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karp773 5 hours ago [-]
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.
srmatto 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Lammy 4 hours ago [-]
The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.
PorciiVorbesc 3 hours ago [-]
>I grew up with DOS, Win 95, 98, 2000, XP and so on. I have to ask when was Microsoft above breaking things?
Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion?
My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.
krageon 2 hours ago [-]
They broke:
* at "random", during regular use
* when installing something, sometimes
* when removing something, sometimes
* slowly, over time
They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.
What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.
This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
2 hours ago [-]
torben-friis 4 hours ago [-]
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.
vladvasiliu 4 hours ago [-]
> some dialogs literally blurry because they haven't adapted them to my 4k display
Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.
Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.
The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.
At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.
Neikius 2 hours ago [-]
The OS is no longer a product they care about. Brings no money compared to Azure.
karp773 3 hours ago [-]
I don't remember them being so bad. Windows 7, 8 were great. Visual Studio 6 was good. Excel was top quality for a long time. What used to be annoying to me was that Microsoft ignored the common Unix conventions for no good reason and tended to reinvent stuff. It was like smart nerds were tasked to come up with stuff without any awareness of prior art, or as if Bill G snd Steve B were trying to lock in customers into incompatible stuff. Obviously not great but working. What we get now is pure slop and negligence.
Neikius 2 hours ago [-]
I remember a Windows update pushed through SBS that bricked all machines in company overnight. Boot up to bsod. Was that Windows 7?
karp773 2 hours ago [-]
I just looked it up. Yes, it was Windows 7. You have a better memory than me.
maccard 3 hours ago [-]
The internet revolted against 8 and stuck on 7 until it was EOL’ed and went straight to 10. I don’t recall 10 being positively received, but the hate has moved to windows 11. I’m happy to be corrected though.
bigstrat2003 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with 8 was that the UI was designed for a touch screen without a thought given to the fact that most users were going to be driving it with a mouse. Reliability-wise, it was perfectly fine.
nicce 2 hours ago [-]
> 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 am happy to tell that gaming is in pretty good state in Linux these days.
0x696C6961 51 minutes ago [-]
Not until the anti-cheat situation is figured out. But I play most single player games on Linux these days.
bigstrat2003 4 hours ago [-]
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.
HappySweeney 4 hours ago [-]
DOS 5 was awesome. I can't recall a single bug?
acuozzo 3 hours ago [-]
But DOS 6 was buggy as hell due to DoubleSpace.
serbuvlad 4 hours ago [-]
I've recently switched to a Mac after years on Linux, basically due to my frustration with the way the Linux desktop is being developed and the lack of quality all around for that platform.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
worik 4 hours ago [-]
I switched to Linux in 1993. Never looked back
wolfi1 2 hours ago [-]
ah, those were the days, when compiling the kernel took about 12 hours, or the switch from COFF to elf - fun times indeed
CamperBob2 4 hours ago [-]
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.
xvxvx 8 hours ago [-]
Aside from the audio issue, it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA. This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option.
mikestew 7 hours ago [-]
it feels like the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.
(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
SSLy 6 hours ago [-]
that rotting lack of QA is now spreading through their Xbox subsidiaries too. WoW is much buggier than ~4 years ago.
the_solenoid 4 hours 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.
SSLy 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ainar-g 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kenhwang 7 hours ago [-]
For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software.
Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.
WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.
Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
alphager 7 hours ago [-]
Have you had recent experiences? I thought the same until I tried it out, on decision stable no less. The driver support nowadays is incredibly good on Linux (my desktop Bluetooth didn't work under Windows with official drivers; just works without any tinkering under Linux).
kenhwang 5 hours ago [-]
One of my machines is always Linux desktop; I've been using it to see if it's ready enough for my main desktop to switch over and so far my verdict has been it's not.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
a-priori 5 hours ago [-]
If you're talking about compiling WiFi drivers, then you're not using Linux the way most people do.
dcrazy 4 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, they’re just holding it wrong.
a-priori 4 hours ago [-]
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.
dcrazy 4 hours ago [-]
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.
josephg 1 hours ago [-]
Is it?
I use Linux mint on my desktop. Wifi just works. I’m using some X870 motherboard.
I got the motherboard when it was really new, and I think it took a few months before wifi worked properly in mint out of the box. (I use Ethernet anyway so it wasn’t too upsetting). But after a few months, they had it all sorted. I have never manually compiled a kernel or wifi drivers or anything on this machine. I suspect most Linux users don’t do stuff like that any more.
