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Our commitment to Windows quality

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#951

Post by DANmode »

idjdjsndjns wrote: post #938
gerdesj wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are an awful lot of groups installing Linux on Win 10 cast offs around the world. My uncle runs one in Bradford on Avon and they are slapping on an OS for you whilst you supp tea and chat. Often, the user-agent is set to something Microsoftie in the browser. If necessary Edge is installed but that is frowned on 8) I have not heard of this MacBook Neo thing ... Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang…

> Why would ? I only own a little IT company and hang around on HN. Something’s not quite right here. If you hang around HN you have absolutely heard of the Neo. And I’d be downright frightful to have anything to do with your little IT company (whatever service it provides) if you haven’t at the very least /heard/ of the Neo at this point. I suspect this is a little white lie just to drive a point home but I fail to…

> If you hang around HN

This could mean 2 hours per week,

not 10.

Never know.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#952

Post by rleigh »

drob518 wrote: post #49

It feels like Windows is old and tired. Remember when Microsoft and Intel seemed unstoppable in the 1990s and early 2000s? The momentum is no longer there. The latest bad decisions around AI for Microsoft are just the straw breaking the camel’s back.

When they used to have to fit the whole thing onto six floppy discs, it had to be constrained in size and scope. Today there are no constraints and it really shows. I think having hard constraints, be it storage, memory, cpu, update distribution, product requirements, drives quality and forces hard engineering decisions to fit within them. I think a lot that is wrong with Microsoft of today is a complete loss of enginering discipline and focus; you only have to look at the incoherence of their GUI development strategy to see how badly they are doing there.

I think it would have been useful for them to have really made a proper effort at modularising Windows along the lines of how Linux distributions and the BSDs do things. I can't see any way of recovery from the bloated mess they have created; they can't keep cramming any more in, it's an unstable, unusable and untestable mess.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#953

Post by subscribed »

chihuahua wrote: post #747
VerifiedReports wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows USED to have a polished UX. Is it still better than most Linux distros? Maybe. But it has regressed so far from where it was 25 (or more) years ago that every day I'm still infuriated and depressed that I've had to return to it for work. The idiotic UI blunders alone must waste hours of my life per week. Aside from the absolutely baffling functionality removals, there are the hateful petty ones. Great example…

You can use TeamViewer (free) for remote assistance for Windows. It even has a web client so you don't have to use Windows if you don't want to.

TeamViewer is absolutely atrocious for incidental home use.

Endless chasing of the versions upgrades/matching, to the point of rendering itself unusable.

For one-off I use something else.

For more persistent access needed I use either Tailscale with mstsc or *VNC.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#954

Post by halJordan »

reyaaltrooth wrote: post #764
PaulKeeble wrote: post #469

Microsoft has spent over a decade swimming against their users interests at this point and during that time frame Linux has been improving its desktop and improving kernel performance. We are now at the point where Linux emulating Window's entire API space for games with worse drivers is dangerously close on performance with none of the privacy invasion and anti user features. Its pretty late in the game for them to…

It hard to say what went wrong with this company. They were doing all the right things, hiring top notch decision makers like Satya, Pavan Davuluri, Asha Sharma, Sonali Yadav. Then employing tens of thousands of highly skilled H1Bs. I guess its just bad luck that this company's product quality is down in the drain.

It's definitely not bad luck. It's entirely a driven chosen situation. Read the blog post. They're not improving quality there reverting anti-end user decisions. "Quieter defaults," "more control over widgets"

There's zero intention to improve the fundamentals of the os. These are what a smart group thinks will be the smallest concession to retain goodwill.

Come off it with "bad luck"

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#955

Post by subscribed »

inferniac wrote: post #310
dmos62 wrote: post #195

I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait. But then, since Linux adoption didn't meaningfully change in the last 20 years, I'm forced to confront the fact that either I'm wrong about its fundamentals, or the market is able to…

"it's fundamentally inferior to Linux" I installed linux mint on a new drive in January Firefox was tearing awfully on just scrolling Surely I just need to install Nvidia drivers Install drivers, but they dont work due to some secure boot interaction with driver signing, that made me jump through quite a few hoops (thx to AI for walking me through it fairly well) I'm sorry but an average person is not ready for this…

Well, on windows you just need to install Nvidia drivers so it stops crashing.

