Pretty sure it's just that Windows is horribly broken, privacy-invading, ad-ridden malware disguised as an operating system. I swear it seems like nobody at Microsoft not even once have asked the actual users for what they would like to see in the OS.

Windows was fiercely hated for a long time for being extremely buggy, low quality, high price, weak security (a later concern), and Microsoft’s general anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices.

Things improved slightly for a while and maybe the generation of Mac/linux using tech workers never suffered through the worst of it, but Microsoft seems to be back on track with their old ways.

For over three decades Microsoft offered a free planned obsolescence to PC manufacturers. Windows got heavy and slow after a couple of years and needed a hardware upgrade which generated billions of revenue and all were happy. This continues till today and is the reason that MS increases the Windows bloat and HW vendors keep installing them.

If they installed Linux, we would still have our 12 yo PC until now. The year of Linux desktop will never come due to this reason.

I strongly prefer my Linux machine but use Windows mostly so that I can run Quicken. I feel doubly trapped: can't get off Quicken and thus can't get off Windows.

I'm only very slightly less reluctant to get an Apple machine (though the M* chips tempt me) and there will probably be incompatibilities between the versions of Quicken.

I think I should probably rip off the band-aid and migrate to:

+ spreadsheets (more control/future proof) + gnucash or similar (and risk that going unmaintained) + Wine + something I've not considered

When is gaming on the latest hardware going to be mature enough to move off this garbage operating system?

Can I play Kingdom Come II on Mint now? If not, are we moving there?

Big tech apologists: “while I used to enjoy playing Starcraft on Windows XP, it’s become clear that computing is no longer ‘personal’ and society needs some guardrails around it. I’m okay with sacrificing some liberties to protect the children.”

The way I see it, there is very little creativity in big business. Fund an interesting new concept, or fund a formulaic sequel? Same thing every time.

So the makers of tired old PC operating systems look enviously upon the success of smartphones and think: We must do as they do. And thus S3 suspend gets replaced by "modern suspend" - just like a smartphone, not really suspended, just in a low power, always online, always ready to act mode. And local storage gets replaced by cloud, and local accounts get replaced by cloud accounts, and the cloud reaches in and modifies features and apps. Does this really make sense? Does it matter? Smartphones blazed the way and are successful. Must copy the formula, of your device just being an extension to the cloud, nothing more.

I sit here in front of my old school Linux machine, with terabytes of local storage and as little cloud dependency as possible. Heck it's part of the cloud itself, hosting an ancient cobwebsite right here from the basement. But I feel increasingly like an anachronism. Want to pass a photo dump to computer-neurotypicals? Not even a USB stick will do. Not even a USB-C stick that will plug right into their smartphone and allow the pix to be copied off easily from its UI. The whole concept of non-cloud stuff has become alien to most people.

Don't even get me started about getting photos from them! Anyway if that's how the world works now, why would anyone bother making a traditional operating system any more?

The last line was really good. I may have differing opinions on some specifics but I loved this line: "The personal computer movement was about empowerment not dependency"

TL;DW: the exploding hate is due to Windows transitioning into a fully cloud-first OS.

But Microsoft says that it's ok: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...

I still don't understand all of the hate. In my eyes Windows has never been more capable and stable.

- Windows Terminal is actually pretty dang good

- There's actually a package manager built in now with WinGet

- Hyper-V comes with pro and is incredibly powerful

- While WSL2 isn't great at times, it does fill in a lot of gaps and working with Docker is pretty seamless

- Ever since Windows Defender became standard, cleaning up relative's machines has basically turned into disabling some startup apps and removing spyware-like browser extensions

- With 11 the UI actually feels reasonably consistent for the first time in a long while. There's still some core applications that need a rewrite (Disk Management, Format, RegEdit, Device Manager, Event Viewer), but it feels like real progression when compared to 8/8.1 or 10

- Backwards compatibility is quite simply unmatched

There's some areas that have regressed or have been omitted for _some reason_:

- If you're going to push Microsoft 365 family subscriptions, I never want to have to download TeamViewer, AnyDesk, etc. Give me some capable remote assistance tool. It's obvious this is ignored so they don't piss off partners.

