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Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

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51–60 of 141 posts

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#51
post #43

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.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#52
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#53
post #51
post #43

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.

I switched to Linux in 1993. Never looked back

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#54
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

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 w…

> 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

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#55
post #49
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 "ver…

I have had these problems on Windows too.

Computers are complex and there are always trade offs

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#56
post #51
post #43

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#57
post #43

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#58
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#59
post #51
post #43

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.

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.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#60
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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