It doesn't take a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together.
- They're beholden to Wall Street and stock price is the only relevant metric.
- They've been laying off staff even up to senior/principal engineering levels.
- Shifting towards vibe coding instead of engineering.
Azure will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Their stock price has depended on it since Cloud and AI got restructured into a single department (it was Nadella's baby before he became CEO), and Azure was already pretty bad before vibe coding entered the picture.
Has it really, though? Or has it just shifted its corporate priorities away from its traditional stalwarts of Windows and Office, but in doing so caused disruption to users that had bet on the eternal stability of Microsoft’s product line? I don’t like the current direction of Windows any more than the next guy, and personally I’ve made other choices in recent years, but as a general principle, I’m not sure how reasonable it is to expect a business to continue offering the same product or service indefinitely if market forces are pushing it elsewhere.
IMHO, a deeper problem here is that we collectively allowed a near-monopoly culture to develop around desktop operating systems and basic business software. Instead of having a healthy degree of competition between providers and using standardisation to ensure interoperability and portability of our data, we’ve ended up in a “too big to fail” situation where many users have all their eggs in one basket and that basket has a rapidly growing hole in the bottom and looks like it’s going to fail anyway.
There are also reasonable arguments to be made about length of support for products already sold, forced obsolescence and ratcheting “upgrades”, where possibly the actions of some providers in the market are exploitative in ways we should not allow, and therefore regulating to prevent the undesirable behaviours might be in the public interest.
Ultimately, I think a combination of restricting customer-hostile practices while also encouraging a healthy degree of competition and interoperability in important markets would be best for the users and fair to the developers. Sadly, right now, we have neither of those things, and that’s how we get Windows 11, the mobile device duopoly, numerous examples of products or services being locked down against their users’ interests, online services that people increasingly rely on for fundamental aspects of their normal lives and yet that have little real obligation to those people in return, and assorted other ills of the 21st century tech landscape.
Market forces aren't pushing it elsewhere. The cornerstone of Microsoft still is Windows and Office. If those would not exist nobody in their right mind would choose Azure over AWS or GCP.
By letting their guard down on those fronts and letting Windows and Office degrade more and more, they are exposing themselves to the risk that someone ends up building a competitive company filling those niches and people risk the switching cost in order to get away from ever increasing Office 365 subscription costs.
You mean Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot App?
There's a really interesting dynamic here in that Azure has a solid spoiler role for large organisations that don't want to be commercially dependent on only AWS, and they can probably get really solid discounts if they're aready on board elsewhere. It's something that doesn't play out with Microsoft's other products nearly so much: you get shouted down if you want to have desktop diversity, but having a multicloud strategy is (in my experience) looked on as essential.
Again, is it really, though? I have no special insider knowledge so perhaps this is just a misunderstanding of the public information, but just going by the organisation structure, leadership comments and recent financials, it looks like Windows makes up a relatively small part of Microsoft’s revenues these days, while the traditional desktop Office applications seem to be almost lost in the noise. The emphasis seems to be firmly on cloud services, though admittedly with all the rebranding from Microsoft lately, I find it hard to understand even what basic products and services they offer any more.
Google also makes most of their money in "ads" but if they were to axe Search and Youtube (which in an reduced view are only sales funnels for ads), they wouldn't have much of a business left.
Windows appears to be positioned more as a platform to reach all the online services now, rather than its traditional role as a desktop OS. Can you even activate it without being online and having a Microsoft account any more? I’m out of the loop, so genuinely don’t know the answer to this one.
Office — or whatever it’s being called after the recent changes — also appears to have morphed into something quite different. I tried searching just now to see if you could still buy a permanent licence and install the classic applications like Word and Excel locally, and some sources implied you could, but I didn’t actually find any way to buy it in five minutes of looking around office.microsoft.com. As far as I saw, that site is now 100% about the online SaaS version and trying to get users to save their documents in the cloud. For businesses, the strategy seems to include promoting other online services like SharePoint and Teams as well.
So I think I stand by my original argument, though I don’t think it necessarily disagrees with yours. Windows and The Software Product/Service Formerly Known As Office might still be a significant part of Microsoft’s sales funnel, but they aren’t the products that Windows and Office used to be any more. The products they used to be have been repurposed to support an online-first corporate strategy, along with almost everything else in the Nadella era. Would Microsoft care if 100% of their customers stopped using Windows tomorrow and jumped to Apple or Linux systems, as long as they still used the other services that generate most of Microsoft’s revenues these days? I’m not entirely sure they would.
Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.
Sort of matching the decline of Intel too.
They haven't made their money from selling Windows for a very long time, these types of mistakes are gonna have precisely 0 impact on their stock price.
If windows ever gets so bad that people actually do defect to macos/linux en masse that absolutely will affect their stock price, but so far it hasn't happened
Also obviously this is someone else's problem some other quarter.. so.. like who cares?
Short term no but long term these rotations do happen, otherwise we'd all still be using IBM
I'm currently stuck in some sort of an infinite loop where a bug in Microsoft's server offerings causes us to waste some money each month, my management is pushing me towards re-creating the same ticket with Microsoft's support in hopes of getting rid of those extra costs, and Microsoft's support partners waste my time by telling me to check the same 5 things I've already checked before they close the ticket due to "inactivity" once (heaven-forbid) some other task on my plate deserves my attention and I fail to re-check those same 5 things fast enough.
It's like Dell telling you that CPU voltage/RAID controller alert and server reboot is your fault that will get fixed if you just install EXACTLY the same firmware version you have, or this another firmware update to completely different component. Yes, it's market "optional", but you must have it installed before they actually consider it a hardware problem next time it happens.
He'll be gone in a few years with all his bonuses and RSUs intact and there'll be absolutely no consequences for him if his actions cause MS to fall apart in 2035
The financial incentives are to upsell incompetent IT departments onto forever subscriptions. The poor products lead to fat over-engineering in the cloud and huge running bills that are very hard to undo. Sloppy LLM integrations, and sloppy LLM advice about IT needs, would seem to feed into that same strategy.
If you think it's bad now wait until they consolidate the rental PC market (Bezos and Nadella are all over that)
How do you find the subtle bugs? Working with LLMs I noticed, they try to implement things from scratch. I asked it to output the md5 hash of some string in the api response, it went on to implement the md5 algo and then called it. I simply did not have the time to check correctness so asked it to import a library I know. Someone might just have gone with it, shipped to prod and then bugs.
It also introduced slight changes in the intended flow of your program, that if you aren’t fully aware, are unnoticeable until they compound and you’re too deep to go back because now 10 different weird behaviors are in prod, you’re not sure what the cause is or if they were actually intended. You just have no frame of reference because maybe you didn’t build all of it as part of a team. And those are the things you should have had tests for, but when you were writing the code yourself you were coding with intent, so you know when something was off.
Now you build at the speed of thought and no longer know all the intents, only that the end result satisfies loosely written requirements.
They're quite a bit late to the 'move fast and break things' party.
I wonder if MFABT is a similar justification
Does MFABT work? It's possible. But people have complained about Facebook for years as a buggy product. And it doesn't fulfill what it's apparently meant to be used for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
Facebook has been built on a lot of fraud. Don't just copy them as the example to follow
On the internet I can search for "pictures of the eiffel tower". If I try the same on my own computer I expect to find photos from the time I took the family to paris... Yet I don't.
Does PowerToys still installs new updates once a work-day, and never delete it's old updates so you end up with GBs of useless .exe's? Remember discovering about 200GB of old updates back when I was still using Windows.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb5072911-explorer...
The "Windows is going to be an agentic OS" announcement was the last straw.
Linux and Mac it is.
I will note that I have used Darktable extensively. But there isn't a good Photoshop alternative.
Affinity is a risk. Undocumented file formats (unlike PSD + LR database), no XMP support and vendor relying on AI to keep it free.
Nope!
then you already have a license.
Unfortunately they don't sell single LTSC licenses to individuals
What did I do wrong on my 5800X3D w/ 4090?
When you can get multiple different agents to all work on things and you are bouncing between them, careful review of their code becomes the bottleneck. So you start lowering your bar to "good enough", where "good enough" is not really good enough. It's a new good enough, which is like you squinting at the code and as long as the shape is vaguely ok, and the code works (where that means you click around a bit and it seems fine), it's ok.
Over time you lose your "theory"[1] of the software, and I would imagine that makes you effectively lower your bar even further, because you are less attached to what good should look like.
This is all anecdotal on my end, but it does feel like quality as a whole in the industry has tanked in the last maybe 12 months? It feels like there are more outages than normal. I couldn't find a good temporal outage graph, but if you trust this: https://www.catchpoint.com/internet-outages-timeline , the number of outages in 2025 is orders of magnitude up on 2024.
