My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.
I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.
The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.
I think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while.
Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely that Microsoft mainly designed Windows 95 for compatibility. (The contemporary Windows NT on the other hand was a much cleaner design, though still questionable above its kernel layer).
Just not being able to use one application is better than your whole OS going up in smoke every couple weeks. Yes, Windows 95A on the wrong hardware (and how would you know?) did that.
I mean, sure, although the crashes could sometimes come with data loss as well.
You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were.
In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).
Oh, man. The "Active" Desktop. The only thing that it kept active was my CD drive when I was forced to reinstall Windows every time I tried to make it work on my PC and it broke everything.
I was all about some 98lite ‘Sleek’ on my hand-me-down 486DX/2-66 in the late '90s, Windows 98/98SE/Me with the original Windows 95 pre-OSR2.5 non-Active Explorer swapped in :)
Pretty much up until Windows 10. Not that every decision they made was great (it wasn't), but they very rarely shipped stuff which was straight up broken. They used to have a commitment to quality which they threw away around the time of Win10 when they fired the QA staff.
This was the era when I had replaced explorer.exe with litestep and had a reminder to reinstall Windows every six months to keep the computer running smoothly. It wasn't MS "shipping" stuff that broke it IIRC (though patches did have that effect), but rather a steady degradation in performance over the months. I tried to hold in abeyance with tools like defrag, but to no avail.
* Surfing the web
* Using Eudora lite for email
* Playing Quake1 and GLQuake, probably some Quake 2 and StarCraft around that time
* Using mIRC a ton to chat on undernet
* Using Xylinx to do my coursework for CS314
* Using MS Visual J++ do do more coursework (good riddance!)
* Writing papers in (I think) StarOffice, but it might have been just "Word" at that point.
This was right around the year I switched to Linux because of the issues. Though, I have to admit, it was a memory and DVD drive upgrade that drove me over the edge. I guess MS had a "point" system for each hardware component, and if enough points of components changed, they considered the machine a different computer, and would refuse to boot (since you didn't buy a license for that "different" computer). They told me I had to call them so I could boot my machine, at which point I table flipped, formatted my drive, and asked my buddy to burn a whole bunch of floppies so I could install Slackware.
They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.
What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.
This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
Random existing Windows bugs breaking things, third party software breaking things on install/uninstall, and bloat causing problems are very different from Microsoft forcing an update that introduces new flaws in windows and breaks Windows in ways that had been previously working.
Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For decades people would go online on Patch Tuesday to look to see if people were reporting problems with the newest round of Windows updates. Maybe there'd be a problem with an update and a specific network card, or a certain video driver, but Windows didn't usually break Windows.
Even if it did, you at least had the option to just not update. These days Microsoft doesn't care about problems with their updates. Even when they are warned ahead of time that there are problems they're happy to shove them down our throats, at any time of the day or night, and break Windows or even delete your personal files (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-d...) in the process.
Out of all the vague and unprovable things that never happened, that one never happened the most.
I'm sure you can find users on any OS complaining with "random" breakages but unless you can show any data that proves it was due to the OS and not your HW or third party apps or your own actions, this means nothing.
Very cool. Of course we both understand that this is the case - this is why it is in scare quotes. You are arguing about something I literally acknowledged in my original post. The issue is that it happened due to what is for all intents and purposes bitrot: It breaks during regular use due to small compounding errors that happen due to bad software design. In practical use this means what I wrote, even though to the most pedantic of nerds it means literally what happened. It can in fact mean both things
I just started using windows after being on macOS since Vista. I planned to go full Linux for a gaming pc, but there are still some kinks, so dual booting it is.
The shocking negative was the amount of ads and tracking I had to get rid of, like chinese budget phone tier of crap.
Once you get rid of that though, the experience is halfway decent. But there are absolute head scratchers for 2026: some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display, apps adding itself to self start at boot left and right, and so on.
The most laughable event happened after I installed windows home when my license was for windows profesional. The official way to solve this was... to turn down wifi and write a hardcoded switch-to-professional key as a fake activation. That was the most amateur workaround I've seen in decades.
> some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display
Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.
Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.
The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.
At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.
That lack of care is the part that's annoying to me, combined with them being one of the largest corporations that has the resources to throw at those issues if they chose to do so. Quality issues aside, there's lots of similar aspects like the long drawn out migration of the control panel (i.e. their own control panel applets, putting aside third party) since win8 in 2012, if they wanted they could have completed that in the last 14 years and however many major releases you count since then.
It may not be the bean counting optimal, but it is a long term image they project of the company.
I think the general issue they have is that pretty much nobody who cares chooses Windows actively. It's mostly gamers, which seem to be on the way out, corporations who don't care about this, and creatives who, for whatever reason, don't want to buy a mac.
I'm in the latter category. As a Sunday photographer who daily drives Linux for work, I can't justify investing in Apple hardware. I used to daily drive macs, so I'm not against Apple on principle, but for my current needs it's just too expensive, since for my actual work Linux works better for me and the hardware is free (through work). Since I don't spend 8 hours a day using Windows and my income doesn't depend on it, I just put up with the shoddy quality. I can do what I need with my photos and it's good enough.
I've recently switched to a Mac after years on Linux, basically due to my frustration with the way the Linux desktop is being developed and the lack of quality all around for that platform.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
Meta-topic: I've seen this comment many times over the years, and it never results in a discussion where folks can agree. My reaction reading it is "You must be holding it wrong!" because I daily-drive Linux in many more ways than one (servers, laptops, desktops, handhelds (Hackberry Pi), SBCs, and, Valve-willing, VR headsets), and adore the Linux desktop. I use Pop!_OS almost everywhere, but Debian/Ubuntu/Arch with IceWM or Fluxbox (or the like) works great.
Anyway, this is not a call for you to start listing all the stuff that's broken (though feel free!), I'm just amazed that, with years of power and freedom on Linux, you truly enjoy Mac more. Just goes to show each of us has our own workflow and tastes!
It's a bit deeper than just a series of bugs. For all of Linux's power and freedom, its modern desktop architecture is extremely restrictive.
* There is only one systemd --user session per user with one D-Bus instance. So you can only have one desktop instance active at a time.
* There is no way for privileged apps/scripts to generically control the desktop or other apps in Wayland. (so no accessibility, AI computer use or even general scripting)
* There is no differentiation between configuration that should be active on (user, machine) tuple, and configuration that should be active on (user, *) tuple. (even Windows gets this right!)
* Desktop apps do not report rich activity information so they cannot be smartly memory managed.
* Desktop apps cannot generally be restored after getting killed/system shutdown.
* No application identity, PIDs voluntarily take on application identities in Wayland and on D-Bus, but PIDs that don't can easily escape observability, and if they consume resources but not enough to show up high in top, good luck knowing about them.
As technical as I am, none of those items really matter to me at all. So it's a great illustration of how the long tail of user needs is what ends up differentiating us in these discussions. It's very rare to get deep enough to actually identify that. I've always treated the desktop like a second-class citizen on Linux with the command line being my primary interface, and that has adapted so well to agentic usage that it never even occurred to me that desktop tool use was missing.
Which is an interesting assertion by itself, since I have a local deep-seek model that routinely uses scripting to fire up servers, browsers, take screenshots, and assess how it's converging on a solution. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had about how all of that is just a dirty hack, but for my purposes, it's been working excellently.
Same for me and I don't use MacOS for the same reason some people don't use Linux, I find the UI lacking and confusing.
And more importantly, MacOS (like Windows) are still poorly translated compared to your average Linux desktop with some leftover always in English. It's okay for me as a software engineer but it's not acceptable enough to give to my parents.
As a kid I vaguely remember our family had a stack of Dr. Dobb’s Journals with one particular article actually warning about the dangers of doublespace, and since it was completely optional (despite being touted as a flagship feature) we kind of dodged a bullet and had a pretty reasonable experience with DOS 6.
> I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on.
For me it's worse: I grew up on stuff like the C64 and then the Amiga. Switching to DOS was a serious step backwards.
> I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?
Never: they've always been mediocre.
> As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back.
I switched to Linux in the early Slackware days (then Debian 1.1). Most of the world followed and now tens of billions of devices are running Linux, not Windows.
Games I cant play on Linux are kernel level anti-cheat shooters. Anti cheat should be handled on the server anyway, no one should be installing that on their machines. Everything else works great!
I don't remember them being so bad. Windows 7, 8 were great. Visual Studio 6 was good. Excel was top quality for a long time. What used to be annoying to me was that Microsoft ignored the common Unix conventions for no good reason and tended to reinvent stuff. It was like smart nerds were tasked to come up with stuff without any awareness of prior art, or as if Bill G snd Steve B were trying to lock in customers into incompatible stuff. Obviously not great but working. What we get now is pure slop and negligence.