Not to say it’s a trouble free experience. I’ve had problems with the nvidia drivers a few times recently. In the transition to nvidia’s new driver model, I’ve somehow ended up with incompatible nvidia packages on my system and the graphical environment broke. The most recent time I asked Claude code to take a look at my system and tell me what commands I should run to fix the nvidia packages. It did a great job.
It doesn’t feel like a kit plane any more. It’s a bit temperamental from time to time, but for the most part Linux just works.
coderenegade 15 minutes ago [-]
I can honestly say that I've never had to compile wifi drivers from source in more than a decade of using Linux as my main OS, even through my distrohopping phase. And I'm not researching my hardware ahead of time, either. I don't even know what you'd need to be running in order to have to do that? Maybe void or something similar? I don't think that my experience is particularly unique.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.
ahartmetz 3 hours ago [-]
It's compile drivers or research your hardware before you buy it. The latter is highly recommended. If you go against the common advice, it's kinda your problem. If you bought the hardware before installing Linux or it was given to you, well, that sucks. That said, driver problems, especially important ones, aren't that common anymore.
hacker_homie 7 hours ago [-]
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 computer that's two years old.
prmoustache 56 minutes ago [-]
> At least if they buy a mac they know it's going to work
If you buy a computer from a brand that sells computers with Linux preinstalled, you also know it's going to work.
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 work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
> 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
josephg 53 minutes ago [-]
The pain points have gotten less painful in the last few years. As someone who has run a hackintosh at one point, Linux is a walk in the park in comparison.
Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.
rescbr 21 minutes ago [-]
> Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.
The last emerge conflict I had was handled 100% by an agent.
I'm not wasting my weekend on stupid sysadmin tasks anymore.
nickjj 2 hours ago [-]
The review's purpose wouldn't be to provide you an in-depth guide to walk you through installing some distro. It's more like probing for high level details around hardware compatibility.
For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.
xvxvx 7 hours ago [-]
I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the rest of the year trying to get Linux running on my Alienware desktop. I think most of the software I use is available on Linux, I just need to find the time to get started.
noisem4ker 7 hours ago [-]
Any random thread with "Microsoft" in the title from the last few years is likely to include a decently representative library of reasons. Seriously: it's always the same, trite talking points being brought up, most often hijacking the subject of discussion.
</meta>
Yizahi 4 hours ago [-]
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 "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
josephg 50 minutes ago [-]
> It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong.
Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.
(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)
kevinrineer 2 hours ago [-]
To be honest, I feel that the ceiling is higher in Windows. I just today dealt with a faulty HP Printer driver that caused wuauserv (Windows Update) to report that I had to reboot every day. Finding which files were corrupted in `C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\` was not an easy task.
I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.
Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.
In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.
VCFundedGenYer 2 hours ago [-]
> It is very hard to debug and fix stuff on Linux if something goes wrong.
No it isn't. That was true maybe 20 years ago. Most distros now just work. If something isn't working, the internet solves most of the problems.
worik 4 hours ago [-]
I have had these problems on Windows too.
Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
Yizahi 2 hours ago [-]
In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable" compared to a home desktop Linux (among all sorts of distro plus DE combinations). And I was using Win 98 ME, early Vista builds and so on too. It is really hard to bork Windows install to become fully inoperable. It will be screeching and throttling under fifty different viruses and malware installed by a naive aunty in the accounting but it will just somehow work. And GPU driver crashes in my case were self recovering. Linux on the other hand allows way more manual intervention, but it also kinda expects way more manual intervention too. In my experience.
prmoustache 54 minutes ago [-]
> In my anecdotal experience, Windows (never used Mac) is a lot more "auto recoverable
It is usually called formatting the drive and reinstalling.
adamc 4 hours ago [-]
Been a couple years, but discord on linux was... much less stable than it was on Windows, and I was using it to play a lot of D&D at the time, so, I ended up reverting to Windows.
simoncion 3 hours ago [-]
I've been using the Discord "thick client" on Linux for many years now and it works just fine. I've never seen any sort of crashes, nor have I seen any instability that couldn't be explained by shitty Internet "weather".
Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.
xlayn 7 hours ago [-]
Just do it, if you want linux to be exactly windows without issues, that will never happen, but if you accept the compromises linux has been there all this time waiting for you to accept a tradeoff.
