This is insanely good and mimics my personal experience of Windows these days. I literally say "pop-up! pop-up! pop-up!" out loud during a normal workday where one pop-up or prompt is rapidly replaced by another. Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop unless you configure the hell out of it (and even that is no longer enough).
My favorite "joke" from this site:
> Scan complete: 1 threat found — ChromeSetup.exe
FWIW, I switched to Fedora in January and have no plans to look back. Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.
"always something trying to grab attention", that's the root problem right there. Even on a work computer unless you've changed your homepage, every time you open a tab on Edge you get a screen full of distraction clickbait. And then you wonder why you never manage to concentrate any more.
Whoever curates the Edge homepage knows they have mere seconds to capture a new recruit before they manage to escape to a different browser. Their jobs depend on the amount of bait they can dump in one window.
Welcome to Fedora! I've missed literally nothing about Windows since switching to it about a decade ago now (around the time they announced Win7 EOL), and every time I had to use it for work (thankfully never these days), I grew more and more confident that I never will need to return and that Windows is only getting worse.
I tried installing fedora on mac m1 vmware recently, and enabled 3d acceleration separately. Llm seemed to think 3d acceleration would work better on fusion.
Performance sucked bad, particularly on games. Tux games were unplayable. I am confused what the bubble is on hn or on my end. Before that, on utm I think i tried ubuntu. After decades, linux is still hard to try out.
There’s a lot to unpack here but if you want acceleration to work better in a VM you should use Parallels instead. VMware on mac has been in life support only mode for years and has not kept up in this area. You are also handicapping performance using the VM at all. M1 is well supported by Asahi at this point and even has native 3D acceleration. Not saying your lived experience isn’t real but the issue you experienced reflects a lot more on the state of mac virtualization and Vmware than linux.
CAD and video games are the areas where I struggle to ditch Windows. Many games work well under Proton and I have had luck with running Windows with an assigned GPU - but that does sometimes break for seemingly no reason.
Sounds like Proton and SteamOS are very successfully closing the gap with games. Ironically hardware pricing might be the reason SteamOS doesnt progress at the same speed that it has been as Steam machines are pricey.
Specialist software on the otherhand. I get that. Its the same reasonw hy I have a macboom for academic work and Windows for other work. Vendors not building across ecosystems is frustrating, though presumably thats due to tooling lock in.
The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%. The OS settings are conveniently located in a sensibly organized system settings manager and it works great. Then you need to mount a network drive (temporarily or permanently) and simply cannot do so in a GUI. If you're comfortable dealing with that small handful of outlier tasks (and if you're here, you can probably manage), then they're all already there.
[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them
IIRC in Thunar you just open a dialog and paste the connection string and you're done. Pretty much the same as in Windows but you don't need to execute some icky looking binary from some web page to e.g. get support for sshfs.
That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.
But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.
I only have Windows at work, which means less pop ups. Nevertheless, lately I get forced updates with 5 minutes “grace period” more often than I’d like. Soon will be approaching pop up frequency.
I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.
It's soul destroying going from personal computer Linux (been figuring out the distro for me) to Windows for work.
Even worse they use Office 365 with sharepoint, they've even turned off web search somehow on copilot and can only search internal servicenow and SharePoint pages making it worse.
Things are pretty dire.
Anybody hiring who uses Google workspace and (preferably) Linux or MacOS let me know.
Any big name is going to be Windows or Mac, 95% of the time. There's not many UEM / RMM tools that handle linux well, and if they do, it'll only be for one or two distros like Ubuntu.
Lmfao. What are they even doing with Copilot? Paying for premium and then handicapping it because they think that being able to search online sources might exfiltrate your sharepoint data? That is not at all how that works.
Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop
One of the things that most impressed me when I switched from Windows to OSX was that OSX prohibited programs from stealing focus.
Sadly, that prohibition ended maybe five versions ago, and now macOS is like Windows -- You can be typing a document in a word processor, and then suddenly for no reason you're typing it into a browser, and then into a password field that popped up out of nowhere.