Maybe this is because there are way more, maybe this is because they are now tracking way more, I'm not sure. But it definitely _feels_ like we are in for a bumpy ride over the next few years.
[1] in the Programming as Theory Building sense: https://gareth.nz/ai-programming-as-theory-building.html
Out of the blue, for months now, there's something causing the Shift key to remain magically stuck, and there's no way to troubleshoot it that I can tell. Everything is off - sticky keys, accessibility settings, all that garbagey Settings-not-Control-Panel that seems to move around all the time. If I mash shift a couple of times it returns to normal - almost as it Sticky Keys WAS active (and again all that stuff is disabled).
What's annoying about Windows is that There's Nowhere to Go to fix problem - nothing is transparent. I can google away and I'll get people also experiencing this and there's no answer.
With Linux and to a limited extent, MacOS, you can use unix tools and logs and playing around, even if it's hard you're empowered. With Windows you're a slave to Google searches.
After 10 minutes with Gemini, we found the incantation to completely reset the USB+HID stack. I put the commands in a script, and I could make the script auto-run on wake if I wanted.
I was so happy. Even after 8 years on Linux I didn’t expect this to work.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
I further speculate that before they had some senior/principal engineers that were the backstop holding things together but they've been let go too now. So there's nothing to stop AI slop taking over.
It didn't used to be so bad. It was really not that long ago that Windows really ramped up spending most of the users' resources on things which work against the user. While still getting not much new accomplished that most users were asking for.
>something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.
This is exactly it.
More than one thing changed in "unison", and not for the better.
Just fixed one of the 2019 HP's for my family which came with W10 1809 version on the same (actually decent) HDD. This was a pretty nice laptop and not the budget model.
It was not too bad when he got it but he had gotten some useless performance-hogging downloads and it was W10 Home to be taken off the internet anyway.
While waiting for the NVMe and some more memory, his partitions were then backed up to external media before experimenting with the built-in HP factory recovery method. Which wiped the HDD and started Windows 10 Home fresh like it was 2019, including of course the HP-specific software. If it was my PC I would have curtailed or uninstalled a selected good bit of the HP stuff, along with things like OneDrive from Windows, and limited the Windows settings to only those I particularly need. So that's what I did. It takes a little time but then it feels about as satisfyingly like a new PC has been doing for decades. Boots fast and everything is pretty responsive, especially without going on the internet. And that's with the HDD set up like it was originally.
When W11 first came out I had already shrunken his main partition by some decent space and installed W11 there for a regular plain Microsoft dual-boot system (but he never liked w11), so did that again too using the newest W11 Pro 25H2. This was a clean install without any HP bloatware, but I did properly manually download then install all the device drivers to current versions which some of them need to come from HP. Without going on the internet, and with equivalent Windows settings it's a real dog by comparison.
It naturally takes twice as much effort to set up one PC to dual-boot as if it was two different PC's, but after that the A/B testing back-to-back on identical hardware is as easy as it gets.
When you look into it Windows 11 is just hammering the C: volume like it's never done before, almost constantly, needing simultaneous reads & writes so much it would have been way more widespread ridicule if most people had not already been on SSD's before W11 "accelerated" the march of sluggishness.
W11 is a huge difference in what you see from older W10, back when loads of these laptops for a few years had W10 on 5400rpm HDDs and very few users could intuitively point to that one factor being worse than any other Windows performance degradation that came along in years before.
Now anybody could tell the difference if they tested on a more level playing field like this.
Once the NVMe was in he's now got the W11 Pro 25H2 and the W10 LTSC 2021 which does look like peak Windows. Neither one is nearly as frustrating as on HDD, but you can tell there is something very unfortunately wrong with W11 by direct comparison still.
Once you get on the internet it does get worse and stays worse. In addition to the very frequent simultaneous read/writes of the storage drive, then you've got all kinds of simultaneous send/receive actions to your network on top of that. And W11 is now up to 4GB of Windows Update per month, where W10 only took about 1GB to update all the way from the 2021 ISO.
Dwarfing W10 with a bunch of things that weren't needed at all for Windows 10 to do fine, so why can't it get better instead of worse?
As someone who back in the day worked on plenty of Dell ultralights running 4200 RPM drives and 5400 RPM drives at best, yes, yes it was "so bad". [And these devices were on the REDMOND domain!]