The internet revolted against 8 and stuck on 7 until it was EOL’ed and went straight to 10. I don’t recall 10 being positively received, but the hate has moved to windows 11. I’m happy to be corrected though.
The problem with 8 was that the UI was designed for a touch screen without a thought given to the fact that most users were going to be driving it with a mouse. Reliability-wise, it was perfectly fine.
The problem with 10 was that it was pushed as a "security update" on Windows Update. It was force-fed to unwitting/unwilling Windows 7 users like caged geese at a foie-gras farm.
That betrayal was arguably the first step towards the near-total enshittification of Windows that we see today, if you don't count the introduction of product activation with Windows XP.
Especially when the following years once again confirmed that none of the big enterprise customers care enough to cancel any contracts over QA problems.
I can. I could've told you decades ago, that this was the late stage of not just Microsoft, but any software company whose bread and butter was vendor lock-in. Microsoft was just the worst at the time because they were the biggest. Eventually the vendor lock-in becomes so great that the marginal cost, in terms of customers lost, from not fixing/improving your software, or at least not not letting it get worse, becomes much smaller than the cost of improving it/maintaining it. Any resources the company has to spare go into solidifying the lock-in, rather than making the software worth staying on in the first place. Even Apple seems to be in the early-mid stages of this transformation.
Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.
(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
Lay the blame where it belongs: it was one of Satya Nadella's early decisions to eliminate the SDET role at Microsoft. Everybody praised him at the time as some kind of wunderkind for juicing the stock but now Microsoft and users are facing the consequences. Hopefully history will correctly attach responsibility to Nadella for it.
To be fair, as of today, history still proves him right. Windows crumbles, but it still features enough value via its dominant position. As much as consumers are dissatisfied, investors are getting what they asked for, it is more efficiently extracting money. I hope that eventually that trend would reverse, but just being able to hold 10+ years with that bad of a product is already pretty sad.
To be fair, WoW is a 20+ year old game that to my knowledge never really got the ground up rewrite it has needed.... so I feel issues keep compounding faster and faster. Also - and not trying to defend MS here - I am pretty sure MS has been fairly hands-off about how blizz is run - so far. Just the general enshitification going on in parallel everywhere.
Midnight's war on addons, won by addons btw, is rumoured to be a push from top up. It has been cause of such borkage that stock, no addons UI shart LUA errors upon release.
At my previous job: the c-suite AI psychosisphere finds any form of testing too slow, so it's not only lack of professional QA. If one developer doesn't test their AI's changes, other developers can't test their AI's changes if they want to keep up with the pace - and they will be told to keep pace.
> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.
For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software.
Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.
WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.
Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
For what it’s worth, Proton has all but solved gaming on Linux. The only things I have been unable to run are games with low level anticheat.
It is so consistent I don’t even question if a new game will work.
Nvidia drivers on the other hand could still use some work. All wired for me, so I can’t speak to your driver troubles.
I have a windows vm for photoshop and the few programs I can not run native.
I personally run Mint and find it very reliable and capable. It has a windows style interface and my only issues are some minor things with taskbar settings and window snapping. For comparison, I could write a few novels on my issues with windows.
Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).
One of my machines is always Linux desktop; I've been using it to see if it's ready enough for my main desktop to switch over and so far my verdict has been it's not.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.
More that my motherboard came with a Broadcom WiFi chip instead of MediaTek which everyone recommends for Linux, and the shipped Linux drivers can only use 1 of the 4 antenna and won't connect to any 5ghz networks.
It "works" with 2.4 with 1 antenna, but the speed is then capped at 150Mbps instead 600Mbps/1300Mbps the hardware is capable of.
So it's like buying an AWD car, but realizing only one wheel gets power. Still technically drivable, but hardly working well. Maybe most people wouldn't even notice at all, but I figured I was technical enough to get in the weeds and fix it. Not all cars end up being Toyotas, sometimes you get a Jaguar.
I use Linux mint on my desktop. Wifi just works. I’m using some X870 motherboard.
I got the motherboard when it was really new, and I think it took a few months before wifi worked properly in mint out of the box. (I use Ethernet anyway so it wasn’t too upsetting). But after a few months, they had it all sorted. I have never manually compiled a kernel or wifi drivers or anything on this machine. I suspect most Linux users don’t do stuff like that any more.
Not to say it’s a trouble free experience. I’ve had problems with the nvidia drivers a few times recently. In the transition to nvidia’s new driver model, I’ve somehow ended up with incompatible nvidia packages on my system and the graphical environment broke. The most recent time I asked Claude code to take a look at my system and tell me what commands I should run to fix the nvidia packages. It did a great job.
It doesn’t feel like a kit plane any more. It’s a bit temperamental from time to time, but for the most part Linux just works.
It's compile drivers or research your hardware before you buy it. The latter is highly recommended. If you go against the common advice, it's kinda your problem. If you bought the hardware before installing Linux or it was given to you, well, that sucks. That said, driver problems, especially important ones, aren't that common anymore.
Nailed it. My Linux machine was built from the retired parts from my main desktop, so it very much is stuff that served me well for several years under Windows.
But the advice is still very much to research the hardware or buy a prebuilt with vendor support.
Compared to a decade ago, more stuff just works; especially noticeable with graphics drivers. But when things hiccup, which they still do, it still requires quite a lot of tech savviness to solve.
I can honestly say that I've never had to compile wifi drivers from source in more than a decade of using Linux as my main OS, even through my distrohopping phase. And I'm not researching my hardware ahead of time, either. I don't even know what you'd need to be running in order to have to do that? Maybe void or something similar? I don't think that my experience is particularly unique.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.
It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that.
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
To be honest, I feel that the ceiling is higher in Windows. I just today dealt with a faulty HP Printer driver that caused wuauserv (Windows Update) to report that I had to reboot every day. Finding which files were corrupted in `C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\` was not an easy task.
I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.
Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.
In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.
In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable" compared to a home desktop Linux (among all sorts of distro plus DE combinations). And I was using Win 98 ME, early Vista builds and so on too. It is really hard to bork Windows install to become fully inoperable. It will be screeching and throttling under fifty different viruses and malware installed by a naive aunty in the accounting but it will just somehow work. And GPU driver crashes in my case were self recovering. Linux on the other hand allows way more manual intervention, but it also kinda expects way more manual intervention too. In my experience.
I mean, maybe I'm misrepresenting desktop Linux, that's quite likely (at work I use exclusively CLI destro, so my experience in DEs and drivers is limited). But I'm pretty confident in my ability to generalize Windows state across many installs over past decades, I also had a stint as a all-rounder IT POC in a small journal in the early 00s, so there is that. Windows since NT kernel almost never needs a format/reinstall. Every single unbootable Windows PC was due to a hardware problem, like storage giving up, or burning the power supply, or dead battery, or busted condensers and mosfets. Or an incorrect dual boot install, when MBR gets overwritten. Windows is a very robust OS, despite all the real negative issues in other aspects.
The thing is, Linux is robust too in my experience.
My current laptop is running the latest release 44 of Fedora. That install dates back to version 26 which was something like 9 or 10 years ago, can't remember the exact year. That install migrated from an ssd on a laptop to an nvme on another laptop and then moved to a larger nvme drive. I never had any breakage really. The only problem I ever had on this laptop/install is that sometimes after several long multidays sleep/wake up/sleep/wake-up cycles sound going to a bluetooth device may start having shorts stutter every 10 to 20s that is solved by a reboot. I could probably solve that by restarting pipewire and/or ubloading/reloading a bluetooth module but it doean't happen frequently enough for me to investigate further. And it is nowhere as bad as what sometimes happens on my corporate windows 11 laptop.[1]
Other computer of mine, the "gaming console", is running bazzite, an immutable variant of Fedora dedicated to gaming. Being immutable there is very little breakage possible: if you happened to had an issue with an update you could just boot from the prior version image (not happened in 3 years).
My wife is using similar system with another immutable variant of Fedora called bluefin. It actually started its life as my own secondary laptop when I explored immutable distros under aurora (same base as bluefin but with kde desktop instead of gnome). Migrating from Aurora to Bluefin just involved rebasing image from one distro to another without having to do anything with the user data. All in all pretty robust and painless.
[1] OTOH the sound stack of the windows 11 running on my company issued laptop has had many hiccups to the point some usb or bluetooth devices looks to simoly disappear on a regular basis. A number of times I completely lost the complete sound stack in a middle.of a teams call. I could plug and unplung usb audio devices, bluetooth, usb or jack headsets to no avail. Only rebooting the laptop would make sound work again.I also experience absurd slowness of start menu and even random freezes of explorer windows from time to time on a very lightly used laptop as most of the stuff I do is done on an azure cloud windows desktop (don't get me started on this one, feels like using a raspberry pi 3) via rdp.
> It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong.
Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.
(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)
I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase.