Windows brought the disease of "Always on like a cellphone, because that's where the trends are going, and you have to be able to just open it and keep going on" which is exactly what suspend to ram was, and even then on linux it just works.
Thinkpad x220, x230, hp probook 445 g7, 845 g7, 845 g8, 835 g8, thinkpad t14 gen 2, gen 3, lenovo legion go, steam deck, dell 8290 (yes, dell had of course to do their "magic" with the fan so no amount of claude ASTRAL GOD PLUS can fix that), any elitedesk minipc, asus rog g14, all the versions since the first one, dell precision 3571....
don't you like some aspect of it, claude the thing... there is the freedom of knowing that the thing does what you want, and only that
(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
mejutoco 5 hours ago [-]
I agree with your sentiment, but I dont see linux as windows with some compromises. I simply see windows as unusable (only wsl is imo), so anything will be an improvement.
trashface 3 hours ago [-]
Been running linux for a few months (before that I was windows up from 3.1 up to 10, though I skipped 8 and ME) and it kind of reminds me of the windows 95 experience in terms of quality level - and the bugs. Right down to occasionally dropping back to "DOS" (or the equivalent - the framebuffer console) because I need to do something that restarts the GUI. For instance, because of one thing or another having trouble with suspend, I _basically_ have to shut down my session every day, just like in the bad 'ol Win 9x days - my machine will sleep, but only after I shut down the entire GUI and make sure nothing is using NVIDIA, oh and turn off the intel wifi driver.
GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok.
I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability.
Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
qu4z-2 38 minutes ago [-]
> "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...
Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.
dziulius 3 hours ago [-]
Try linux mint. Gnome 3.x is cancer. Also, linux mint still uses xserver and for some reason suspend works properly on nvidia
prmoustache 49 minutes ago [-]
> Gnome 3.x is cancer.
No it is not. It is just not to your taste. Thanksfully no linux user is forced to use it and there are plenty of alternatives.
Yizahi 5 hours ago [-]
Haven't you heard? QAs are unnecessary ballast now, devs and managers can test product just as well in their spare time ;) . Also, people are buying bug ridden products anyway, so why bother.
EvanAnderson 7 hours ago [-]
> ...the remote access and pasting issues should have been discovered in QA.
They were. QA is paying Customers now.
Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
baal80spam 8 hours ago [-]
> in QA
No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026
moepstar 7 hours ago [-]
> remote access and pasting issues
And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...
shevy-java 1 hours ago [-]
Or MS could have used AI to find all these issues months ago already. But obviously they did not, which is strange. These big corporations promote AI but then don't use it to improve their own software code base systematically.
gib444 8 hours ago [-]
> issues should have been discovered in QA
Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!
xvxvx 7 hours ago [-]
That’s my bigger fear in this scenario: that they did limited testing with the internal agreement that any small issues that arise can be carried by the customers. As long as it didn’t fully break, it can be released.
this_user 5 hours ago [-]
No need for QA if you just tell Claude to "make no mistakes".
doron 7 hours ago [-]
but...but... AI was supposed to make this all better!
7 hours ago [-]
yoyohello13 1 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has constantly been bragging about AI writing all their code. And they push out more bugs than features these days.
bunderbunder 9 minutes ago [-]
I don’t know if that’s strictly true. But one thing I’ve seen since AI coding has taken over is that the additional features that do get built are all the lower-value ideas that would previously been left on the cutting room floor.
I’m not convinced that’s a positive. Users don’t necessarily even perceive those lower-value changes as features, so much as unnecessary bloat.
taviso 7 hours ago [-]
A recent update broke the file history service for me, which I only discovered when I went to restore a previous version of a file. If you use it too, you should probably check it's actually working.
kasabali 2 hours ago [-]
joke's on you, it has never worked for me.
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
It has always worked for me when I needed it.
post_break 6 hours ago [-]
There's a massive RDP bug in the new update that is breaking stuff with no fix right now. Congrats Microsoft on the help desk ticket generation.
(KB5124008)
htrp 8 hours ago [-]
> "The paste operation might fail silently," according to Microsoft.
> Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 are affected. Microsoft said: "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message."
How many people wrote lgtm on the security patch?
cube00 8 hours ago [-]
Similar behaviour here:
> Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, and File Explorer might also become unresponsive," Microsoft admitted.
> "Additionally, the Windows Update page might stop responding and continuously display a loading indicator."