- NTP synchronization shouldn't be behind the location access permission. I understand why it is, but then make location access more granular.

- Disk performance could be much better

- NTFS is so antiquated. It's time for another filesystem. I want native overlay support, checksumming, not-ass permissions (though tbf nobody gets this right)

- Windows + D is just a key shift to the right from ctrl C so I hit it all the time. It would be less infuriating if hitting it again actually put all of the windows in their previous state / stacking order.

- I usually sign in with my Microsoft account when I setup my PC, but ffs let me create a local user. If you want to put signing into my Microsoft account in my face, do it at first login not at first setup.

Serious (related) question: is the the state of window 'snapping' equivalent to or better than Windows 11 in any *NIX, non-tiling WM desktop environments?

Personal Computing was never in a better position.

Linux is a joy to use. Self hosting is easy as hell, with an abundance of tools and applications available. You can buy old refurbished machines that are still pretty amazing home servers for cheap.

Hell, even AI help with that. It's pretty good at making scripts and detailing step-by-step what you need to to get things running.

...for people who insist on using only Windows on their personal computer.

Microsoft's playbook: take somethign that works, add telemetry, subscriptions, and a Copilot button, then act surprised when people notice.

I had to restore my son's desktop PC last night from a USB stick. It didn't even have drivers for graphics over 800x600 or the wifi card. I was flabbergasted. It's windows 11, 2026, a 6-month old PC. I genuinely don't know how someone could sell something this awful with a straight face.

Windows was only ever better than DOS, by the same vendor. It's been awful compared to any competitor it's ever had. Really. I don't see a non-gaslighting argument for Windows anywhere.

This all pre-dates AI. It's response to market forces and revenue growth.

With the rise of Linux and ChromeOS the operating system is becoming a free commodity. Applications with real revenue are becoming web bound, google here as shown the way. Google's productivity software is a major threat to Microsoft. Here there is monthly recurring revenue.

There is no significant profit left in producing the operating systems. It is a necessity, sure, but it's not offering a USP. It just is.

So, the corporate thinking goes, switch investment into monthly paying applications, like Office 365. Reduce the investment in the OS, while using the established user base as a way to push new customers toward the online services Microsoft provides. Sure, MS can extend it to ARM, but this is because they are chasing the Chrome OS users.

Of course, Windows, like MacOS can still host "native" applications like desktop versions of office, or adobe products. But the real revenue is in the online monthly subscriptions. Games will fall into this section too.

In the end to the user, Windows becomes just like Chrome OS, a launch pad into online services.

Valve seeks the direction of travel and creates it's own OS designed to launch games and drive users to its store... it's the same story, and play book.

For developers, and creatives, the only home left is Linux (and maybe *BSD). This is acknowledged, as both Windows and MacOS can now run Linux applications via WSL and Apple Containers. Why? = because this helps developers create applications that can be hosted in the cloud... something that has recurring revenue.

AI? - Well, it's a possible accelerator down this path, as the hardware needed to host the inference is huge.

So what's going to happen in the future? - Well, the cost of AI is a limiting factor. Add in the political moves between China, the US and the EU are going to limit the growth of US owned cloud. Digital sovereignty is key, and the US government can get access to anything held on US owned servers. China is moving forward with plans to remove US technology from its ecosystem.

The result, well, AI does offer great productivity gains with costs so high, and latency of online services, tasks specific small models will be pushed to the desktop. Laptop and hardware manufacturers will add accelerators for this. In the EU there will be new opportunities for competitors to Microsoft / Google to stand up solutions, open source will be key to this, so NextCloud, will be popular. But overall there will be a pull away from the very thin client toward a slightly thicker client. The EU will probably want to sponsor, or help create a version of an AI agent similar to DeepSeek in China, they've shown what's possible with a smaller budget.

This won't run on Windows, or MacOS, it's all going to end up running on Linux. A Linux disto from China, and one for the EU.

The company never made good software