro KDE distro on a secondary PC a while ago, and on login it had the option of X11 or Wayland, but Wayland wouldn't work on my setup... Sigh, the average user doesn't care to learn about windowing system options, they just want to do their work.

There is no good replacement for Active Directory, by a large margin. It’s the single biggest factor that keeps Windows alive in the enterprise.

> Apparently it's easier to administer a Windows network than a Linux one.

Not really. I suspect that there's a fallacy similar to the one in <https://thedailywtf.com/articles/an-obvious-requirement> going on. (The most relevant comment: 'Ah, so the user is using "obvious" to mean "familiar."').

you have a valid point. I always had Macintosh machine and then Linux, discovered at the university.

I think I fall in the case of tech literate people who know how to do things in Linux but don't care to relearn it all in Windows.

So I guess it's true for the opposite too ahah

macOS !!

Blender is unique in having a big set of users who are actually good at aesthetics professionally. A subset of that group wanted to contribute, and the technically minded were actually willing to let them.

Most other open source projects have people behind them who don't put UX first, and who are suspicious, jealous, or plain disagree when people want to help with UX.

This shouldn't be too surprising in a world led by people who value technical excellence most.

The bottleneck regarding UI/UX was (and is still) X11 / Xorg, with the obsolete client/server architecture inherited from a time when computers had no graphic card. Wayland has been in progress for some time now to replace X11 / Xorg, but it is still bugged to some extend, and driver support needs to be improved.

I find it better than windows rn. Linux mint especially.

I mean there is even a playstore-like "app" to install softwares

Well, as you say, desktop environments look the same. But they don't feel the same. When we talk about UI/UX we talk about look and feel. I've installed Ubuntu & MX Linux to reply to your question, here are random issues I get with the default setup: why do I get no sound when I play a youtube video (it works on one distro, broken on the other one) ? why do I have no option to change the refresh rate of my monitor to more than 60Hz ? Therefore where is the 120hz smooth scrolling ? Why is my keyboard layout set to english by default while I am located in Europe ? How am I supposed to configure my WIFI password if my keyboard layout is incorrect by default ? Why does my CPU fan runs at full speed while I am just writing this text currently with no other user task in background ? If I use a laptop with a second keyboard (bluetooth), why aren't my keystrokes taken into account when the system asks me to confirm the reboot by pressing "enter" (I need to reach the laptop keyboard since the bluetooth one is not taken into account) ? Why does my browser need to reload its cache & configuration from my drive each time I boot my computer; why isn't it loaded in RAM by default ? Why do I still have the first mouse wheel scrolling event ignored in the Chrome/Chromium web browsers in most distros I try, while this bug has been driving users nuts for years while the solution is already known ? I use a dual monitor setup, why does the system displays some glitches at first boot ? Why doesn't it doesn't remember my primary screen when I log off the session, and shows the login prompt on the other screen ? Why does the system hangs when I run a game like counter strike 2 and I try to switch back to the desktop ? Why does the system get super slow while it tries to recompile shaders, making it impossible to open a web browser ? and I'm not even mentioning the issues installing/uninstalling proprietary video drivers which is still a huge mess. For my usage, the Linux Desktop feel experience is still pure hell currently... although I really wish it were good.

I understand your perspective and appreciate the flexibility of Linux, however achieving my desired setup on Linux does involve more effort and is sometimes impossible, as I explain in my post below.

What problem? In 2013 Microsoft only had 2-3 big products, Windows, Office and X-Box. Now it's significantly more divested and the company's growth no longer depends on Windows' success or failure, and the stock pricing reflects that.

People have been having that feeling for 20 years as well, just different people with different tolerances.

Look at the feedback on Windows Me, Windows 8, The IE monopoly, breaking web standards, etc etc.

And when will that happen? In 30 more years?

Well I still need to access the good old control panel each time I long on to a new machine, since the new settings app thing still doesn't have all the regional settings.

Quite basic stuff, at least it's still available in the old control panel for now.

I dunno man, with Steam on linux and most of the major game engines making porting easy (or at least moving in that direction) I have very few reasons to stick with Windows anymore. At this point it's basically Photoshop and Fusion 360, otherwise I'd abandon it completely. If they lose gamers, I think they'll have a real issue.

Sure, but here's the thing, all they really have to do is... nothing. Just leave the old control panel alone and stop making new ones. Make small evolutions, not redesigns. It might not have been brilliant, but once people learned where things were there's very little upside to changing it and all sorts of downside.

> I don't think there's any control panels people are in love with.

Not in the modern era, but I do love this one from Mac OS 1: https://i.imgur.com/XKfnGMl.png

I understand that there are closed source software tools used in science out there, but it seems pretty wrong-headed to me. A scientific tool that doesn’t have exposed source code seems not very trustworthy. If you get unexpected results, how do you know it wasn’t a bug?

I was talking specifically about Ubuntu. ASUS Linux folks recommend Fedora and Arch to have proper kernels and refuse to touch Ubuntu, so the engineering marvel of G14 with 4090 barely works on Ubuntu.

As noted in TFA comments, `control /name Microsoft.Printers` also works.

I think it's kinda nice that my random identifiers have a little flag bit to indicate they were random v(._. )v

> their mixed endianess

Pardon my pedantry here but this is a misinterpretation of GUIDs through the lens of the UUID structure. The actual difference between GUID and UUID isn't the endianness-on-the-wire within the chunks but the number and sizes of the chunks themselves.

GUIDs are [32 bits, 16 bits, 16 bits, [8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8, 8] bits].

UUIDs are [32 bits, 16 bits, 16 bits, 8 bits, 56 bits].

Endianness only matters with multi-byte data, so the "mixed-endianness" thing comes from the fact that the two specs mostly line up, but then people interpret GUID's array of octets as if ⅞ of it were a single multi-byte field as it is in UUID.

> or how version bits are placed in them

Indeed this is mostly lost to time and seems like odd placement these days. For anyone who's curious, the reason why those bits are where they are is because the Apollo Network Computing Architecture "version 0" UUIDs had a different third layout where the ninth octet indicated socket address family. IP's dominance led to the ossification of AF numbers which did not keep growing as anticipated, leaving several bits of effectively wasted space that were then reused to indicate the version since those bits could always be assumed to be 0 on NCA/NCS due to lack of any network standard on which they could be anything else.

Source: wrote a GUID/UUID library that implements all the old weird shit just for the fun of it:

  irb> GlobeGlitter::from_gregorian_time.inspect => "#<GlobeGlitter 01eed42e-d812-1db0-0f52-00e04c180069>"
  irb> GlobeGlitter::from_ncs_time.inspect => "#<GlobeGlitter 3cd0b18cbd50.02.00.00.e0.4c.18.00.69>"

massgrave activator - open source and on github lol

I use it for test VMs myself.

yes windows updates and all still works

The most current iteration is very fond of that, yes.

But I was answering why people keep trying and failing to add the functionality long-before it was an ad space grab.

> OS X works well especially with the hardware it was co-designed with.

Only while they continue to support it. It may work well now but when they stop supporting it; it's proprietary, it's dead.

When they fully move away from Intel based support, all those without the latest platform will be dead in the water.

"Your not running the latest secure version of OSX! -- Your running an Intel? Sorry we don't support that".

As which that can be seen with old iPhones and iOS.

Like passkey support. I thought for sure it would be further ahead in Linux but nope.