This culture of trying to avoid showing the user an error message has to stop.
sdcfgy 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve got that problem.
I think I’m just going to roll that machine back and turn updates off now. It’s too risky.
kmeisthax 1 hours ago [-]
I remember the time when spurious copy-paste failures meant something shit the bed so badly in the Win32 subsystem you needed to reboot. Never did figure out why that would happen but it kinda stopped around the Windows 8 era...
mococa 5 hours ago [-]
Let's pour more AI
throwaway85825 5 hours ago [-]
Will the last competent employee being laid off please turn out the light.
3 hours ago [-]
dgarciaf18 6 hours ago [-]
Do they even have automated testing? This should have been detected not only in one layer of the release process, but in serveral ones.
bunderbunder 23 minutes ago [-]
So there’s an argument to be made that when the same person designs, implements and tests the change, any purported defense in depth is largely illusory.
Once upon a time I disagreed with this argument, insofar as I believed it wasn’t necessarily true as long as you had good peer review every step of the way.
But the shift to AI coding has made good per review a heck of harder to pull off.
throwaway85825 5 hours ago [-]
Not anymore. The test lab and testers got laid off. Now they test in production on end users.
hn_submit 2 hours ago [-]
Linux is rising from the ground up. Many users are fed up with Redmond's nefarious schemes to pump up their share price like using its user base as A.I. guinea pigs.
Amazingly it's U.S. users who are taking the lead in installing Linux Mint and other Linux distros. I assume it's because there are few consumer privacy and protection laws and tech companies can abuse their users as they see fit. Many have had enough and are jumping ship towards Linux.
keithnz 57 minutes ago [-]
Everyone loves to bag on Microsoft, but they are generally quite good at keeping their software patched, they do get it wrong from time to time and everyone jumps on them. I've jumped to Linux as my main OS a while back (though still use windows for work), it's definitely not as seamless as windows is. It's great, I generally love working in linux, and with AI now it's WAY easier to sort out linux issues, but it does not seem anywhere near as polished as windows and I've had to deal with all kinds of niggly little issues with various things (all solvable ish... wayland seems a big source of issues).
cromka 1 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised recent MS Office isn't fully supported under Wine yet, given the advantages that LLMs give in reverse engineering stuff.
I generally assume Wine cannot use LLMs considering developers that have been in contact with Windows code cannot contribute and LLMs almost certainly were.
No such reference to LLMs possibly being trained on Windows code however. Well maybe AI companies were careful to remove problematic data from the training set.
EMIRELADERO 46 minutes ago [-]
That would be a stupid application of the rule, it would mean no developer could use an LLM for anything that already has a proprietary alternative with heavily documented internals or leaked source code.
yukIttEft 8 hours ago [-]
There is not a single component in Windows that is not riddled with bugs, its infuriating.
I wonder what exactly the "quality czar" is doing, maybe he needs a good PIP?
The culture of QA sailed off like 10-15 years ago I think.
bakugo 7 hours ago [-]
I keep hearing about how software development is a solved problem in the age of AI... and then reality hits, like we see here.
Sharlin 5 hours ago [-]
We just need QA agents to check the work of the coding agents (yeah, I’m sure that’s already a thing and people are saying this in all seriousness).
sdcfgy 3 hours ago [-]
Senior staff at my company have been saying that already. They don’t care if it works just if they can say they have it and get rid of the QA people.
shevy-java 1 hours ago [-]
The time has come for Microsoft to support LibreOffice.
The people have enough of Microsoft's shenanigans.
sitzkrieg 3 hours ago [-]
item no. 17531 why i will be using windows 10 LTSC to the grave. zero issues
tombert 3 hours ago [-]
Every time I see one of these articles I will, very briefly, get optimistic that people will move to an operating system that isn't terrible, and then realize that most people will literally just forget about the bullshit they put up with Windows.
I don't know what kind of reality distortion field Microsoft generates, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, people will literally simply forget every single awful thing Windows does.
People will (correctly) call out the jankiness of desktop Linux, but tacitly imply that Windows doesn't have jankiness. They will forget all the times that Windows Update bricked their computer, or all the time that their "repair" tools were literally just no-ops, or their copy-paste feature not working, or Microsoft literally breaking fucking Notepad, or the "System Restore" tool not actually restoring anything.
Desktop Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not so deluded as to say that it's perfect, but I really feel like its bullshit-level is lower. Oh, and since it supports filesystems that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, the snapshotting actually works.