Anything else is rose-colored glasses, the same glasses people wear when they reminisce about the glory days of Windows 2000 or XP, absolutely forgetting what a security nightmare they were, or the boot times of Windows 2000 (when we used to regularly shutdown rather than suspend), or the not-so-uncommon BSODs, either from native Windows components or 3rd party drivers, etc.
I am now very wary of this Out of Band Update. I don't know the same problem is still there, or whether this update makes the problem any better or worse.
In fact, it's arguably better that way.
The old saying about known unknowns vs. unknown unknowns comes to mind.
You should look at the CVE list that's fixed every month. Surely you agree it's important to have those exploits patched, especially since baddies can reverse engineer the patches to find the original exploits?
A zero day attack is where there have been zero days since the attack mechanism is discovered(by the victim, not the attacker obviously), there is no after. There is no time for a fix to be developed. When you get hit one day after the attack vector is known that would be a one day attack. if you get a fix one day after the attack that would be a one day patch. If the vulnerability gets discovered and patched before the attack occurs, then there is no zero day attack. only multi day ones on people who did not get or apply the patch.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-...
[2]: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/185534985/sunsettin...
DIFFUSION
It is very nice having an Operating system that respects the Hardware I own and makes efficient use of it. My experience has been very good so far. Every device in my custom built desktop PC worked immediately. The only driver I had to build and install was for my XBOX Wireless dongle.
Gaming has been really damn good. I installed Steam and my games just worked. No fiddling around with configs or anything. Even installing a custom Proton version to try it out is very simple.
I've been on Fedora now for nearly a month and only boot into Windows for work. Eventually, I might get rid of Windows entirely. It'll take a massive U-turn from Microsoft on the philosophy for Windows for me to change my opinion now.
Microsoft is a joke; all of the formerly glorious tech companies are.
I had to try three window managers until I was able to use fractional scaling in such a way that my main 4K 32" screen shows 150% and my secondary screen shows a sharp image because Gnome cannot do fractional scaling only on one screen and for some reason 100% resulted in a blurry image.
The window manager crashed multiple times when I tried to unlock it.
Whenever I woke up my screen the whole system froze, apparently because of the USB hub in the monitor which registered. So far the only solution has been to disconnect the USB hub.
Fan control doesn't work properly because the chipset isn't supported.
I see rendering issues with window decorations all the time.
That's just after two weeks. I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors. Whenever I'm in the console or do IO heavy stuff I feel right at home but as a desktop OS it's still inferior to me. I don't have fewer problems on Linux, just different ones.
> I can't remember the last time my windows froze or crashed or had display errors.
This is my new daily life with Windows 11. I've got a client that requires some software that can't run under Linux (even with wine) and picked up a fairly spendy new laptop with windows on it. Not a day has gone by in the last three months I haven't regretted being forced to use it. Hangs and glitches every day for a minute or two, occasionally to the point that I give up and force restart it.
Does your Gnome install use Xorg? If yes, than it supports this. Xrandr settings are per screen. That is independent from the Window manager.
I hope you are using KDE Plasma instead of the default GNOME which is going the Microsoft way.
If you are not on KDE, I strongly recommend it.
Source: daily driving Linux for 25+ years.
TBH I was rather shocked at how bad Kubuntu is out of the box:
* Hibernate is flaky
* The OS freezes from time to time requiring a hard reset
* Snaps completely bork the system - better to just uninstall snap
* Keyring is flaky. Often you get stuck into an "enter your password" endless loop.
The list goes on - and this is on a desktop PC! But fortunately an AI can sift through the arcane workaround lore in the various forums.
The bugs are annoying, but a helluva lot better than using Gnome!
I believe one should use "KDE Linux" as the reference implementation, nowadays.
I picked Linux Mint way back when, before snap was a thing, so I can't lay claim to foresight. But I was really glad when they announced that they were disabling snap by default (though of course allowing you to install it if you choose to). There days, Mint is what Ubuntu should be — and nearly all Ubuntu-based packages will run unmodified on Mint too, so if you want to run an Ubuntu version that's sane, then Mint is what I would recommend.
That is a disingenuous statement.
Gnome is just as open source as KDE is and there are several forks for those who don't like the direction on Gnome. At no point does Gnome force ads on you, changes default apps under your butt, or takes a nap before opening a menu.
Sure, Gnome is not for everybody and you may dislike the direction it is taking, but saying it is like MS Windows, or the community project is like Microsoft is dishonest and insulting. I expect better behaviour from a fellow FOSS enthusiast.
