This generation of software companies really seem to have abandoned all previous goals for “Let’s see how shit we can make this!”
“Sir, if we can finish our robot it could help with any household chores and even take over most of the care work for the elderly. Then in future patches we could make it waterboard the user unless they get the waterboardless premium subscription. Then we’ll increase the cost and slowly reintroduce waterboarding even for subscribers.”
You are now VP of product development at Microsoft. Congratulations.
P.S. Get a bullet proof vest and car.
Doesn’t stop a homemade drone and a fragmentation payload. Or for that matter, a rigged car or location.
You are now VP of product development at Alphabet. Congratulations.
P.S. Entrance details to your bunker will be sent shortly via seperate means.
I have been very successful at ignoring Windows for quite some time.
The tech bros are turning everything to shit so you don’t notice any one thing is shit because it’s all shit now. Genius
I have tried out a bunch of Linux ones last year and I will be converting over my main PC at some point this year due to all the things they have done or want to do with Windows 11. I agree it’s very hard to ignore.
Debian + KDE has been rock solid, if you dont already have a favorite distro. KDE is just what you expect in a traditional desktop, it doesnt have a bunch of ui experiments to make things “better”.

Ha! It’s 2026 now. Those problems can easily be ignored as they are all in the past.
I love the smell of pedantry in the morning
The new Start menu is also a significant improvement over the old one, with more icons on show, the ability to turn off Recommended ads, […]
Guys, we are allowed to disable the ads now. We might have been too harsh on microsoft after all.
…insanity, I tell you. Ads, in your face, right in the Start Menu, on your computer that you bought, on your OS that you bought.
Note that it doesn’t disable ads. It just means the ads a user sees will be less relevant to the user based on their browsing history and consumer profiles.
Yup was gonna say the same thing.
They can be removed with third party tools but they shouldn’t be there in the first place.
I already thought it was pretty bad but that is somehow even worse. Par for the course I suppose
And everywhere you go there’s prompts and alerts to upgrade your OneDrive storage or subscribe to Xbox game pass.
Don’t even get me started on the experience on handhelds. Microsoft’s attempts so far at the Xbox Full Screen experience convinces me they will never get it right.
They will shove ads into our faces at every possible opportunity. Ads work, they effectively brainwash you, the more you see, the better they do.
Consumers are what, less than 10% of MS’s revenue? Most of their income is from cloud (Azure, O365) so they can afford to treat their consumer customers like trash. They don’t give a shit about your 50-150 bucks for a win license because it’s peanuts to them.
The only viable option for consumers is to massively ditch MS products altogether and migrate to alternatives, which used to be in short supply but luckily aren’t anymore.
It’s probably less for OEMs, right? Most people don’t install their own OS, much less pay full price for a license.
And yeah, consumer Windows could disappear and MS wouldn’t care, as long as office computers are still stuck with it. Which they are.
Windows 10 was the last Windows I’ll use. Windows 7 was the last one I was happy with. Windows 98SE and XP, we had great times, didn’t we? Miss you guys.
I miss the days of windows xp, that was middle school to early high school for me. It was around that time when I switched to mac.
Still have random memories of random windows stuff.
Fun fact: 7 was the last version MS produced under the injunction from the late 90s that prevented them from bundling required services with the OS. They actually had MS accounts (then called .NET Passports) ready to track activation and for login on XP but had to make them optional.
One of the best feelings for me ever was when I cancelled my Micro$oft account after switching to Mint.
The freshness is real.
I resisted getting 10, and finally acquiesced. When 11 was announced, I watched apprehensively from the side-lines, and finally decided it was time to dump Windows if I could. Fortunately, Linux is here, it’s great, and it just works, now.
An OS should do its job and disappear behind the programs (I’m purposely resisting saying “app” in favor of the old-school “program”, too). Linux does that, like Windows used to.
I do admit that I run Win10 IOT in VirtualBox for a few small programs that won’t run under Wine. Once a week, for a few minutes. I’m sorry. I don’t wear the shirt, because I feel like a fraud. Please forgive me.
First of all, don’t feel bad about it. That said if you want to improve yourself in the virtualization department and get rid of Oracle’s VirtualBox, I recommend having a look at virt-manager with KVM/Qemu as a VM host. It’s a bit more of initial setup but once this is done it works pretty much the same way as VirtualBox.
An application is for end user, a program is a set of instructions. All apps are programs but not all programs are apps ;)
I like how taskbar buttons dynamically resize depending on window title. I like that the size of the buttons on the taskbar are all different, and I like not having a way to change this back to the boring obvious tried-and-true standard of having buttons that are all the same size.
I like that the rules appear to not make any fucking sense, leading to situations where you can have 3 entries for the same program with the same content open that are all different sizes.

I like it because it takes me out of whatever I’m doing and forces me to notice the user interface. I like getting distracted by little hints of movement at the bottom of the screen that make me stop and go “wait what the fuck did it just do”.
I like that when I last searched for “windows 11 taskbar button resize disable”, the only mention of the word “disable” on the first page of search results was this:

I like having to put “site:reddit.com” at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
And I like having to ultimately give up and live with it because at the end of the day, it’s a feature and not a bug.
Why in the world do you have titles of the taskbar?!
Visibility and accessibility of windows, without the need to expand a group or neutral icon.
Zac Bowden used to post a video for every single new insider build of Windows to cover any change he could, he’s bought the original Surface table from 2007, he’s been covering and championing all things Windows for at least a decade. To get someone like him off side, you really gotta be fucking the dog.
Yep.
I started using windows as a kid (Win 3.1). Was more or less happy to be a windows user through all of the various versions, although 95, XP and 7 were the most usable.
For the first time in about 35 years, I’m genuinely unhappy with Windows and am looking at other options.
They’ve really dropped the ball if users like me are unhappy.
Come to CachyOS!
It’s like everything I’ve ever wanted from an OS served on a silver platter.
Look, I’ve used Cachy. It’s great, pretty polished, looks nice.
But do not recommend an arch distro like that until you know person is more tech inclined.
Because a lot of Windows users are not, and they’re not going to want to open the terminal.
Cachy is best for those who like to more effortlessly tinker with their system, like messing around with Polkit so KDE doesn’t ask for a password every second.
Don’t forget, it’s not about what we’ve always wanted from an OS, but what the other person might want from an OS. When unknown, pick the simpler solutions, like Bazzite, Debian, or Mint.
That’s how I’ve gotten 8 people converted to Linux from Windows this year.

I’m starting to think Microsoft gives windows a new version number every time they want to make a bunch of big breaking changes, just so the bad reputation can die when they rebrand it as Windows 12 (or whatever stupid naming scheme their marketing team comes with next.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if they just started calling it Copilot at some point. I could see them renaming their “agents” after big feature updates, much like we do with hurricanes which would be fitting given their history of breaking things with each KB.
I’ve been a Windows user my whole life. I support 5000+ Windows devices along with the whole Microsoft enterprise suite. It’s been bad with them, but there have usually been patches at some point or at least community discovered workarounds. However, Microsoft’s reckless abandon into AI legitimately worries me.
I’m finally making the switch to Linux for personal devices.
Su that’s why they never released 9 - it was too perfect and they wouldn’t make money in the future











