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

Our commitment to Windows quality

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

971–980 of 1001 posts

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#971

Post by toraway »

halJordan wrote: post #954
reyaaltrooth wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Look at the names, the parent comment is implying hiring Indians destroyed Microsoft with a wink/nudge. And conspicuously omitting Phil Spencer who led the deteriorating Xbox/gaming division for almost a decade but instead chose to include Spencer's replacement of 1 month and some Xbox PM because his ethnicity wouldn't fit.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#972

Post by mancerayder »

There's no accident. The OS isn't led astray by overzealous product managers or 'out of touch' with users. I think we are projecting our own experiences in our own companies.

I think instead there's a deliberate attempt to transform the entire experience into an agentic-driven UI to replace the organization of the UI elements. In other words, tell the AI you want to open X, you want Y changed in settings, etc. Users don't want this, and it doesn't matter - it turns Windows into a sort of ad-serving, auto-updating, spying operating system that behaves more like an appliance.

I'm looking forward to ditching it as my only reason was gaming on my Nvidia hardware, and now Linux is ready (or so they tell me).

But people raised on this 'new' Windows experience will never have known anything different. People-who-are-not-us, the average people, don't mind ads, being spied on, and being told what to watch.

Isn't popularity of TikTok, the rampant posting of personal stuff on social media, and the like enough evidence?

We're going to all turn into Richard Stallman (although I heard a rumor bathing is as distasteful as Windows to him).

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#973

Post by darthwalsh »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #895
malfist wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. A…

From the article: "focusing on experiences that are genuinely useful and well‑crafted". Can you imagine actually using that as an excuse when managing one of the most important software companies in the world? I'm just in awe at how little self-relfectio they have at that company. The implication is that they weren't focused on "genuinely useful and well-crafted" features 40 years into their company's history and it'…

Seems to acknowledge that windows 11 launched without expected features from 10.

Maybe they thought they could get away without taskbar location customisation, but now they have to put that complexity back in.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#974

Post by 000ooo000 »

>We are introducing the ability to reposition it [taskbar] to the top or sides of your screen

*reintroducing

Windows is terminal. Taskbar on the top isn't changing that. It has product manager rot. Good luck ousting the people with the power these days.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#975

Post by vitorgrs »

dupdrop wrote: post #840
vitorgrs wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try arch, it's RAM management it's way better. Use Endeavouros if you don't want to deal with the arch install. I have the same experience on Fedora, and most distros. Arch is the only distro that it's 100% smooth for me. OpenSuse comes second.

I'm curious: what would make it so much worse in Fedora compared to Arch?

At least here, in a very low-end system, Fedora just freezes when ram is full, it's not as smooth. On Windows, there was a ton of problems, but in general, this never happened. Windows would increase the "swapfile" to 20gb, but would never let the system completely freeze.

My guess it's just the default kernel settings that Arch use instead of Fedora. Arch uses zswap, while Fedora use zram... there's other stuff as well.

It's linux in the end, so you could just change several settings on Fedora... But then... why if you can just install arch?

I think some people are very used to high RAM devices, and doesn't realize these days how some distros can be very bad on low-end systems.

Like, packagekit on Fedora it's a ram hog (and they acknowledge that). Windows these years been bad, but the situation in some linux distros is not great either.

What Linux does better, it's respecting user choice and UX.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#976

Post by gerdesj »

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…

"you have absolutely heard of the Neo"

I blank threads I'm not interested in. To be honest I certainly did not notice it here and now I have engaged, I've only now noticed the adverts on TV here.

Now I know what I'm looking at, the Neo ads here are so up their own arse that it is unlikely that anyone has noticed what is on offer. Its an Apple {something, in pastel shades} is my only takeaway.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#977

Post by hdivider »

cguess wrote: post #921
hdivider wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope you're right. The challenge with Linux still seems to be practicalities -- like in particular, does Zoom run well on most distributions? Reports seem to be of system crashes and degraded performance. I imagine there are lots of 'it works for me' stories, but think: for Linux to eat into Windows user market share (which I would greatly support), critical things like Zoom have to work at least as reliably…

Even my Starbook, so... literally made for Linux, doesn't do things like going to sleep when I close the lid. It made me switch back to my Mac because despite being able to, I have a life and little time for my main work device to decide to not work randomly. Linux is never, and I mean never going to be a legitimate alternative to Windows or MacOS on the desktop under the current paradigm. "Switch to X desktop or dis…

Yes, precisely. And then as I anticipated, the "it works for me" stories, even here in this thread. Wish we could get past this steady-state in the Linux ecosystem.

Imagine a Linux distro largely displaced Windows and Mac simply due to usability, security, reliability, and the fact that there's no monstrous corporation pulling the strings. That would be awesome.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#978

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

canucker2016 wrote: post #900
aeternum wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of big tech became Product leaders running amok. Somehow It shifted from users know best to "Product" knows best. I think this all stemmed everyone wanting to be Apple except no one actually achieved it and now we have 3 different versions of the audio control panel in Windows, the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen, and windows search no longer searches your PC. Deleting "Product" might save wi…

> ... the start button is somehow in the middle of the screen ... If you take a look at the size of widescreen monitors, you can kinda guess why someone decided to move the start button/menu to the middle of the screen. I know Samsung and Dell have ginmorous 49 inch monitors. Start menu that pops up from the lower left corner of the monitor would be a bad UX - the user might not even notice that a menu had popped up…

I have a 48" 4k non-curved monitor, running stock KDE with the launcher in the corner and UI scale set to 100%. Not only is the experience just fine, I simply cannot see having the launcher in the middle being useful. It would lead to a beak in left-right organizational thinking for where window and pinned tasks live as my active applications change and I have to hunt for their new screen position. Alt-tab breaks down after a certain number of windows, as does the exploding "overview". Having a consistent order and positioning for multitasking is both faster and less cognitive load.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#979

Post by EchoReflection »

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…

100%. It's amazing how unfriendly/hostile MS has become with things like forced updates, trying to force users to use their shitty, bloated "Edge" browser, MS "Copilot", building location "services" as an "on-by-default" aspect of the OS. it's like they were deliberately trying to make users switch to Apple or Linux. But since Linux is a little more for "tech-savvy" ppl, I imagine Apple has been the biggest winner of MS's blindness.

Re: Our commitment to Windows quality

#980

Post by f30e3dfed1c9 »

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…

I hang around on HN a fair amount and I'm even a mac user. Never heard of a mac Neo.
Post reply on HN