The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.
At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
> Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon
The review's purpose wouldn't be to provide you an in-depth guide to walk you through installing some distro. It's more like probing for high level details around hardware compatibility.
For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.
The pain points have gotten less painful in the last few years. As someone who has run a hackintosh at one point, Linux is a walk in the park in comparison.
Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.
Sigh, webcams, at one point they were solved. How far we have fallen.
Originaly every webcam was a special snowflake, a screwball custom interface with a screwball custom driver. Then microsoft, as much as I like to rag on them here they did something good, microsoft created the usb video standard and said if you make a webcam it has to be uvideo. and life was good, webcams just worked. on linux, mac, and even my beloved obsd.
And here we are again, shitty special snowflake interfaces and drivers and webcams barely work anymore, same story with audio.
Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion.
I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.
Installing Pop_OS! or Ubuntu takes about an hour to 90 minutes (including setting up eg Steam, your preffered browser, etc). You'll want to run it as a live USB for a bit first to make sure there's driver support. IME much faster to install and update than MS Windows.
If the hardware you buy doesn't support Linux use then it can be a crap shoot (down to luck). Why people blame their Linux distro for that I don't really understand.
Been a couple years, but discord on linux was... much less stable than it was on Windows, and I was using it to play a lot of D&D at the time, so, I ended up reverting to Windows.
I've been using the Discord "thick client" on Linux for many years now and it works just fine. I've never seen any sort of crashes, nor have I seen any instability that couldn't be explained by shitty Internet "weather".
Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.
Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff.
Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works.
Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571....
don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that
(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
I agree with your sentiment, but I dont see linux as windows with some compromises. I simply see windows as unusable (only wsl is imo), so anything will be an improvement.
Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble with suspend, I _basically_ have to shut down my session every day, just like in the bad 'ol Win 9x days - my machine will sleep, but only after I shut down the entire GUI and make sure nothing is using NVIDIA, oh and turn off the intel wifi driver.
GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok.
I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability.
Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
> "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...
Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.
Haven't you heard? QAs are unnecessary ballast now, devs and managers can test product just as well in their spare time ;) . Also, people are buying bug ridden products anyway, so why bother.
That’s my bigger fear in this scenario: that they did limited testing with the internal agreement that any small issues that arise can be carried by the customers. As long as it didn’t fully break, it can be released.
Or MS could have used AI to find all these issues months ago already. But obviously they did not, which is strange. These big corporations promote AI but then don't use it to improve their own software code base systematically.
A recent update broke the file history service for me, which I only discovered when I went to restore a previous version of a file. If you use it too, you should probably check it's actually working.
When it works it's amazing. Files are saved as is with date time stamp appended, so all do is to undo that. Great if you trashed something a while back and always quicker than getting it back via github. Haven't found anything using a similar approach - just copy the change to the mirror. if the file is moved, just make a copy of the changed file, if it is deleted, who cares, just ignore from then on. simple. Everyone else is being way too clever, compression and exact deltas history, etc
One recent issue required cloning the user account to get file history working. Just would not work with that account while any new account worked fine.
Current status is broken - the last two security updates report file history as broken. Git hub handles code ok, but for all the other stuff on windows file history was the way to go. Now cumbersome incremental backups.
> September 14, 2026—KB5129195 (OS Builds 26200.9457 and 26100.9457) Out-of-band
> [Remote Desktop Services (known issue)] Fixed: This update addresses an issue affecting Remote Desktop Services (RDS) after installing the September 2026 Windows security update (KB5122880). In affected environments, RDS might become unstable, causing RDP connection and sign-in failures or servers to become unresponsive during Remote Desktop configuration. Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, File Explorer, and the Windows Update page, might also stop responding.
> "The paste operation might fail silently," according to Microsoft.
> Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 are affected. Microsoft said: "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message."
> Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, and File Explorer might also become unresponsive," Microsoft admitted.
> "Additionally, the Windows Update page might stop responding and continuously display a loading indicator."
This culture of trying to avoid showing the user an error message has to stop.
I remember the time when spurious copy-paste failures meant something shit the bed so badly in the Win32 subsystem you needed to reboot. Never did figure out why that would happen but it kinda stopped around the Windows 8 era...
I don’t know if that’s strictly true. But one thing I’ve seen since AI coding has taken over is that the additional features that do get built are all the lower-value ideas that would previously been left on the cutting room floor.
I’m not convinced that’s a positive. Users don’t necessarily even perceive those lower-value changes as features, so much as unnecessary bloat.
The friction between coming up with an Idea and implementing it is a feature in most corporates. Otherwise managers will be too focused on creating shiny slides and marketing nonsense - which is happening with AI.
Also just a lot of overemgineering. The last project I kicked off, I straight up told my manager that in the pre-Claude days I’d have pushed back pretty hard on automating this particular task.
And even with AI I’m still pretty sure that building and maintaining the automation ended up being more expensive than just continuing to do this particular task by hand. The real business value is one more thing to list as an accomplishment at performance review time, and nothing more.
For me, it was about the time of the early announcements for the TPM2.0 reqs for windows 11 that I started to seriously consider alternatives (though I consciously accepted many pain points even then).
The initial debacle that was the Recall recall and announcing the level of AI stuffing of win 11 that made me actively try out Linux mint (which has been quite nice and smooth). LLMs help to diagnose and fix items if you aren’t familiar with Linux. You no longer have to scour message boards for up-front answers (only use them as a “confirmation backstop”).
For work I now use macOS which feels like a toy but is ok overall (probably still some personal habit-based things).
If it weren’t for the fact I still develop plugins for a single, very specific windows-only app in my spare time, I would completely ditch windows, with contempt. Outside of Windows I am continually stubbing my toe on every single use of every single MSFT product with which I interact; primarily outlook, teams, and some azure stuff. Their products feel highly “feature optimized” with absolutely zero (perhaps negative) cross-feature cohesion. e.g. it’s as if the various outlook panes and the boxes of content were designed so modularly and independently that they don’t re-size or scale themselves cooperatively.
I perpetually experience stark jamais vu using their products, i.e. I am forced to use them every day and each time feels as unfamiliar, clunky, and unintuitive as the first time I ever touched them.
That's why I had to enable the "pause updates for four weeks" setting on Windows. Otherwise every second update would break something somewhere and disrupt workflows regularly. With the one-month update delay you'd get the updates that fixed the previous update.
I was on 24H2 and recently went to 25H2 for app compat reasons. I havent even been updating my Nvidia drivers for months, stuck in the 5xx releases because whenever I update to the latest studio drivers which are supposed to be stable, the computer fails to wake up from sleep and hibernation.
So there’s an argument to be made that when the same person designs, implements and tests the change, any purported defense in depth is largely illusory.
Once upon a time I disagreed with this argument, insofar as I believed it wasn’t necessarily true as long as you had good peer review every step of the way.
But the shift to AI coding has made good peer review a heck of a lot harder to pull off.
For 100% of the root cause analyses for critical production defects that I’ve done over the past 18 months or so, a key finding was that AI-generated tests asserted that the defective behavior was correct.
Windows 11 has been broken since launch. If you have more than 20 files of mixed types (especially media files) in a folder, the new file explorer takes 10 seconds to load the folder. In Windows 10, the same operation took less than a second.
Windows 11 is so comically slow that I sometimes feel the warm nostalgia of using the Intel Pentium desktop shared by the entire family when I was a kid -- click, wait 3 seconds, click, wait 3 seconds, click...
I tried using the AI recommendations in the security scanning tool being used where I work. If I were to accept some of the recommended fixes, it would simply delete all the content in the file. The actual fix required was a simple tweak on one line, but the AI wanted to take the nuclear approach.
Linux is rising from the ground up. Many users are fed up with Redmond's nefarious schemes to pump up their share price like using its user base as A.I. guinea pigs.
Amazingly it's U.S. users who are taking the lead in installing Linux Mint and other Linux distros. I assume it's because there are few consumer privacy and protection laws and tech companies can abuse their users as they see fit. Many have had enough and are jumping ship towards Linux.
Everyone loves to bag on Microsoft, but they are generally quite good at keeping their software patched, they do get it wrong from time to time and everyone jumps on them. I've jumped to Linux as my main OS a while back (though still use windows for work), it's definitely not as seamless as windows is. It's great, I generally love working in linux, and with AI now it's WAY easier to sort out linux issues, but it does not seem anywhere near as polished as windows and I've had to deal with all kinds of niggly little issues with various things (all solvable ish... wayland seems a big source of issues).
not sure what you are trying to say, you don't have to in windows either, it just works, it sorts itself out. Doesn't seem like it has anything to do with "easier to use". Easier to use is like your day to day experience. Windows out of the box is ok, windows with a few tweaks and add ons is really quite good. Linux out of the box is really a starting point for customizing. It's acceptable by default for a bunch of distros, but you do end up having to spend a bunch of time configuring it, then you have the issue with software for different distributions, supported versions, etc. There are various quirks, drivers not quite working right and having to be customized (for instance, I have two separate sounds systems configured because when I play dota2 and discord because one kills the sound in the other for random reasons I could never get to the bottom of, AI couldn't get to the bottom of either, so went with an alternative, and it works fine). I have had so many quirky things happen that I've had to work around. However end result is a system I really love working with, I have customized a lot to match what I like (still have a bunch of things I need to make time to work out how to make it work better). Overall though, I think for the most in most workplaces Linux would be a great default choice these days.