Mint might be the wrong choice. AFAIR on both Fedora and Ubuntu you can just add "nonfree" repositories (one checkmark) and you'll have proprietary, closed source binaries installed. At least this is how it worked kn my Linux laptops. I've never had to specifically install NVIDIA drivers and conversely, firmware upgrade was comes from the repository as well, so the installation is one commandline command and reboot, no obscure websites and weird firmware installers.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#956

Post by asveikau »

Tomis02 wrote: post #828
asveikau wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac? How many hours have they put into the Linux client? My guess is the answer to these questions indicate more of how it got there than anything the distros or upstream components can do.

> How many hours has Zoom put into making the client stable on Windows and Mac? Users don't really care, do they?

I'm not talking about that. I was replying to a claim that Zoom is less stable on a platform, as if that somehow happened for free and not as a result of a team tracking and fixing bugs on the application side, likely over the course of years.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#957

Post by subscribed »

glitchc wrote: post #251
dmos62 wrote: post #195

I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait. But then, since Linux adoption didn't meaningfully change in the last 20 years, I'm forced to confront the fact that either I'm wrong about its fundamentals, or the market is able to…

> I'm somewhat surprised that Windows is still most of personal computers. In my eyes, it's fundamentally inferior to Linux, and its superficial superiority only comes from the ecosystem, which is to say adoption, not some inherent trait. I'm not a Windows fanboy by any stretch, but it is a remarkably resilient OS. Case in point: I took the OS drive (SATA SSD) from my old workstation and installed it into a laptop. T…

I just took out my SSD from the Intel 11th Gen Dell and put it into Framework 13 AMD Ryżem w/Radeon.

It powered on, I could decrypt my drive and login into GUI.

First i downloaded all the firmware (three commandline commands), then I rebooted it, then run dnf update.....

.... And that was it. Fedora.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#958

Post by gradientsrneat »

As other commenters have alluded to, due to the timing, this is likely in response to the "Microslop" nickname catching on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216047

Microsoft's PR team is in damage control mode right now.

Some commenters have pointed out that it's in response to the release of the Macbook Neo. I would argue that, if people were satisfied with the Windows OS, they wouldn't feel the need to jump ship. Ditto for Linux/SteamOS.

Other likely confounding factors:

The unnecessarily different hardware requirements of Windows 11, combined with Windows 10 Home reaching EOL in the United States, likely left some users feeling alienated.

The temporary-but-still-painful hardware cost crunch puts more pressure on software developers to improve their software on existing hardware rather than hoping their users will upgrade.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#959

Post by orthoxerox »

natas wrote: post #151

I recently had dinner in Bellevue with an individual who holds a relatively senior position within Microsoft’s executive leadership. During our conversation, she emphasized repeatedly that Microsoft does not primarily view its offerings as consumer products. According to her, the company’s leadership is strongly focused on B2B strategy, with revenue growth driven mainly by Azure, AI, and enterprise solutions. Her per…

But probably the biggest reason why Windows became the enterprise OS of choice was that every worker already learned how to use Windows on their home PC.

Now that people have phones as their principal computing devices and 90% of enterprise software runs in a browser the biggest thing helping Microsoft keep their share is AD (or whatever it's called these days, Copilot Entra ID 365?).

If someone disrupts their business by releasing a stripped-down OS that you don't even need GPOs to lock tight and a companion comprehensive IAM solution that works with iOS/Android as well, I can see Windows quickly degrading to become the "we keep one Windows PC around to control this widget from 2022" OS.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#960

Post by orthoxerox »

throw_winblows wrote: post #671
rgovostes wrote: post #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.

It might sound like a joke but it's because they are re-adding a feature they had in Windows 95, why was it removed? One can only speculate but given the pervasiveness of webviews in places where there used to be plain (and performant) win32 stuff, one is led to the conclusion that the recently on-boarded interns simply can't write any C++.

Probably for the same reason why Google keeps removing customizable features from Chrome. The more of them you have, the harder it is to test the product due to all kinds of unforeseen interactions between them. Someone probably said, "there's 10'000 lines of 30-year-old window positioning code we have to maintain, let's replace them with 1'000 lines of fresh window positioning code, then we'll have more leeway to add more Copilot features into the Start menu".
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