Instead, I'll be stuck playing tech support for Microsoft's shitty products for my parents until the heat death of the universe.
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
Don’t project your parents on every Windows user. :)
tombert 4 minutes ago [-]
I'm not. It seems to be something that affects nearly every person who uses Windows by choice. It's actually kind of a testament to Microsoft's marketing that they can continue to release terrible, broken products and people still keep purchasing them.
fithisux 5 hours ago [-]
After the last update many things suddenly feel very sluggish like searching an app and starting it.
tencentshill 7 hours ago [-]
They must have forgotten to prompt "bug-free and make no mistakes". It happens to the best of us.
al_borland 7 hours ago [-]
Also, “maintain all existing functionality.”
I tried using the AI recommendations in the security scanning tool being used where I work. If I were to accept some of the recommended fixes, it would simply delete all the content in the file. The actual fix required was a simple tweak on one line, but the AI wanted to take the nuclear approach.
charlieyu1 3 hours ago [-]
so just a regular day for Microsoft
_s_a_m_ 6 hours ago [-]
Vibe coding?
5 hours ago [-]
PowerElectronix 7 hours ago [-]
Sounds like Microsoft, yes.
sdcfgy 3 hours ago [-]
Well that explains why excel was completely and utterly borked cutting and pasting then.
What an absolute fucking shit show.
everyone 7 hours ago [-]
MS is forcing everyone to vibe code right? Like they utterly fucked Minecraft with many baffling bugs fairly recently afaik.
krater23 4 hours ago [-]
Windows users, welcome to the world of Linux! Now you don't need to have to install Linux to experience the Linux way of working.
Stevenrojas888 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pmontra 4 hours ago [-]
When they tell you that Linux has issues with suspend, reply that Windows has issues with paste /s
krater23 4 hours ago [-]
I see no difference anymore. I used Windows because it worked and didn't break obvious things. Thats gone. I switched to Linux because the user experience is now better. Never expected that this switch happens because Windows gets worse...hoped everytime Linux gets better.
ahartmetz 3 hours ago [-]
Nah Linux is clearly getting better, but perhaps Windows is getting worse faster than Linux is getting better. Easier to destroy than to create and all that.
7 hours ago [-]
tylerchilds 8 hours ago [-]
Ty here from Sillyz.Computer pointing out once again, software authorship is and has always been political and not technical.
AI inverted power structures to favor action over bureaucracy and software development is historically the definition of bureaucratic— dating back to IBM backing the Holocaust.
The entire thing is just men LARPing as executives behind closed doors and kids vibing futures is forcing them to keep up while the mask of “the responsible computer adult” continues slipping.
jakzurr 5 hours ago [-]
I really wanted to spend more time reading the comments, but I've sworn off doom-scrolling.
Can you share specifically what did those OS exactly break back then? And were the breakages more common than competing OSs used in similar fashion?
My memory of those OSs things would break due to the drivers and hacks of third party SW, not due to things MS was shipping like today.
* at "random", during regular use
* when installing something, sometimes
* when removing something, sometimes
* slowly, over time
They were essentially just huge steaming piles of shit.
What you are describing was true at the time for Linux. It was an absolute bear to set up (at the time of win95/98) if you had anything unusual but once it ran it ran.
This has never been true for windows although the reasons why have shifted over time: it used to not work primarily because it was just shit. Now it additionally doesn't work because it is actively malicious.
I am writing this from the perspective of someone who is regularly forced to use Microsoft's products for work. I am familiar with the subject matter.
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.
Windows is amateur hour when it comes to 4K support. They have rewritten some applications recently and they are hilariously broken. Like the task manager or the freaking start menu. If the scaling changes once they’re running, they end up a blurry mess.
Also, the task manager never recovers after changing from dark to light mode or vice-versa. The start menu is broken the first time it opens, but it then recovers.
The taskbar sometimes shows the icons at the wrong scale, so you have these weird mis-aligned portions of icons.
At this point I’m wondering if anyone in Redmond actually uses this OS.
I am happy to tell that gaming is in pretty good state in Linux these days.
Overall, it's an absolute joy.
It just works extremely well.
Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know how to repeat (my recent downloads file things disappeared from by dock on the last reboot), and extremely missable interactions (apps asking for the permission to send notifications is an extremely missable notification that you have to hover over -> Options -> Allow).