I generally assume Wine cannot use LLMs considering developers that have been in contact with Windows code cannot contribute and LLMs almost certainly were.
No such reference to LLMs possibly being trained on Windows code however. Well maybe AI companies were careful to remove problematic data from the training set.
That would be a stupid application of the rule, it would mean no developer could use an LLM for anything that already has a proprietary alternative with heavily documented internals or leaked source code.
Not so sure, if the LLM has been overfitted and can just throw back something equivalent to the original code, then it's no different from a human having seen the code and writing something similar afterwards.
On another hand, I'd be curious about Microsoft's reaction if somebody let an agent write a "perfect" Windows emulator/compatibility layer eating away at Windows's market share (assuming that's possible; since it does not exist it's probably not currently). Would not do much for kernel anti-cheats but would help for productivity software. Microsoft could either choose to say this is not a white box implementation and take down the project but it would hurt anything LLM-related since all LLM-based projects could be targeted, or let it live and eat away at Windows (I suspect they'd choose the latter because it's the shiny new thing and would probably not hurt Windows that much).
Every time I see one of these articles I will, very briefly, get optimistic that people will move to an operating system that isn't terrible, and then realize that most people will literally just forget about the bullshit they put up with Windows.
I don't know what kind of reality distortion field Microsoft generates, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, people will literally simply forget every single awful thing Windows does.
People will (correctly) call out the jankiness of desktop Linux, but tacitly imply that Windows doesn't have jankiness. They will forget all the times that Windows Update bricked their computer, or all the time that their "repair" tools were literally just no-ops, or their copy-paste feature not working, or Microsoft literally breaking fucking Notepad, or the "System Restore" tool not actually restoring anything.
Desktop Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not so deluded as to say that it's perfect, but I really feel like its bullshit-level is lower. Oh, and since it supports filesystems that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, the snapshotting actually works.
Instead, I'll be stuck playing tech support for Microsoft's shitty products for my parents until the heat death of the universe.
I'm not. It seems to be something that affects nearly every person who uses Windows by choice. It's actually kind of a testament to Microsoft's marketing that they can continue to release terrible, broken products and people still keep purchasing them.
The alternative to Windows for the majority of people is MacOS. Throw out or sell your old PC and get a Mac, they can be had for cheap in great condition second hand. Or an iPad with a keyboard, which is best for the elderly or other people who need to just pay bills, read news, and write e-mails.
Another reason that users put up with Windows is simply because that's what the computers at their job have. The employer has decided on Windows, and when the Windows/Office users get back home from work they don't even touch a computer.
I think desktop Linux has improved significantly, and I do think that most people would be fine with one of the more normy-friendly distros like Mint, but I think macOS is a lot more approachable for most people.
I set up my mother in law with Mint, and she seems to like it just fine, but honestly if the MacBook Neo had been around when I bought her that laptop I probably would have just done that instead.
In a bit of fairness to my dad, he does use most of the features of the Windows version of Excel more than literally anyone I know, including the VBA and the like, so there would be a learning curve going to the Mac version of Office or migrating to OnlyOffice or something.
I tried showing him my laptop running Winboat but he was unimpressed. Maybe eventually Valve will figure out how to get full-fat Office working with Proton.
Another minor bug with this release - explorer doesn't launch on Citrix platforms, or those with FSLogix (a Microsoft product) installed. Good job Microsoft.
I see no difference anymore. I used Windows because it worked and didn't break obvious things. Thats gone. I switched to Linux because the user experience is now better. Never expected that this switch happens because Windows gets worse...hoped everytime Linux gets better.
Nah Linux is clearly getting better, but perhaps Windows is getting worse faster than Linux is getting better. Easier to destroy than to create and all that.
Ty here from Sillyz.Computer pointing out once again, software authorship is and has always been political and not technical.
AI inverted power structures to favor action over bureaucracy and software development is historically the definition of bureaucratic— dating back to IBM backing the Holocaust.
The entire thing is just men LARPing as executives behind closed doors and kids vibing futures is forcing them to keep up while the mask of “the responsible computer adult” continues slipping.
My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.
I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things? In my mind they always had a reputation as being pretty shoddy. As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back. I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.
The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.
I think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while.
Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely that Microsoft mainly designed Windows 95 for compatibility. (The contemporary Windows NT on the other hand was a much cleaner design, though still questionable above its kernel layer).
But surely random crashes is better than a broken login screen that prevents you from doing any work at all?
Just not being able to use one application is better than your whole OS going up in smoke every couple weeks. Yes, Windows 95A on the wrong hardware (and how would you know?) did that.
I mean, sure, although the crashes could sometimes come with data loss as well.
You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were.
In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).
Reinstalled win98 so many times.
Oh, man. The "Active" Desktop. The only thing that it kept active was my CD drive when I was forced to reinstall Windows every time I tried to make it work on my PC and it broke everything.
I was all about some 98lite ‘Sleek’ on my hand-me-down 486DX/2-66 in the late '90s, Windows 98/98SE/Me with the original Windows 95 pre-OSR2.5 non-Active Explorer swapped in :)
- https://www.litepc.com/swap.html
- http://toastytech.com/guis/l98.html
Pretty much up until Windows 10. Not that every decision they made was great (it wasn't), but they very rarely shipped stuff which was straight up broken. They used to have a commitment to quality which they threw away around the time of Win10 when they fired the QA staff.
>I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?
Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion?
My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.
This was the era when I had replaced explorer.exe with litestep and had a reminder to reinstall Windows every six months to keep the computer running smoothly. It wasn't MS "shipping" stuff that broke it IIRC (though patches did have that effect), but rather a steady degradation in performance over the months. I tried to hold in abeyance with tools like defrag, but to no avail.
http://litestep.net/
I was doing random college kid stuff:
This was right around the year I switched to Linux because of the issues. Though, I have to admit, it was a memory and DVD drive upgrade that drove me over the edge. I guess MS had a "point" system for each hardware component, and if enough points of components changed, they considered the machine a different computer, and would refuse to boot (since you didn't buy a license for that "different" computer). They told me I had to call them so I could boot my machine, at which point I table flipped, formatted my drive, and asked my buddy to burn a whole bunch of floppies so I could install Slackware.Looking back, the writing was on the wall...
They broke:
* at "random", during regular use
* when installing something, sometimes
* when removing something, sometimes
* slowly, over time
They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.
What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.
This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
Random existing Windows bugs breaking things, third party software breaking things on install/uninstall, and bloat causing problems are very different from Microsoft forcing an update that introduces new flaws in windows and breaks Windows in ways that had been previously working.
Windows was always buggy as hell, but windows updates didn't break windows as often and most importantly they were also optional. For decades people would go online on Patch Tuesday to look to see if people were reporting problems with the newest round of Windows updates. Maybe there'd be a problem with an update and a specific network card, or a certain video driver, but Windows didn't usually break Windows.
Even if it did, you at least had the option to just not update. These days Microsoft doesn't care about problems with their updates. Even when they are warned ahead of time that there are problems they're happy to shove them down our throats, at any time of the day or night, and break Windows or even delete your personal files (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-d...) in the process.
The irony is that regular and free updates were supposed to help stability .. no consequence no intelligence
> at "random", during regular use
Out of all the vague and unprovable things that never happened, that one never happened the most.
I'm sure you can find users on any OS complaining with "random" breakages but unless you can show any data that proves it was due to the OS and not your HW or third party apps or your own actions, this means nothing.
Very cool. Of course we both understand that this is the case - this is why it is in scare quotes. You are arguing about something I literally acknowledged in my original post. The issue is that it happened due to what is for all intents and purposes bitrot: It breaks during regular use due to small compounding errors that happen due to bad software design. In practical use this means what I wrote, even though to the most pedantic of nerds it means literally what happened. It can in fact mean both things
I just started using windows after being on macOS since Vista. I planned to go full Linux for a gaming pc, but there are still some kinks, so dual booting it is.
The shocking negative was the amount of ads and tracking I had to get rid of, like chinese budget phone tier of crap.
Once you get rid of that though, the experience is halfway decent. But there are absolute head scratchers for 2026: some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display, apps adding itself to self start at boot left and right, and so on.