I use a 15 year old computer and I assure you creating a folder has no lag at all.
React Native though.
Doing so caused me headaches because it installed Gnome (again my fault for selecting a bunch of packages) alongside KDE and I didn’t realize it. Causing me a bunch of “issues” until I selected KDE as the desktop environment on login.
I’ll probably move to Arch on my primary workstation sometime in the next few weeks (from PopOS which has treated me well for the last five years but Cosmic has been frustrating). My biggest reason is Arch has much more up to date packages than what I’ve had access to via Pop and it’s what SteamOS is based on so imagine it’ll be easier to keep up to date (along with little tweaks that Valve incorporates). Not to mention the Arch docs are great, I’ve had them help me even on PopOS for years now.
Addendum: Gnome + Wayland has more or less jumped the shark for me, with its highly opinionated design. KDE has thus far been plenty acceptable. For folks wanting to try both it’s easy enough to just install, pretty much all login managers (screens) let you choose which one you want. My only regret about KDE is losing Kinto.sh for MacOS style keybindings but I lost those with the move to Wayland anyway (still trying alternatives but they’ve been slow or quirky by comparison).
More interesting to me however, are the macOS technical friends in my circles. A trickle of them are switching to various Linux desktop distributions. This was inconceivable to me a mere 10 years ago. But I have to admit the quality of the Apple ecosystem has slid an astounding amount, which is driving the more advanced technical users into the arms of Linux. There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS, system-wide kinetic/momentum scrolling, iCloud sync, system-comprehensive battery management that includes working sleep and suspend, advanced trackpad gestures, uneven Unicode support, uneven human interface guideline adherence, limited laptop LLM inference, etc. So I'm not expecting this trickle to turn into a flood soon, but the solid lock Apple used to have on developer mindshare is not as solid any longer.
I wouldn't be so assertive about that. No OS is perfect, and as we see here, windows is no exception. It's mostly a matter of being used to living with those imperfections. At least on Linux, nobody is making those worse for you for "fun" (actually for their own profit at the detriment of yours), and many more nontechnical users sense that just fine (just the way copilot was forced is baffling).
> There are still plenty of Apple ecosystem-specific integration points and features that are still not available on Linux, like Apple Notes/iMessage/AirDrop/AirPlay/Handoff between macOS and iOS
KDE Connect solved that, and much more, many many years ago. I don't know the situation in the Apple walled garden, only that any hurdle there is the result of Apple abusive, user-hostile and anticompetitive practices that should (and will eventually) be illegal outside of the US.
Microsoft code is bad. This is not a react issue, and is probably not caused by lead developers. But the problem is now that things have regressed to 98 era technology, it’s going to take a long time for the problem to get better.
In Windows 95, Microsoft let you set a HTML file as your wallpaper and let you set up “channels” that were web-based widgets. This was the beginning.
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
Windows XP/2000 still had Internet Explorer as a core component. Web tech was involved every time you opened a folder.
Windows Shell using web tech is as on-brand Microsoft as it gets.
Windows 98 used webpages as core components for Explorer. Literally browsing your files involved J(ava)Script… in 1998.
"Active desktop"? Most people turned that off, and the explorer was pure native code otherwise.
Windows 98. Windows 95 would let you do this if you installed Internet Explorer 4.0 but there was no HTML anywhere in the OS in vanilla Win95.
> "We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication..."
> "We need to make deliberate choices on how we diffuse this technology in the world as a solution to the challenges of people and planet," Nadella says. "For AI to have societal permission it must have real world eval impact."
> https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-ceo-satya...
[1] https://adoption.microsoft.com/files/copilot/Unlocking-AIs-I...
EDIT to add: I agree that they've been going downhill the past few years, though. And I don't think it's a coincidence that that corresponds with the tendency for some devs (not all, thankfully, but too many) offloading too much of their thinking to LLMs and uncritically pushing insufficiently-reviewed slop into the code review process. I suspect MS has the same problems as other companies with that, perhaps more because of internal pressure (I assume, I have no insider knowledge) to use Copilot.
Really needs to be studied.
It's like they started making structural decisions a decade ago that are now overwhelming their ability to deliver basic functionality.
I realize there were always problems like this, I live through Windows ME, but it does feel qualitatively different now with advertising being forced into the product, performance of no consideration at all, etc.