It’s too snappy and responsive, real windows I gotta wait with the spinning blue ring thing for a few seconds after clicking ‘x’ on the notifications. That is when they’re generous enough to give an ‘x’ and not force the user through some onboarding flow with no easy way to opt out
You're doing something serious aaand suddenly out of nowhere the fan starts screaming cause some cryptically named process decides right now is the time to get stuck in some loop
It must be hard for Windows users to imagine that on Linux there are is no activation, no Microsoft account, no cloud backup, and no pop-up requesting that you install crapware when you plug in a peripheral.[0] You also own your disk encryption keys and are not assigned an identifier that can be used against you.[1]
Meanwhile Linux updates and upgrades have given me grief far more than Windows ones have, FWIW. As does the UX, all the time. As do a million other things I have no energy to list. Every OS has nonsense you have to wade through. It's just that love is blind, and Windows's feels like it's more out of spite than ignorance.
Do you happen to be running Ubuntu? They have made updates terrible in their effort to try and make snaps a thing. I experience far less grief on other distros.
I've had a pretty good track record with Fedora Atomic / Silverblue. The thing I like best about it is that I can have updates safely staged in the background invisibily. And next time I reboot my computer, I boot into that new version. No waiting around or anything.
That's not to say it's perfect. There was a pretty bad bug maybe around 2 years ago where upgrades just stopped working and without any warnings. You had a notice the issue and run a special command to fix the issue. I've also had quite a few AMD/kernel regressions recently that resulted in artifacts in the desktop and AV1 video decode.
I wish there was like a Debian but atomic that has broad support like Fedora does. Though I did see that openSUSE leap 16.1 introduced an immutable option.
Someday I'd like to see someone do a similar parody of Linux where your job is to get a printer working in Kubuntu. Preferably on a laptop with a HiDPI monitor.
......? Windows 95 to Vista all had similar installation workflows to Linux sans an extra step to enter the install key. 7 and 10 made it easier since the hardware ID would make having to enter the key manually on hardware unnecessary. Until 11, there was no need for MS account, cloud, etc.
Windows 10 definitely begged you to use a Microsoft account to log in. IIRC you couldn't even set it up with a local account unless you told the install process you didn't have internet. I believe it also moved your home folder to onedrive without asking with no way to fully undo that
This is true for essentially all Win32 programs too, including the ones that have started to appear in the MS Store. Developers can play in the sandbox from the get go by using Windows Runtime, but no one wants to rewrite their application with a library or environment that Microsoft is going to deprecate and replace in 6 months time.
It's not like Flatpak is perfect, but at least it uses primitives that we understand through containers, and can apply to already existing programs. Even though they were written without playing in the sandbox and might expect full access to services and files, we can fudge it for the most part with bind mounts and open up safer doors through Portal and widget toolkits over time.
I haven't used Windows in a long time, but IIRC Windows behaves the same way. At least, on Linux, there is an expectation that user accounts be actively used, and this is indeed the model followed by most critical software like nginx, postfix, dovecot, etc.
I dont even remember now why windows 2000 was superior to XP, but I ran it until I switched to Linux some time in 2004, despite having XP available too. Installed XP on other people’s computers though, FCKGW…
2k appeared to retain NT's responsiveness with seemingly separate threads for processing UI stuff where XP appeared to devolve to Windows 98 (pre NT) in terms of UI and app event processing merged together into a single foreground event loop.
A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible. You could easily configure it so that it stayed out of your way, and only the updates were a headache. Windows 8 and those beyond were all downright atrocious. While I had dabbled in Linux for years before then, announcing Win7 EOL finally pushed me 100% into the Linux camp.
Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.
Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.
It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.
My windows 10 pc continues to bother me to update because I won't get security patches anymore. I will absolutely never update to Windows 11. The only way they ever get me to pay for an OS again is if they go far out of their way to be respectful to the user to compensate for all the disrespect.