The most laughable event happened after I installed windows home when my license was for windows profesional. The official way to solve this was... to turn down wifi and write a hardcoded switch-to-professional key as a fake activation. That was the most amateur workaround I've seen in decades.
> some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display
Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.
Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.
The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.
At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.
The OS is no longer a product they care about. Brings no money compared to Azure.
That lack of care is the part that's annoying to me, combined with them being one of the largest corporations that has the resources to throw at those issues if they chose to do so. Quality issues aside, there's lots of similar aspects like the long drawn out migration of the control panel (i.e. their own control panel applets, putting aside third party) since win8 in 2012, if they wanted they could have completed that in the last 14 years and however many major releases you count since then.
It may not be the bean counting optimal, but it is a long term image they project of the company.
I think the general issue they have is that pretty much nobody who cares chooses Windows actively. It's mostly gamers, which seem to be on the way out, corporations who don't care about this, and creatives who, for whatever reason, don't want to buy a mac.
I'm in the latter category. As a Sunday photographer who daily drives Linux for work, I can't justify investing in Apple hardware. I used to daily drive macs, so I'm not against Apple on principle, but for my current needs it's just too expensive, since for my actual work Linux works better for me and the hardware is free (through work). Since I don't spend 8 hours a day using Windows and my income doesn't depend on it, I just put up with the shoddy quality. I can do what I need with my photos and it's good enough.
I've recently switched to a Mac after years on Linux, basically due to my frustration with the way the Linux desktop is being developed and the lack of quality all around for that platform.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
Meta-topic: I've seen this comment many times over the years, and it never results in a discussion where folks can agree. My reaction reading it is "You must be holding it wrong!" because I daily-drive Linux in many more ways than one (servers, laptops, desktops, handhelds (Hackberry Pi), SBCs, and, Valve-willing, VR headsets), and adore the Linux desktop. I use Pop!_OS almost everywhere, but Debian/Ubuntu/Arch with IceWM or Fluxbox (or the like) works great.
Anyway, this is not a call for you to start listing all the stuff that's broken (though feel free!), I'm just amazed that, with years of power and freedom on Linux, you truly enjoy Mac more. Just goes to show each of us has our own workflow and tastes!
It's a bit deeper than just a series of bugs. For all of Linux's power and freedom, its modern desktop architecture is extremely restrictive.
* There is only one systemd --user session per user with one D-Bus instance. So you can only have one desktop instance active at a time.
* There is no way for privileged apps/scripts to generically control the desktop or other apps in Wayland. (so no accessibility, AI computer use or even general scripting)
* There is no differentiation between configuration that should be active on (user, machine) tuple, and configuration that should be active on (user, *) tuple. (even Windows gets this right!)
* Desktop apps do not report rich activity information so they cannot be smartly memory managed.
* Desktop apps cannot generally be restored after getting killed/system shutdown.
* No application identity, PIDs voluntarily take on application identities in Wayland and on D-Bus, but PIDs that don't can easily escape observability, and if they consume resources but not enough to show up high in top, good luck knowing about them.
As technical as I am, none of those items really matter to me at all. So it's a great illustration of how the long tail of user needs is what ends up differentiating us in these discussions. It's very rare to get deep enough to actually identify that. I've always treated the desktop like a second-class citizen on Linux with the command line being my primary interface, and that has adapted so well to agentic usage that it never even occurred to me that desktop tool use was missing.
Which is an interesting assertion by itself, since I have a local deep-seek model that routinely uses scripting to fire up servers, browsers, take screenshots, and assess how it's converging on a solution. I'm sure there's a long discussion to be had about how all of that is just a dirty hack, but for my purposes, it's been working excellently.
Same for me and I don't use MacOS for the same reason some people don't use Linux, I find the UI lacking and confusing.
And more importantly, MacOS (like Windows) are still poorly translated compared to your average Linux desktop with some leftover always in English. It's okay for me as a software engineer but it's not acceptable enough to give to my parents.
DOS 5 was awesome. I can't recall a single bug?
But DOS 6 was buggy as hell due to DoubleSpace.
As a kid I vaguely remember our family had a stack of Dr. Dobb’s Journals with one particular article actually warning about the dangers of doublespace, and since it was completely optional (despite being touted as a flagship feature) we kind of dodged a bullet and had a pretty reasonable experience with DOS 6.
> I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on.
For me it's worse: I grew up on stuff like the C64 and then the Amiga. Switching to DOS was a serious step backwards.
> I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?
Never: they've always been mediocre.
> As soon as MacOS (OS X) was a viable alternative I gleefully switched and never looked back.
I switched to Linux in the early Slackware days (then Debian 1.1). Most of the world followed and now tens of billions of devices are running Linux, not Windows.
> I still keep a Windows machine around for gaming but I don't use it for anything more than that. All my serious work happens inside of MacOS.
I am happy to tell that gaming is in pretty good state in Linux these days.
Games I cant play on Linux are kernel level anti-cheat shooters. Anti cheat should be handled on the server anyway, no one should be installing that on their machines. Everything else works great!
Not until the anti-cheat situation is figured out. But I play most single player games on Linux these days.
They really got their shit together from like 2005-2017 or so. Then all garbage.
It’s so bad, the windows engineers in my company are on MacBooks and work in jump boxes.
I switched to Linux in 1993. Never looked back
ah, those were the days, when compiling the kernel took about 12 hours, or the switch from COFF to elf - fun times indeed
Indeed.
I was a wuss and waited for a CD. I doged the 98 floppy install....
my first installation was a floppy installation (slackware), yeah that was an added bonus ;)
I don't remember them being so bad. Windows 7, 8 were great. Visual Studio 6 was good. Excel was top quality for a long time. What used to be annoying to me was that Microsoft ignored the common Unix conventions for no good reason and tended to reinvent stuff. It was like smart nerds were tasked to come up with stuff without any awareness of prior art, or as if Bill G snd Steve B were trying to lock in customers into incompatible stuff. Obviously not great but working. What we get now is pure slop and negligence.
I remember a Windows update pushed through SBS that bricked all machines in company overnight. Boot up to bsod. Was that Windows 7?
I just looked it up. Yes, it was Windows 7. You have a better memory than me.
The internet revolted against 8 and stuck on 7 until it was EOL’ed and went straight to 10. I don’t recall 10 being positively received, but the hate has moved to windows 11. I’m happy to be corrected though.
The problem with 8 was that the UI was designed for a touch screen without a thought given to the fact that most users were going to be driving it with a mouse. Reliability-wise, it was perfectly fine.
The problem with 10 was that it was pushed as a "security update" on Windows Update. It was force-fed to unwitting/unwilling Windows 7 users like caged geese at a foie-gras farm.
That betrayal was arguably the first step towards the near-total enshittification of Windows that we see today, if you don't count the introduction of product activation with Windows XP.
WinNT 4.0 SP6 was stable as a rock
"This program performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."
I don't think anything tops this one from 8 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18189139
"Windows 10 October 2018 Update no longer deletes your data"
There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it.
In 2014 they got rid of the bulk of QA. That's probably the biggest turning point.
Especially when the following years once again confirmed that none of the big enterprise customers care enough to cancel any contracts over QA problems.
> There's plenty blaming AI here, but IMHO the rot was already there long ago, and AI only accelerated it.
This. We had Electron hell before AI. It's infuriating when you consider that we used to have access to so many easy to design native GUI solutions.
My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with... a login window.
So now, just-in-time debugging only works if I happen to remember my password.
I can. I could've told you decades ago, that this was the late stage of not just Microsoft, but any software company whose bread and butter was vendor lock-in. Microsoft was just the worst at the time because they were the biggest. Eventually the vendor lock-in becomes so great that the marginal cost, in terms of customers lost, from not fixing/improving your software, or at least not not letting it get worse, becomes much smaller than the cost of improving it/maintaining it. Any resources the company has to spare go into solidifying the lock-in, rather than making the software worth staying on in the first place. Even Apple seems to be in the early-mid stages of this transformation.
> I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.
They have always been so low. I cannot believe a software company can be so hilariously bad at their core business and yet rise so high.
> I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.
Just spawned did you :)
Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.
(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
Lay the blame where it belongs: it was one of Satya Nadella's early decisions to eliminate the SDET role at Microsoft. Everybody praised him at the time as some kind of wunderkind for juicing the stock but now Microsoft and users are facing the consequences. Hopefully history will correctly attach responsibility to Nadella for it.
To be fair, as of today, history still proves him right. Windows crumbles, but it still features enough value via its dominant position. As much as consumers are dissatisfied, investors are getting what they asked for, it is more efficiently extracting money. I hope that eventually that trend would reverse, but just being able to hold 10+ years with that bad of a product is already pretty sad.
that rotting lack of QA is now spreading through their Xbox subsidiaries too. WoW is much buggier than ~4 years ago.
