Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 550 posts

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#361

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

mancerayder wrote: post #354
ninjagoo wrote: post #250

Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late. I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consume…

So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff. Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Lin…

Losing market share to ChromeOS and Apple has to be the most significant and obvious hit. The Steam Deck and second generation Steam Machines are also likely to nibble away at the edges.

I am not a Mac person, I actually hate a lot of how they operate. Yet, if a tech-illiterate friend were looking for advice, I would likely steer them towards those computer appliances so as to avoid Microsoft's nonsense.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#362

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

starky wrote: post #344
cfiggers wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Windows 11, when you reconnect to a monitor or set of monitors that you've connected to before, it will automatically return your open windows to the layout across those monitors that you had when you last disconnected (assuming those windows are still open). This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked tha…

Yet when I switch between home and work I have to fully restart my laptop about half the time in order for it to even detect the monitors. I also find this feature has an issue with certain programs (Obsidian in particular) where it opens the window almost off screen.

Have you tried restarting your dock instead? I have had some luck with this when detection goes awry.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#363

Post by k3vinw »

itopaloglu83 wrote: post #259
k3vinw wrote: post #188

I’m most excited for the scheduler and memory footprint improvements. As bad as I hear Windows 11 is, I’ve rarely had issues with it. For the most part it just works and stays out of my way. My only gripes are the occasional forced updates and a rare hard crash that happened once in a span of a year of using it as my daily driver. Well that and I have to be mindful of running too many resource starving processes at t…

I think I’m more bothered by the paper cuts I experience every minute. Starting from web based start menu taking forever to launch, to everything resisting to you to be in control of your computer. Some say the speed is fine, but forget that these machines are running at nanosecond level instructions and there’s no reason for a simple task to take milliseconds unless somebody is optimizing for service revenue and use…

Interesting. I replaced most of my gripes with power toys and WSL. That and a ridiculous amount of hardware. YMMV.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#365

Post by evanelias »

mancerayder wrote: post #354
ninjagoo wrote: post #250

Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late. I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consume…

So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff. Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Lin…

If a decent number of people migrate away, it would definitely show up in aggregate: Windows Update traffic, for example. Or sales of Windows-specific software/subscriptions. It doesn't require correlated tracking at an individual customer level to see the broader trend.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#366

Post by ninjagoo »

mancerayder wrote: post #354
ninjagoo wrote: post #250

Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late. I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consume…

So I moved from Win 11 to Fedora Workstation some months back. I dual-booted back into Windows once or twice to check something, to upgrade my audio receiver with a serial port, that sort of stuff. Everyone talks about execs monitoring metrics. What sort of metric would I have registered as? You see a desktop that's on 24/7 suddenly going offline. There's no way these people find out indirectly that I'm now using Lin…

> What sort of metric would I have registered as?

Monthly average user. Uptime for Win 11. Uptime not counting screensaver. Uptime for non-enterprise consumer. If you were a Win 11 enterprise user, then Uptime for enterprise users. Unique hardware indicators - number of distinct PCs in Win 11 ecosystem, separated from new activations. And I'm sure a few others that I haven't thought of.

Declining stats on these measures indicate a problem somewhere in the Win 11 ecosystem. Combine with competitor indicators like sales, and other Win ecosystem OSes.

A single person switching probably doesn't do much to move the indicators. But as a collective?

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#367

Post by p_ing »

pragmatick wrote: post #360
codedokode wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft doesn't allow its users even to reboot the computer without permission?

It only shows "Update and shut down" (which is a lie as it still will reboot) or "Update and reboot. I think all this was a response to severely outdated Windows machines being infected with worms and what not. Microsoft got bad press for this and went (way) overboard with trying to force users to install updates as soon as released.

Update and shutdown was fixed in Oct '25.

https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-11-update-and-shut-...

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#368

Post by Telaneo »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #230
qingcharles wrote: post #24

They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles. Installing Tiny11 and then running a debloat over its corpse results in a much faster and less memory hungry default clean install.

Cruft can be removed yes but the telemetry is literally how they measure quality. Their metrics of whether it’s good or not is the status of telemetry on a given device set and figuring out root cause. So they can’t easily roll back the telemetry without a massive rethink in their quality strategy

> So they can’t easily roll back the telemetry without a massive rethink in their quality strategy

Given how that strategy has gone, that sounds like a great idea.

Re: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

#369

Post by gchamonlive »

fasterik wrote: post #345
gchamonlive wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me an instance where users got locked into a dying ecosystem in Linux? What I can tell you is that CentOS, which was used extensively in servers, died and you didn't really see much issue, at least not as much as compared to the pain and suffering users are having to go through now that Windows is the dying place. What's lazy is the repetition of this realist fallacy of the technical lockin, when in fact…

There are several software packages that are essentially mandatory if you want to run a modern distro with good desktop hardware support. Some that come to mind are glibc, systemd, and Wayland. These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software. I actually did leave Ubuntu because background Snap updates were randomly crashing running applications. Now, I'm fai…

> These projects have made controversial design decisions which impact the entire ecosystem of Linux software.

> I reject the idea that if I have technical critiques of these projects, that the fault somehow lies with me if I'm not willing to waste my time jumping distros or rewriting them myself. That attitude is exactly analogous to the user-hostile bullshit coming out of Microsoft.

I understand it's frustrating when your distro or OS starts acting up. It's a means to an end, it should get out of your way and let you do your work.

On the other hand, it's impossible to appeal to everyone, so every decision will make some people happy and others unhappy. There's no way around it. The only thing that matters is whether we can live with it or not, in which case the option is to fix it or move on.

It's frustrating but nobody owes you anything. The sooner you realise this the better.

I for instance wasn't happy with anything available. The closest thing was hyprland so I made my own micro-distro on top of it: https://github.com/gchamon/archie. It's way less work than you think in the age of AI, but it does require you intimate knowledge of the system.

Post reply on HN