That's just awesome and makes me regret not switching to Linux earlier. I wish the creator of this made the start menu suddenly change after running Windows update, because Microsoft knows best on which folders you need to be visible by default. It can be customized, but you can't go back to how the start menu was.
I recently switched back to windows so I could play Wardogs with the boys and I’m not enjoying my fans running at 100% when I’m not even running a game and the constant notifications. I’ll be back on Linux within a month
I feel like its experience in US version of Windows. I never had so many popups in EU. Whats funny, I feel this way with macos, even after a year after setup I get some start notifications which I clicked many times.
My mother-in-law bought a new laptop last week and asked me to set it up for her, it came with Win11 by default. I was genuinely flabbergasted at how terrible of an experience it was, screen after screen of "We respect your privacy. Let Microsoft collect every single thing you have ever dared to breath onto this computer?" right in the install screen. After that lovely experience you're greeted with a billion random junkware preinstalled like fucking Candy Crush. I wanted to crash out when I clicked around in explorer and saw every UI element buffer for a split second, and after further research it seems they're using React in explorer these days.
My aunt pulled a Windows XP computer out of storage recently because she's sick of Win 11. I'm excited to hear updates from my cousin (though unfortunately, I have to expect this experiment will fail)
Valid. The good news is it's a nicer experience once you click through those. (Be careful; there are a few tricks where the "skip" button changes position and emphasis). Then sometimes a Windows update will make you go through part of it again; once every 3 months or so.
1. It needs to take a minute to load. While doing so it should display an "Installing Updates" progress bar that is controlled by a random number generator.
2. After booting in, it should try to sell you several services. The decline options should be hidden and possibly moving around evasively. Clicking them should have good chance of backing up all your files to OneDrive anyways.
just want to add that if the creator adds Powerpoint, then starting a Powerpoint presentation should prompt a 10 second countdown to a forced update and restart...
Will anybody, ever, write an OS that doesn't serve the purpose of itself? Like Solaris, Win 3.11.. So many pop-ups, every so often... very nice, very useful, thank you. Worse than Micro and soft guy os.
I've spent a few months trying to convince my management on getting a Macbook after fighting with a kernel memory leak that consumes the 128Gb of RAM in my freshly new Dell Pro Max 16 with Windows 11. It seems the best solution my IT gives me is to replace my laptop... which I have already done... three times.
> Restore failed. Control Panel was replaced by Settings, except for the settings that are still in Control Panel.
Microsoft really needs to remove the Control Panel and let us control everything in the Settings app. It's infuriating to have to go dig in this old mess because of backwards compatibility or something.
Someday in the future, business students will be directing their agents to study cases written by the Harvard Business Review's LLM agent about how people at Micrsoslop saw:
- What good UI/UX could be
- What good LLM integration can look like
- What good office productivity software looks like
And how after seeing those thins they went on to do the exact opposite. I simply cannot believe how bad most Microsoft products are these days. Windows in particular is so much worse than even Windows 10 from just a few years ago that it's almost funny.
I can only conclude that Satya Nadella is a mac user, because nobody who actually dogfoods Windows would consider the current state of affairs to be acceptable.
It's not that complicated. Yeah you have to spend an hour or two after install looking up some guides, tweak some registry keys & turn off a bunch of default Settings.
Then you have practically zero nags.
Also no need to update 600+ MB every friggin day like on Ubuntu...
Ex-Microsoft, but it's incredible how mismanaged this company has become.
Firstly, the level cronyism is just ridiculous, almost comical. You see Principals and Directors that can barely code at what I'd consider SDE 2 level, but are there purely because of favoritism. Then, you have multiple factions duking it out and releasing iterations of the same product over and over, just for the sake of empire building. All this while blocking or even sabotoging other teams from getting ahead.
There's also the constant rotation of the same people speedrunning features and wrecking havoc on projects before getting promoted and rotating out. Then, whoever's left behind to clean the mess gets PIPed because "the project was running fine when we left it!"