To be fair, WoW is a 20+ year old game that to my knowledge never really got the ground up rewrite it has needed.... so I feel issues keep compounding faster and faster. Also - and not trying to defend MS here - I am pretty sure MS has been fairly hands-off about how blizz is run - so far. Just the general enshitification going on in parallel everywhere.
Midnight's war on addons, won by addons btw, is rumoured to be a push from top up. It has been cause of such borkage that stock, no addons UI shart LUA errors upon release.
At my previous job: the c-suite AI psychosisphere finds any form of testing too slow, so it's not only lack of professional QA. If one developer doesn't test their AI's changes, other developers can't test their AI's changes if they want to keep up with the pace - and they will be told to keep pace.
> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.
For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software.
Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.
WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.
Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
For what it’s worth, Proton has all but solved gaming on Linux. The only things I have been unable to run are games with low level anticheat.
It is so consistent I don’t even question if a new game will work.
Nvidia drivers on the other hand could still use some work. All wired for me, so I can’t speak to your driver troubles.
I have a windows vm for photoshop and the few programs I can not run native.
I personally run Mint and find it very reliable and capable. It has a windows style interface and my only issues are some minor things with taskbar settings and window snapping. For comparison, I could write a few novels on my issues with windows.
Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).
One of my machines is always Linux desktop; I've been using it to see if it's ready enough for my main desktop to switch over and so far my verdict has been it's not.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
If you're talking about compiling WiFi drivers, then you're not using Linux the way most people do.
Ah yes, they’re just holding it wrong.
All I’m saying is that if your idea of driving a car is to sit on the engine compartment and pull levers and cables from there, you might have a different experience than most drivers.
More that my motherboard came with a Broadcom WiFi chip instead of MediaTek which everyone recommends for Linux, and the shipped Linux drivers can only use 1 of the 4 antenna and won't connect to any 5ghz networks.
It "works" with 2.4 with 1 antenna, but the speed is then capped at 150Mbps instead 600Mbps/1300Mbps the hardware is capable of.
So it's like buying an AWD car, but realizing only one wheel gets power. Still technically drivable, but hardly working well. Maybe most people wouldn't even notice at all, but I figured I was technical enough to get in the weeds and fix it. Not all cars end up being Toyotas, sometimes you get a Jaguar.
I’m saying that compiling Wi-Fi drivers from source is still representative of trying to run Linux on consumer hardware.
Desktop Linux is like a kit plane. You can pay to have someone assemble it for you, but you still need to know how to get in there and fix it.
Is it?
I use Linux mint on my desktop. Wifi just works. I’m using some X870 motherboard.
I got the motherboard when it was really new, and I think it took a few months before wifi worked properly in mint out of the box. (I use Ethernet anyway so it wasn’t too upsetting). But after a few months, they had it all sorted. I have never manually compiled a kernel or wifi drivers or anything on this machine. I suspect most Linux users don’t do stuff like that any more.
Not to say it’s a trouble free experience. I’ve had problems with the nvidia drivers a few times recently. In the transition to nvidia’s new driver model, I’ve somehow ended up with incompatible nvidia packages on my system and the graphical environment broke. The most recent time I asked Claude code to take a look at my system and tell me what commands I should run to fix the nvidia packages. It did a great job.
It doesn’t feel like a kit plane any more. It’s a bit temperamental from time to time, but for the most part Linux just works.
It's compile drivers or research your hardware before you buy it. The latter is highly recommended. If you go against the common advice, it's kinda your problem. If you bought the hardware before installing Linux or it was given to you, well, that sucks. That said, driver problems, especially important ones, aren't that common anymore.
Nailed it. My Linux machine was built from the retired parts from my main desktop, so it very much is stuff that served me well for several years under Windows.
But the advice is still very much to research the hardware or buy a prebuilt with vendor support.
Compared to a decade ago, more stuff just works; especially noticeable with graphics drivers. But when things hiccup, which they still do, it still requires quite a lot of tech savviness to solve.
I can honestly say that I've never had to compile wifi drivers from source in more than a decade of using Linux as my main OS, even through my distrohopping phase. And I'm not researching my hardware ahead of time, either. I don't even know what you'd need to be running in order to have to do that? Maybe void or something similar? I don't think that my experience is particularly unique.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.
I bet €5 you’re using a mickey mouse linux distro.
It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong. One can be a greatest network specialist and know all the innards of Linux tools, but then Nvidia driver glitches and whoops... Or dist-upgrade craps DE. or package manager spits out some circular errors with no way to untangle them for a non-expert. Stuff like that.
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
To be honest, I feel that the ceiling is higher in Windows. I just today dealt with a faulty HP Printer driver that caused wuauserv (Windows Update) to report that I had to reboot every day. Finding which files were corrupted in `C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\` was not an easy task.
I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.
Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.
In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.
I have had these problems on Windows too.
Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable" compared to a home desktop Linux (among all sorts of distro plus DE combinations). And I was using Win 98 ME, early Vista builds and so on too. It is really hard to bork Windows install to become fully inoperable. It will be screeching and throttling under fifty different viruses and malware installed by a naive aunty in the accounting but it will just somehow work. And GPU driver crashes in my case were self recovering. Linux on the other hand allows way more manual intervention, but it also kinda expects way more manual intervention too. In my experience.
> In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable
It is usually called formatting the drive and reinstalling.
I mean, maybe I'm misrepresenting desktop Linux, that's quite likely (at work I use exclusively CLI destro, so my experience in DEs and drivers is limited). But I'm pretty confident in my ability to generalize Windows state across many installs over past decades, I also had a stint as a all-rounder IT POC in a small journal in the early 00s, so there is that. Windows since NT kernel almost never needs a format/reinstall. Every single unbootable Windows PC was due to a hardware problem, like storage giving up, or burning the power supply, or dead battery, or busted condensers and mosfets. Or an incorrect dual boot install, when MBR gets overwritten. Windows is a very robust OS, despite all the real negative issues in other aspects.
The thing is, Linux is robust too in my experience.
My current laptop is running the latest release 44 of Fedora. That install dates back to version 26 which was something like 9 or 10 years ago, can't remember the exact year. That install migrated from an ssd on a laptop to an nvme on another laptop and then moved to a larger nvme drive. I never had any breakage really. The only problem I ever had on this laptop/install is that sometimes after several long multidays sleep/wake up/sleep/wake-up cycles sound going to a bluetooth device may start having shorts stutter every 10 to 20s that is solved by a reboot. I could probably solve that by restarting pipewire and/or ubloading/reloading a bluetooth module but it doean't happen frequently enough for me to investigate further. And it is nowhere as bad as what sometimes happens on my corporate windows 11 laptop.[1]
Other computer of mine, the "gaming console", is running bazzite, an immutable variant of Fedora dedicated to gaming. Being immutable there is very little breakage possible: if you happened to had an issue with an update you could just boot from the prior version image (not happened in 3 years).
My wife is using similar system with another immutable variant of Fedora called bluefin. It actually started its life as my own secondary laptop when I explored immutable distros under aurora (same base as bluefin but with kde desktop instead of gnome). Migrating from Aurora to Bluefin just involved rebasing image from one distro to another without having to do anything with the user data. All in all pretty robust and painless.
[1] OTOH the sound stack of the windows 11 running on my company issued laptop has had many hiccups to the point some usb or bluetooth devices looks to simoly disappear on a regular basis. A number of times I completely lost the complete sound stack in a middle.of a teams call. I could plug and unplung usb audio devices, bluetooth, usb or jack headsets to no avail. Only rebooting the laptop would make sound work again.I also experience absurd slowness of start menu and even random freezes of explorer windows from time to time on a very lightly used laptop as most of the stuff I do is done on an azure cloud windows desktop (don't get me started on this one, feels like using a raspberry pi 3) via rdp.
> It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong.
Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.
(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)
> It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong.
No it isn't. That was true maybe 20 years ago. Most distros now just work. If something isn't working, the internet solves most of the problems.
I am running Linux, but I had to spend a solid month researching laptops before buying, and I didn't get up-streamed webcam support for a year after purchase.
The driver situation is a better but for cheap hardware it's so hit and miss, and when you mention this they shame the user for not knowing better and that isn't their fault.
At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work otherwise you need to buy a computer that's two years old.
What kind of research did you do?
I only ask because if you're buying it on a big site like Amazon you can search reviews for "Linux" and see what pops up. Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
Nowadays I'd say it's worth spending time on finding the specs you want at a price you're open to paying. There's a really high chance it'll work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
> Ideally you're looking for people who have said they installed it successfully and haven't run into compatibility issues.
