This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The new Start menu is also a significant improvement over the old one, with more icons on show, the ability to turn off Recommended ads, [...]
Guys, we are allowed to disable the ads now. We might have been too harsh on microsoft after all.
...insanity, I tell you. Ads, in your face, right in the Start Menu, on your computer that you bought, on your OS that you bought.
Note that it doesn't disable ads. It just means the ads a user sees will be less relevant to the user based on their browsing history and consumer profiles.
I switched to linux and i dual boot pop os windows now. I only use windows to configure things that has no linux support. Or when a game doesn't work right after an update. Windows is truly bizzare if you haven't used it for a bit. Like every time i clicked on the windows key, or sometimes, seemingly randomly when i opened a new windows, it opened the xbox game launcher, or whatever it's called. I never installed it obviously. I couldn't really find it, because i uninstalled everything that had the name xbox in it.i "had" to watch a video on how to disable something that i didn't install and didn't want in the first place.
They will shove ads into our faces at every possible opportunity. Ads work, they effectively brainwash you, the more you see, the better they do.
I detest this company for many reasons, it's like they go out of their way to make dealing with them as painful as possible.
Here's just one example I discovered today. I have a Windows 10 VM I needed to upgrade to 11 but the "PC Health Check" app says no, the i5 processor isn't supported.
I can, however, create a new VM and install 11 on the exact same hardware, so that's what I did, along with a whole bunch of extra work to get the new VM set up the same as the old Windows 10 VM was.
Why? Because fuck you, that's why.
Assholes.
This is how i feel about 98% of Azure. Its just so needlessly complicated, with incomprehensible defaults, and out of date documentation, and APIs that just fail silently.
There is a way to upgrade directly. I got this from Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/1afu0uj/is_it_safe_to_install_windows_11_on_my_microsoft/
It works fine - you just won't get the more advanced security features available in more recent laptops.
.\sources\setupprep.exe /product server
This will not actually install the server version of windows but will bypass the CPU check so that you can install Win11 on an unsupported CPU. The actual version of Windows installed will depend on the version of Win10 you have: Pro, Home, or Enterprise, for example.
The tech bros are turning everything to shit so you don’t notice any one thing is shit because it’s all shit now. Genius
Consumers are what, less than 10% of MS's revenue? Most of their income is from cloud (Azure, O365) so they can afford to treat their consumer customers like trash. They don't give a shit about your 50-150 bucks for a win license because it's peanuts to them.
The only viable option for consumers is to massively ditch MS products altogether and migrate to alternatives, which used to be in short supply but luckily aren't anymore.
It's probably less for OEMs, right? Most people don't install their own OS, much less pay full price for a license.
And yeah, consumer Windows could disappear and MS wouldn't care, as long as office computers are still stuck with it. Which they are.
Zac Bowden used to post a video for every single new insider build of Windows to cover any change he could, he's bought the original Surface table from 2007, he's been covering and championing all things Windows for at least a decade. To get someone like him off side, you really gotta be fucking the dog.
Yep.
I started using windows as a kid (Win 3.1). Was more or less happy to be a windows user through all of the various versions, although 95, XP and 7 were the most usable.
For the first time in about 35 years, I'm genuinely unhappy with Windows and am looking at other options.
They've really dropped the ball if users like me are unhappy.
The real issue is that they pulled Windows 10. When Vista was shit, you could use XP until 7 was released, when 8 was shit, you could use 7 until 10 was released. Now 11 is the only supported version and you have no choice if you're for some reason stuck with Windows.
Frankly I’ve never had any issues running Windows 11. It’s just the OS in the background for me. I think the biggest difference is I always run Enterprise versions (not Pro or Home) and most of that crap is either non-existent, disabled by default or easy to disable via GPO.
The big thing for people to realize is that Enterprise is the version most all businesses (especially large ones) run, and Microsoft isn’t going to crap on them as easily. And they know by extension, people will run what their business is, but they can get away with making Pro and Home crappier since it’s just individuals who would switch, not large swaths.
Pro and Home is where they test-market the worst of the garbage... some of it does make it into Enterprise - a surprising amount has gotten into Office 365 - but, yeah, not enough to make it completely dysfunctional.