And not only that, but executives and PMs shoving a barrage of pop-ups and notifications for the sake of improving key metrics because We'Re A DaTa DriVeN CoMPAnY. Yeah, no shit you get more engagement by adding popups, but who cares because the customer satisfaction metric is too abstract to be tied back to your team.
Finally, at the end of the day, everyone goes home and uses Macbooks and iPhones.
I have Windows 11 Pro and I've never seen an ad. I don't remember turning anything off but I did upgrade from Windows 10, so maybe that had something to do with it, unless it's just that Pro doesn't contain ads.
I also don't use it with a microsoft account and don't have any "services" from them, so maybe that helps.
I have a microsoft account but I use a local account for Windows 11. I always had MSDN and had a pro key so maybe its an enterprise thing. It is a legit copy. I don't use onedrive or 365. When I go to Accounts it has a blue button to Sign In, so maybe local accounts don't get ads.
Really? My Win 11 install (sparsely used nowadays) is nag city. Set up OneDrive, activate cloud backups, sign into your Microsoft account, oops Xbox Game Bar popped up because I pressed some key combination, reboot (a few times) to finish updates, set up copilot, error installing update, reboot before installing update, etc.
Some other ones to add on from my fresh install: Start menu search will search the Microsoft Store for apps they want you to install, some key combinations will launch copilot and if it's not setup it will take you to a webpage that will help you set it up, every office application has a cheap looking unhideable jeweled title bar button to "Upgrade your plan".
Solutions in order of the problems listed: https://superuser.com/questions/1927207/how-to-remove-the-st..., https://github.com/midrare/hyperenable, and my favorite: downgrade to a previous version of office which is almost certainly unsafe and has active exploits (16.0.19929.20106). But I hate that button THAT much and my wife refuses to move off of Onenote for our family knowledge management. I am close to just using Onenote in a browser (where I can zap the offending element) but the loading pages on demand is annoying.
I can tell this is fake from the fact the explorer context menu and the start menu open in under 2 seconds (on a top end Ryzen CPU, nonetheless).
Yeah the volume slider wasn't disabled for 2 seconds after opening the dialog, Microsoft should take notes!
Honestly the entire UI was so responsive and fast.
We've come a long way when web apps feel faster and more native than native apps.
Well, it does say "Unofficial parody" on the initial, loading, screen
This is insanely good and mimics my personal experience of Windows these days. I literally say "pop-up! pop-up! pop-up!" out loud during a normal workday where one pop-up or prompt is rapidly replaced by another. Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop unless you configure the hell out of it (and even that is no longer enough).
My favorite "joke" from this site:
> Scan complete: 1 threat found — ChromeSetup.exe
FWIW, I switched to Fedora in January and have no plans to look back. Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.
"always something trying to grab attention", that's the root problem right there. Even on a work computer unless you've changed your homepage, every time you open a tab on Edge you get a screen full of distraction clickbait. And then you wonder why you never manage to concentrate any more.
Whoever curates the Edge homepage knows they have mere seconds to capture a new recruit before they manage to escape to a different browser. Their jobs depend on the amount of bait they can dump in one window.
Welcome to Fedora! I've missed literally nothing about Windows since switching to it about a decade ago now (around the time they announced Win7 EOL), and every time I had to use it for work (thankfully never these days), I grew more and more confident that I never will need to return and that Windows is only getting worse.
I tried installing fedora on mac m1 vmware recently, and enabled 3d acceleration separately. Llm seemed to think 3d acceleration would work better on fusion.
Performance sucked bad, particularly on games. Tux games were unplayable. I am confused what the bubble is on hn or on my end. Before that, on utm I think i tried ubuntu. After decades, linux is still hard to try out.
There’s a lot to unpack here but if you want acceleration to work better in a VM you should use Parallels instead. VMware on mac has been in life support only mode for years and has not kept up in this area. You are also handicapping performance using the VM at all. M1 is well supported by Asahi at this point and even has native 3D acceleration. Not saying your lived experience isn’t real but the issue you experienced reflects a lot more on the state of mac virtualization and Vmware than linux.