That's like telling someone they can run a Hackintosh by just following someone else's build write up. Buying the exact same hardware rarely gives the easy peasy builds the write up suggests. Ultimately, there's always a couple of steps left out of the write up that makes things much less easy peasy. People forget pain points or at least gloss over the pain points. Doesn't matter if it's Hackintosh or reading other's from memory "I installed Linux, you can too" comments on a site like Amazon
The review's purpose wouldn't be to provide you an in-depth guide to walk you through installing some distro. It's more like probing for high level details around hardware compatibility.
For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.
The pain points have gotten less painful in the last few years. As someone who has run a hackintosh at one point, Linux is a walk in the park in comparison.
Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.
> Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.
The last emerge conflict I had was handled 100% by an agent.
I'm not wasting my weekend on stupid sysadmin tasks anymore.
> At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work
If you buy a computer from a brand that sells computers with Linux preinstalled, you also know it's going to work.
https://linuxpreloaded.com/
Sigh, webcams, at one point they were solved. How far we have fallen.
Originaly every webcam was a special snowflake, a screwball custom interface with a screwball custom driver. Then microsoft, as much as I like to rag on them here they did something good, microsoft created the usb video standard and said if you make a webcam it has to be uvideo. and life was good, webcams just worked. on linux, mac, and even my beloved obsd.
And here we are again, shitty special snowflake interfaces and drivers and webcams barely work anymore, same story with audio.
Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion.
</meta>
I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.
Installing Pop_OS! or Ubuntu takes about an hour to 90 minutes (including setting up eg Steam, your preffered browser, etc). You'll want to run it as a live USB for a bit first to make sure there's driver support. IME much faster to install and update than MS Windows.
If the hardware you buy doesn't support Linux use then it can be a crap shoot (down to luck). Why people blame their Linux distro for that I don't really understand.
Fair enough, Dell can be pretty spotty when it comes to Linux support.
Been a couple years, but discord on linux was... much less stable than it was on Windows, and I was using it to play a lot of D&D at the time, so, I ended up reverting to Windows.
I've been using the Discord "thick client" on Linux for many years now and it works just fine. I've never seen any sort of crashes, nor have I seen any instability that couldn't be explained by shitty Internet "weather".
Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.
Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff. Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works. Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571.... don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that
(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
I agree with your sentiment, but I dont see linux as windows with some compromises. I simply see windows as unusable (only wsl is imo), so anything will be an improvement.
Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble with suspend, I _basically_ have to shut down my session every day, just like in the bad 'ol Win 9x days - my machine will sleep, but only after I shut down the entire GUI and make sure nothing is using NVIDIA, oh and turn off the intel wifi driver.
GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok.
I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability.
Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
> "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...
Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.
Try linux mint. Gnome 3.x is cancer. Also, linux mint still uses xserver and for some reason suspend works properly on nvidia
> Gnome 3.x is cancer.
No it is not. It is just not to your taste. Thanksfully no linux user is forced to use it and there are plenty of alternatives.
Haven't you heard? QAs are unnecessary ballast now, devs and managers can test product just as well in their spare time ;) . Also, people are buying bug ridden products anyway, so why bother.
> issues should have been discovered in QA
Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!
That’s my bigger fear in this scenario: that they did limited testing with the internal agreement that any small issues that arise can be carried by the customers. As long as it didn’t fully break, it can be released.
> ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
They were. QA is paying Customers now.
Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
> in QA
No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026
Or MS could have used AI to find all these issues months ago already. But obviously they did not, which is strange. These big corporations promote AI but then don't use it to improve their own software code base systematically.
> remote access and pasting issues
And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...
No need for QA if you just tell Claude to "make no mistakes".
but...but... AI was supposed to make this all better!
A recent update broke the file history service for me, which I only discovered when I went to restore a previous version of a file. If you use it too, you should probably check it's actually working.
joke's on you, it has never worked for me.
When it works it's amazing. Files are saved as is with date time stamp appended, so all do is to undo that. Great if you trashed something a while back and always quicker than getting it back via github. Haven't found anything using a similar approach - just copy the change to the mirror. if the file is moved, just make a copy of the changed file, if it is deleted, who cares, just ignore from then on. simple. Everyone else is being way too clever, compression and exact deltas history, etc
One recent issue required cloning the user account to get file history working. Just would not work with that account while any new account worked fine.
Current status is broken - the last two security updates report file history as broken. Git hub handles code ok, but for all the other stuff on windows file history was the way to go. Now cumbersome incremental backups.
It has always worked for me when I needed it.
There's a massive RDP bug in the new update that is breaking stuff with no fix right now. Congrats Microsoft on the help desk ticket generation.
(KB5124008)
Thanks for the headsup.
it seems they claim to have fixed it :
> September 14, 2026—KB5129195 (OS Builds 26200.9457 and 26100.9457) Out-of-band
> [Remote Desktop Services (known issue)] Fixed: This update addresses an issue affecting Remote Desktop Services (RDS) after installing the September 2026 Windows security update (KB5122880). In affected environments, RDS might become unstable, causing RDP connection and sign-in failures or servers to become unresponsive during Remote Desktop configuration. Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, File Explorer, and the Windows Update page, might also stop responding.
FWIW, neither the KIR nor the OOB patch did fix the black screen problem for us on Citrix.. waiting for another round of updates... yay.
> "The paste operation might fail silently," according to Microsoft.
> Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 are affected. Microsoft said: "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message."
How many people wrote lgtm on the security patch?
Similar behaviour here:
> Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, and File Explorer might also become unresponsive," Microsoft admitted.
> "Additionally, the Windows Update page might stop responding and continuously display a loading indicator."
This culture of trying to avoid showing the user an error message has to stop.
I remember the time when spurious copy-paste failures meant something shit the bed so badly in the Win32 subsystem you needed to reboot. Never did figure out why that would happen but it kinda stopped around the Windows 8 era...
I’ve got that problem.
I think I’m just going to roll that machine back and turn updates off now. It’s too risky.
I keep hearing about how software development is a solved problem in the age of AI... and then reality hits, like we see here.
We just need QA agents to check the work of the coding agents (yeah, I’m sure that’s already a thing and people are saying this in all seriousness).
Senior staff at my company have been saying that already. They don’t care if it works just if they can say they have it and get rid of the QA people.
Microsoft has constantly been bragging about AI writing all their code. And they push out more bugs than features these days.
I don’t know if that’s strictly true. But one thing I’ve seen since AI coding has taken over is that the additional features that do get built are all the lower-value ideas that would previously been left on the cutting room floor.
I’m not convinced that’s a positive. Users don’t necessarily even perceive those lower-value changes as features, so much as unnecessary bloat.
The friction between coming up with an Idea and implementing it is a feature in most corporates. Otherwise managers will be too focused on creating shiny slides and marketing nonsense - which is happening with AI.
Also just a lot of overemgineering. The last project I kicked off, I straight up told my manager that in the pre-Claude days I’d have pushed back pretty hard on automating this particular task.
And even with AI I’m still pretty sure that building and maintaining the automation ended up being more expensive than just continuing to do this particular task by hand. The real business value is one more thing to list as an accomplishment at performance review time, and nothing more.
Will the last competent employee being laid off please turn out the light.
For me, it was about the time of the early announcements for the TPM2.0 reqs for windows 11 that I started to seriously consider alternatives (though I consciously accepted many pain points even then).
The initial debacle that was the Recall recall and announcing the level of AI stuffing of win 11 that made me actively try out Linux mint (which has been quite nice and smooth). LLMs help to diagnose and fix items if you aren’t familiar with Linux. You no longer have to scour message boards for up-front answers (only use them as a “confirmation backstop”).
For work I now use macOS which feels like a toy but is ok overall (probably still some personal habit-based things).
If it weren’t for the fact I still develop plugins for a single, very specific windows-only app in my spare time, I would completely ditch windows, with contempt. Outside of Windows I am continually stubbing my toe on every single use of every single MSFT product with which I interact; primarily outlook, teams, and some azure stuff. Their products feel highly “feature optimized” with absolutely zero (perhaps negative) cross-feature cohesion. e.g. it’s as if the various outlook panes and the boxes of content were designed so modularly and independently that they don’t re-size or scale themselves cooperatively.
I perpetually experience stark jamais vu using their products, i.e. I am forced to use them every day and each time feels as unfamiliar, clunky, and unintuitive as the first time I ever touched them.
Let's pour more AI
There is not a single component in Windows that is not riddled with bugs, its infuriating.
I wonder what exactly the "quality czar" is doing, maybe he needs a good PIP?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/05/satya-nadell...
The culture of QA sailed off like 10-15 years ago I think.
That's why I had to enable the "pause updates for four weeks" setting on Windows. Otherwise every second update would break something somewhere and disrupt workflows regularly. With the one-month update delay you'd get the updates that fixed the previous update.
I was on 24H2 and recently went to 25H2 for app compat reasons. I havent even been updating my Nvidia drivers for months, stuck in the 5xx releases because whenever I update to the latest studio drivers which are supposed to be stable, the computer fails to wake up from sleep and hibernation.