However, at the end of the day, these are all things I can learn. A few I can change with Vorssaint.
The issues with Windows and desktop Linux are much much deeper than that.
So now, just-in-time debugging only works if I happen to remember my password.
You're thinking of 20-years-ago Microsoft. Microsoft famously got rid of their software test teams like ten years ago. As one who worked there 20-some years ago on their test teams, I'd say the quality of their software is really starting to show the negative effects of such a move.
(FWIW, we got rid of our last Windows machine in the house when my spouse retired from MSFT. I'm not running that crap in my house if I don't have to, no matter how much MSFT contributed to our financial security.)
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.
Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance.
WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work.
Desktop environments are still clunky and rough around the edges. Maybe I don't get along with KDE/Gnome and just need to shop around for another DE.
Last weekend I tried updating to Linux 7.2, and WiFi drivers failed to compile, so it's been fun.
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.
I use Linux mint on my desktop. Wifi just works. I’m using some X870 motherboard.
I got the motherboard when it was really new, and I think it took a few months before wifi worked properly in mint out of the box. (I use Ethernet anyway so it wasn’t too upsetting). But after a few months, they had it all sorted. I have never manually compiled a kernel or wifi drivers or anything on this machine. I suspect most Linux users don’t do stuff like that any more.
Not to say it’s a trouble free experience. I’ve had problems with the nvidia drivers a few times recently. In the transition to nvidia’s new driver model, I’ve somehow ended up with incompatible nvidia packages on my system and the graphical environment broke. The most recent time I asked Claude code to take a look at my system and tell me what commands I should run to fix the nvidia packages. It did a great job.
It doesn’t feel like a kit plane any more. It’s a bit temperamental from time to time, but for the most part Linux just works.
The sharp edges are usually pointing the package manager at a repo (generally an official expansion) that lets you install the necessary binary.
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 computer that's two years old.
If you buy a computer from a brand that sells computers with Linux preinstalled, you also know it's going to work.
https://linuxpreloaded.com/
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 work fine with Linux and if not you can always put the factory Windows install back on and return it.
I'm really thankful I picked one up in August 2025 for $580 before prices went crazy. It's a Nimo N155 15.6" Ryzen 7 6800H with 32 GB of RAM (DDR5), 1 TB NVME SSD and an AMD Radeon 680M that lets you allocate up to 8 GB of VRAM.
It's beyond ridiculous that the RAM alone is worth more than the entire laptop today, but they still have laptops today in the $600-700 range with solid specs. Tons of them with 16 GB of memory at that price.
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
Also, strange as it is to say, LLMs are incredibly helpful for fixing any little problems that do show up. ChatGPT and Claude do a great job of helping diagnose problems and tell you what to do to fix them. Less useful for experienced users, but for beginners they’re a lifesaver.
The last emerge conflict I had was handled 100% by an agent.
I'm not wasting my weekend on stupid sysadmin tasks anymore.
For me personally, the laptop I mentioned worked out of the box. I didn't have to do anything custom or follow a guide. I turned it on and everything worked after I installed my distro of choice. Likewise my 12 year old desktop which has a USB audio interface also worked with no special tweaks or hardware incompatibility issues.
</meta>
Basically the problem is not that the "floor" difficulty is a little above "very easy". Linux distributive maintainers and developers have succeeded in lowering the "floor" almost to the Mac or Win levels these past years.
The problem is the "ceiling" is too high, "very hard" in other words.
Also apparently Linux has quite a few failure modes when graphical DEs are run inside VM, to the point of r/Linux just outright telling me "I'm holding it wrong"... ahem... telling me that VMs are unreliable for desktop and I should run it natively. But due to those same personally experienced VM issues, I'm vary about going all-in on native install. Yes, there is dual boot too and I do know the correct order to it (at a guess, not many Win users would, and then risk wiping their old MBR), but for now I'm delaying trying native install (again). A lot of hassle unfortunately, and I'm a procrastinator.
Not these days. Just ask chatgpt or Claude to help out. I did that recently when my nvidia drivers broke somehow. I asked Claude code to take a look. It told me some apt commands to run to uninstall certain nvidia packages and reinstall others. It worked a charm.
(I’m sure the regular chat interface would have worked fine too - I just used Claude code because it was already installed and set up.)
I've also this prior week fixed double digit Wi-Fi issues, my institution is dealing with the deprecation of MSCHAPv2, and so on.
