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Our commitment to Windows quality

blogs.windows.com

61–70 of 1001 posts

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#61

They're saying all the right things here. Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc. I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.

I'm sorry but I need to see it to believe it. Otherwise who can explain, how the Windows Explorer struggles to list 20 files. How is it even possible to spend 4-5 seconds to show a list of files in a local freaking folder?

Well honestly, that's the easiest problem to fix: just install any of the dozens of excellent and stable third party file managers. I for instance am (or was, while I still used Windows) a fan of Total Commander (actually, when I started using it, it was called Windows Commander). As a bonus, you'll be spared the useless UI and usability changes inflicted upon you with every new Windows version.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#62
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but I need to see it to believe it. Otherwise who can explain, how the Windows Explorer struggles to list 20 files. How is it even possible to spend 4-5 seconds to show a list of files in a local freaking folder?

Right now my start menu randomly crashes. Like all I see is a black box with no icons. I'm impressed with how even basic functionalities break pretty often

Reminds me of the new task manager not responding. Like really?

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#63
Too little and too late. I’ll believe it when I’ll see it. And so far everything I’ve seen has told me to abandon ship. Even if you reverse course, you’d need a miracle to make me trust you anytime soon.

This is how goodwill works. Easy to burn, hard to earn back. I’m not touching any products by Meta, Google or Microsoft, and none of them are getting me back on board with a cute blog post.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#64

They're saying all the right things here. Fixing long-standing complaints, removing Copilot from obnoxious places, improvements to Windows Update and Windows Explorer stability/microstutter/lag, etc. I congratulate them on seeing sense, and I congratulate Apple on another victory with the Neo. Kind of frustrating that's what it took for Microsoft to finally listen to their userbase.

Are they?

I see nothing about privacy, spying, forced microsoft accounts and continued locking down of windows that they've been doing.

I see that they're bringing back _some_ of the taskbar options you had in windows 10 (termed it as "introducing"), they promise to make Explorer faster, great. But they also say they're bringing more AI into windows and something about widgets that I don't think anyone cares about.

And lastly they're promising to revamp the place where you go to rant at microsoft, but they're not promising to actually listen to feedback.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#65
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't congratulate yet until you see actual outcomes. The author of this commitment is the same person (Pavan Davuluri) spearheading move of Windows into an Agentic OS: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...

Absolutely nothing wrong with an "agentic OS", agentic UX is the future of personal computing. The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done. Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus. The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.

Even theoretical AI still has the other mind problem from economics.

Communicating and predicting desires, preferences, thoughts, feelings from one mind to another is difficult.

Fundamentally the easiest way of getting what you want is to be able to do it yourself.

Introduce an agent, and now you get the same utility issues of trying to guess what gifts to buy someone for their birthday. Sure every now and then you get the marketers "surprise and delight", but the main experience is relatively middling, often frustrating and confusing, and if you have any skill or knowledge in The area or ability to do it yourself, ultimately frustrating.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#66
> Faster and more dependable File Explorer: ... more reliable performance for everyday file tasks.

This would be great. It's still easy to freeze up File Explorer when moving thousands of files. The same operation from the command line works fine.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#67
To demonstrate the seriousness of their commitment to Windows quality, you can now move the taskbar to the left side of the screen. No no, it's not vaporware, they even included four screenshots. Everyone can rest assured now.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#68

This is good to hear, as someone who has used basically nothing but Windows since 2000. I haven't stepped off the Windows train yet. I use Linux at arm's length for my homelab's hypervisor and at work, but my daily driver is still Windows 10. I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible. And very…

> I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible.

Nah, NT always had... mostly... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved inside of an operating system that actively hates me. But the core OS is cool.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#70
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't congratulate yet until you see actual outcomes. The author of this commitment is the same person (Pavan Davuluri) spearheading move of Windows into an Agentic OS: https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/windows-...

Absolutely nothing wrong with an "agentic OS", agentic UX is the future of personal computing. The ideal is that something intelligent understands what you want to do and gets it done. Unless you really think we've reached the pinnacle of user interface with repetitive clicking around and menus. The problem is with shoving AI down user's throats. Make it an option, not the only option.

It all depends on where the the AI is running. The problem with the idea, is that for the majority of Windows boxes where it would be running do not have the bare metal hardware to support local models and thus it would be in the cloud and all of the issues associated with that when it comes to privacy/security. It would be neat, given MSFT's footprint, to look to develop small models, running locally, with user transparency when it comes to actions, but that doesn't align with MSFT's core objectives.
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