Do they even have automated testing? This should have been detected not only in one layer of the release process, but in serveral ones.
Not anymore. The test lab and testers got laid off. Now they test in production on end users.
So there’s an argument to be made that when the same person designs, implements and tests the change, any purported defense in depth is largely illusory.
Once upon a time I disagreed with this argument, insofar as I believed it wasn’t necessarily true as long as you had good peer review every step of the way.
But the shift to AI coding has made good peer review a heck of a lot harder to pull off.
It can create tests to make sure that things keep working.
For 100% of the root cause analyses for critical production defects that I’ve done over the past 18 months or so, a key finding was that AI-generated tests asserted that the defective behavior was correct.
Windows 11 has been broken since launch. If you have more than 20 files of mixed types (especially media files) in a folder, the new file explorer takes 10 seconds to load the folder. In Windows 10, the same operation took less than a second.
Windows 11 is so comically slow that I sometimes feel the warm nostalgia of using the Intel Pentium desktop shared by the entire family when I was a kid -- click, wait 3 seconds, click, wait 3 seconds, click...
After the last update many things suddenly feel very sluggish like searching an app and starting it.
They must have forgotten to prompt "bug-free and make no mistakes". It happens to the best of us.
Also, “maintain all existing functionality.”
I tried using the AI recommendations in the security scanning tool being used where I work. If I were to accept some of the recommended fixes, it would simply delete all the content in the file. The actual fix required was a simple tweak on one line, but the AI wanted to take the nuclear approach.
item no. 17531 why i will be using windows 10 LTSC to the grave. zero issues
Linux is rising from the ground up. Many users are fed up with Redmond's nefarious schemes to pump up their share price like using its user base as A.I. guinea pigs.
Amazingly it's U.S. users who are taking the lead in installing Linux Mint and other Linux distros. I assume it's because there are few consumer privacy and protection laws and tech companies can abuse their users as they see fit. Many have had enough and are jumping ship towards Linux.
Everyone loves to bag on Microsoft, but they are generally quite good at keeping their software patched, they do get it wrong from time to time and everyone jumps on them. I've jumped to Linux as my main OS a while back (though still use windows for work), it's definitely not as seamless as windows is. It's great, I generally love working in linux, and with AI now it's WAY easier to sort out linux issues, but it does not seem anywhere near as polished as windows and I've had to deal with all kinds of niggly little issues with various things (all solvable ish... wayland seems a big source of issues).
It's not perfect (Linux Mint) but neither is Windows. I mean, there are three or four different UIs in there from different eras.
I find Linux far easier to use because you never have to install device drivers. It either works with your hardware or it doesn't.
not sure what you are trying to say, you don't have to in windows either, it just works, it sorts itself out. Doesn't seem like it has anything to do with "easier to use". Easier to use is like your day to day experience. Windows out of the box is ok, windows with a few tweaks and add ons is really quite good. Linux out of the box is really a starting point for customizing. It's acceptable by default for a bunch of distros, but you do end up having to spend a bunch of time configuring it, then you have the issue with software for different distributions, supported versions, etc. There are various quirks, drivers not quite working right and having to be customized (for instance, I have two separate sounds systems configured because when I play dota2 and discord because one kills the sound in the other for random reasons I could never get to the bottom of, AI couldn't get to the bottom of either, so went with an alternative, and it works fine). I have had so many quirky things happen that I've had to work around. However end result is a system I really love working with, I have customized a lot to match what I like (still have a bunch of things I need to make time to work out how to make it work better). Overall though, I think for the most in most workplaces Linux would be a great default choice these days.
I'm surprised recent MS Office isn't fully supported under Wine yet, given the advantages that LLMs give in reverse engineering stuff.
EDIT: Well, should have searched first before posting: https://itsfoss.com/news/bottles-microsoft-365-early-look/
I generally assume Wine cannot use LLMs considering developers that have been in contact with Windows code cannot contribute and LLMs almost certainly were.
Edit: for reference: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ
No such reference to LLMs possibly being trained on Windows code however. Well maybe AI companies were careful to remove problematic data from the training set.
That would be a stupid application of the rule, it would mean no developer could use an LLM for anything that already has a proprietary alternative with heavily documented internals or leaked source code.
Not so sure, if the LLM has been overfitted and can just throw back something equivalent to the original code, then it's no different from a human having seen the code and writing something similar afterwards.
On another hand, I'd be curious about Microsoft's reaction if somebody let an agent write a "perfect" Windows emulator/compatibility layer eating away at Windows's market share (assuming that's possible; since it does not exist it's probably not currently). Would not do much for kernel anti-cheats but would help for productivity software. Microsoft could either choose to say this is not a white box implementation and take down the project but it would hurt anything LLM-related since all LLM-based projects could be targeted, or let it live and eat away at Windows (I suspect they'd choose the latter because it's the shiny new thing and would probably not hurt Windows that much).
Why such a verbose title ? "Microsoft patches Windows and Excel" would have been enough.
Vibe coding?
The time has come for Microsoft to support LibreOffice.
The people have enough of Microsoft's shenanigans.
Sounds like Microsoft, yes.
Every time I see one of these articles I will, very briefly, get optimistic that people will move to an operating system that isn't terrible, and then realize that most people will literally just forget about the bullshit they put up with Windows.
I don't know what kind of reality distortion field Microsoft generates, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, people will literally simply forget every single awful thing Windows does.
People will (correctly) call out the jankiness of desktop Linux, but tacitly imply that Windows doesn't have jankiness. They will forget all the times that Windows Update bricked their computer, or all the time that their "repair" tools were literally just no-ops, or their copy-paste feature not working, or Microsoft literally breaking fucking Notepad, or the "System Restore" tool not actually restoring anything.
Desktop Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not so deluded as to say that it's perfect, but I really feel like its bullshit-level is lower. Oh, and since it supports filesystems that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, the snapshotting actually works.
Instead, I'll be stuck playing tech support for Microsoft's shitty products for my parents until the heat death of the universe.
Don’t project your parents on every Windows user. :)
I'm not. It seems to be something that affects nearly every person who uses Windows by choice. It's actually kind of a testament to Microsoft's marketing that they can continue to release terrible, broken products and people still keep purchasing them.
The alternative to Windows for the majority of people is MacOS. Throw out or sell your old PC and get a Mac, they can be had for cheap in great condition second hand. Or an iPad with a keyboard, which is best for the elderly or other people who need to just pay bills, read news, and write e-mails.
Another reason that users put up with Windows is simply because that's what the computers at their job have. The employer has decided on Windows, and when the Windows/Office users get back home from work they don't even touch a computer.
I agree.
I think desktop Linux has improved significantly, and I do think that most people would be fine with one of the more normy-friendly distros like Mint, but I think macOS is a lot more approachable for most people.
I set up my mother in law with Mint, and she seems to like it just fine, but honestly if the MacBook Neo had been around when I bought her that laptop I probably would have just done that instead.
In a bit of fairness to my dad, he does use most of the features of the Windows version of Excel more than literally anyone I know, including the VBA and the like, so there would be a learning curve going to the Mac version of Office or migrating to OnlyOffice or something.
I tried showing him my laptop running Winboat but he was unimpressed. Maybe eventually Valve will figure out how to get full-fat Office working with Proton.
MS is forcing everyone to vibe code right? Like they utterly fucked Minecraft with many baffling bugs fairly recently afaik.
Well that explains why excel was completely and utterly borked cutting and pasting then.
What an absolute fucking shit show.
Another minor bug with this release - explorer doesn't launch on Citrix platforms, or those with FSLogix (a Microsoft product) installed. Good job Microsoft.
so just a regular day for Microsoft
When does the people learn enough is enough and ditch Windows?
Is it because they're using LLMs? LOL. This is just the beginning.
Windows users, welcome to the world of Linux! Now you don't need to have to install Linux to experience the Linux way of working.
[flagged]
When they tell you that Linux has issues with suspend, reply that Windows has issues with paste /s
I see no difference anymore. I used Windows because it worked and didn't break obvious things. Thats gone. I switched to Linux because the user experience is now better. Never expected that this switch happens because Windows gets worse...hoped everytime Linux gets better.
Nah Linux is clearly getting better, but perhaps Windows is getting worse faster than Linux is getting better. Easier to destroy than to create and all that.
Ty here from Sillyz.Computer pointing out once again, software authorship is and has always been political and not technical.
AI inverted power structures to favor action over bureaucracy and software development is historically the definition of bureaucratic— dating back to IBM backing the Holocaust.
The entire thing is just men LARPing as executives behind closed doors and kids vibing futures is forcing them to keep up while the mask of “the responsible computer adult” continues slipping.
I really wanted to spend more time reading the comments, but I've sworn off doom-scrolling.