Not going to say MacOS is free of issues either - from my experience with screen flickers / blackouts on full screen video playback with quick transitions.
In my experience this year, the grass is not greener in any desktop OS.
No it isn't. That was true maybe 20 years ago. Most distros now just work. If something isn't working, the internet solves most of the problems.
Computers are complex and there are always trade offs
It is usually called formatting the drive and reinstalling.
Having said that, I run it with Xorg, so maybe it's a huge disaster under Wayland... I wouldn't know.
(and after I convince him, he installs chrome and visual studio code....) oh well...
GNOME is also phenomenally insistent about managing window sizes and positions, and phenomenally bad it it, so it basically boils down to "I don't care what you had it at before, now you are getting a full screen window or something random I made up". Claude tells me this is an intentional design decision on their part...ok.
I will say the gaming has gotten a lot better, proton and DXVK really are amazing. NVIDIAs drivers give good performance in those as well but are...less than amazing in reliability.
Overall I'm happy that I have so far avoided windows 11 but damn has this been quite a bumpy road.
Yeah, Gnome devs hate their users for some reason and want them to suffer (although some people are into it, I guess). I recommend trying KDE or XFCE instead.
No it is not. It is just not to your taste. Thanksfully no linux user is forced to use it and there are plenty of alternatives.
They were. QA is paying Customers now.
Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
No such thing in Microsoft AD 2026
And, to top it all off, not even the Microsoft-issued "Known Issue Rollback" semi-fix did the trick, at least not on Citrix...
Looks like it did. Shift right testing shifted to the customers!
I’m not convinced that’s a positive. Users don’t necessarily even perceive those lower-value changes as features, so much as unnecessary bloat.
(KB5124008)
> Excel 2016, 2019, 2021, and 2024 are affected. Microsoft said: "Although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. When this issue occurs, users receive no indication of the failure, such as a beep or error message."
How many people wrote lgtm on the security patch?
> Related tools, including Microsoft Management Console (MMC), RDS Licensing Diagnoser, and File Explorer might also become unresponsive," Microsoft admitted.
> "Additionally, the Windows Update page might stop responding and continuously display a loading indicator."
This culture of trying to avoid showing the user an error message has to stop.
I think I’m just going to roll that machine back and turn updates off now. It’s too risky.
Once upon a time I disagreed with this argument, insofar as I believed it wasn’t necessarily true as long as you had good peer review every step of the way.
But the shift to AI coding has made good per review a heck of harder to pull off.
Amazingly it's U.S. users who are taking the lead in installing Linux Mint and other Linux distros. I assume it's because there are few consumer privacy and protection laws and tech companies can abuse their users as they see fit. Many have had enough and are jumping ship towards Linux.
EDIT: Well, should have searched first before posting: https://itsfoss.com/news/bottles-microsoft-365-early-look/
Edit: for reference: https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ
No such reference to LLMs possibly being trained on Windows code however. Well maybe AI companies were careful to remove problematic data from the training set.
I wonder what exactly the "quality czar" is doing, maybe he needs a good PIP?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/05/satya-nadell...
The people have enough of Microsoft's shenanigans.
I don't know what kind of reality distortion field Microsoft generates, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, people will literally simply forget every single awful thing Windows does.
People will (correctly) call out the jankiness of desktop Linux, but tacitly imply that Windows doesn't have jankiness. They will forget all the times that Windows Update bricked their computer, or all the time that their "repair" tools were literally just no-ops, or their copy-paste feature not working, or Microsoft literally breaking fucking Notepad, or the "System Restore" tool not actually restoring anything.
Desktop Linux certainly has its issues, I'm not so deluded as to say that it's perfect, but I really feel like its bullshit-level is lower. Oh, and since it supports filesystems that didn't coexist with dinosaurs, the snapshotting actually works.
Instead, I'll be stuck playing tech support for Microsoft's shitty products for my parents until the heat death of the universe.
I tried using the AI recommendations in the security scanning tool being used where I work. If I were to accept some of the recommended fixes, it would simply delete all the content in the file. The actual fix required was a simple tweak on one line, but the AI wanted to take the nuclear approach.
What an absolute fucking shit show.
AI inverted power structures to favor action over bureaucracy and software development is historically the definition of bureaucratic— dating back to IBM backing the Holocaust.
The entire thing is just men LARPing as executives behind closed doors and kids vibing futures is forcing them to keep up while the mask of “the responsible computer adult” continues slipping.