My company (130,000 employees) sticks to 24H2. IT wouldn't approve the 25H2. Don't know whether the refusal to upgrade hurts Microsoft in any way, but if it does, I think we're big enough to be on their radar, and perhaps they talk to our IT about concerns and complaints we may have.
Ha! It's 2026 now. Those problems can easily be ignored as they are all in the past.
I love the smell of pedantry in the morning
Turns out, there were a lot of users, primarily gamers, who were considering giving Linux a chance. Microsoft gave them the push they needed.
Steam should get some credit for working on improving its proton integration.
Valve certainly put in the lion's share of effort in making Linux a hospitable environment for gamers. Without their hard work, the rise in popularity of Linux simply wouldn't be possible, and I had no intention of belittling that.
Valve made sure there were life rafts. Microsoft provided the iceberg.
I had Windows 11 on my Asus ROG Ally that I was too lazy to remove. Bitlocker locked the system randomly and would not accept the recovery key from my Microsoft Account.
I installed Bazzite the next day.
I’m starting to think Microsoft gives windows a new version number every time they want to make a bunch of big breaking changes, just so the bad reputation can die when they rebrand it as Windows 12 (or whatever stupid naming scheme their marketing team comes with next.)
I wouldn't be surprised if they just started calling it Copilot at some point. I could see them renaming their "agents" after big feature updates, much like we do with hurricanes which would be fitting given their history of breaking things with each KB.
I've been a Windows user my whole life. I support 5000+ Windows devices along with the whole Microsoft enterprise suite. It's been bad with them, but there have usually been patches at some point or at least community discovered workarounds. However, Microsoft's reckless abandon into AI legitimately worries me.
I'm finally making the switch to Linux for personal devices.
Time for Nadella to take responsibility for these fuck ups and resign already.
CEOs taking responsibility for their actions? In the Usa?!?!
One of the best feelings for me ever was when I cancelled my Micro$oft account after switching to Mint.
The freshness is real.
I like how taskbar buttons dynamically resize depending on window title. I like that the size of the buttons on the taskbar are all different, and I like not having a way to change this back to the boring obvious tried-and-true standard of having buttons that are all the same size.
I like that the rules appear to not make any fucking sense, leading to situations where you can have 3 entries for the same program with the same content open that are all different sizes.
I like it because it takes me out of whatever I'm doing and forces me to notice the user interface. I like getting distracted by little hints of movement at the bottom of the screen that make me stop and go "wait what the fuck did it just do".
I like that when I last searched for "windows 11 taskbar button resize disable", the only mention of the word "disable" on the first page of search results was this:
I like having to put "site:reddit.com" at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
And I like having to ultimately give up and live with it because at the end of the day, it's a feature and not a bug.
It's unusable and they vibe coded the entire thing.
We had to switch back to windows 10 at work due to the issues we had with 11. Now my computer is permanently broken with many default applications that simply do not work and my IT department can't figure it out.
Wow, this is astounding. I don't love windows, but last time I used it it was at least reliable enough that you could work on it with little problems. If they lose that, then there's little more value that windows still brings to the table, except software which is only developed for windows.
Windows recently "hung up" when opening "network and internet settings", just a blank square.
Also, blank square when opening "file explorer".
Both are working now; my point is I couldn't accomplish basic tasks in the usual way, fundamentally basic settings. First time this has happened to me. I am old and have been using Windows since there were screensavers. That you would buy. For money. On a floppy disk.
I know that linux is the popular answer to this problem.
I use a Mac and it's a pretty good machine. I know it isn't for everyone, but it works well enough for me and has enough mainstream support. As well the hardware has gotten ' good enough'
MacOS is not hostile to me when I want to run and install programs. There is some opensource support on the platform and the a good amount of closed source programs.
I do miss the wide ranging PnP hardware support for things like SAS/LTO
Mac hardware is great. But they overcharge so much and are so anti right to repair that I could never give them my money
I think it's not hard to understand how MacOS is easily better than Windows. I don't think Apple is enshittifying quite as fast as Microsoft, if at all.
Windows is getting so bad, people are finally looking more to Linux
Lol
Lmao even
Some of the issues described in the article must be driving corporate IT departments insane. They thrive on consistent installations across machines. Having each one offering different features (even temporarily) is the opposite of that.