CAD and video games are the areas where I struggle to ditch Windows. Many games work well under Proton and I have had luck with running Windows with an assigned GPU - but that does sometimes break for seemingly no reason.
Sounds like Proton and SteamOS are very successfully closing the gap with games. Ironically hardware pricing might be the reason SteamOS doesnt progress at the same speed that it has been as Steam machines are pricey.
Specialist software on the otherhand. I get that. Its the same reasonw hy I have a macboom for academic work and Windows for other work. Vendors not building across ecosystems is frustrating, though presumably thats due to tooling lock in.
What WM/DE do you use? As much as I find Windows annoying sometimes, I haven't found anything for linux that feels as polished.
The handful of popular DEs [0] are going to be much more polished and functional for like 99% of tasks, and nonexistent [1] for the other 1%. The OS settings are conveniently located in a sensibly organized system settings manager and it works great. Then you need to mount a network drive (temporarily or permanently) and simply cannot do so in a GUI. If you're comfortable dealing with that small handful of outlier tasks (and if you're here, you can probably manage), then they're all already there.
[0] I use KDE, but it's essentially true of all of them
[1] that is, they require the command line
IIRC in Thunar you just open a dialog and paste the connection string and you're done. Pretty much the same as in Windows but you don't need to execute some icky looking binary from some web page to e.g. get support for sshfs.
That was mostly just chosen as an example of something KDE lacks, but which feels like it should be possible to do in a UI. I have no doubt that Xfce has plenty of comparable examples.
But I was curious and looked up the process; it seems that Thunar can only temporarily mount a network drive. So it remains a good example of the kinds of things you can easily do in the UI in Windows or macOS and thus feel weirdly lacking in Linux.
I've been on KDE for the past 2 years and it's been a great experience. I wiped Windows everywhere (impractical before).
I keep it installed on a secondary drive just-in-case but I haven't booted into it in months.
I've been using KDE for the last few years, it's been the most familiar experience.
I use the KDE Plasma Fedora. It feels basically like Windows 10.
"I haven't found anything for linux that feels as polished."
Really? In my experience you can go for pretty much anything and it will be more coherent and less buggy than the Windows shell.
Try Gnome or XFCE. As a bonus you'll be able to remap Caps Lock with ease.
This is straightforward with Powertoys (official config utility from Microsoft) on Windows.
I only have Windows at work, which means less pop ups. Nevertheless, lately I get forced updates with 5 minutes “grace period” more often than I’d like. Soon will be approaching pop up frequency.
> Only $dayjob relies on Windows anymore.
I'm in the exact opposite situation as you. I managed late last year to switch at work to Debian full time on both my machines. The few older Windows only programs I need run just fine under wine. But I'm stuck with a Windows machine at home because of Lightroom/Photoshop. They are tantalizingly close to running well under wine, but not quite there yet for me.
It's soul destroying going from personal computer Linux (been figuring out the distro for me) to Windows for work.
Even worse they use Office 365 with sharepoint, they've even turned off web search somehow on copilot and can only search internal servicenow and SharePoint pages making it worse.
Things are pretty dire.
Anybody hiring who uses Google workspace and (preferably) Linux or MacOS let me know.
Any big name is going to be Windows or Mac, 95% of the time. There's not many UEM / RMM tools that handle linux well, and if they do, it'll only be for one or two distros like Ubuntu.
JumpCloud seems to support:
Amazon Linux
Debian
Fedora
Linux Mint
Oracle Linux
PopOS
RHEL
Rocky Linux
Ubuntu
(May work on others)
https://jumpcloud.com/support/agent-compatibility-system-req...
Lmfao. What are they even doing with Copilot? Paying for premium and then handicapping it because they think that being able to search online sources might exfiltrate your sharepoint data? That is not at all how that works.
Same app or different, doesn't matter, there's always something trying to grab attention on a Windows desktop
One of the things that most impressed me when I switched from Windows to OSX was that OSX prohibited programs from stealing focus.
Sadly, that prohibition ended maybe five versions ago, and now macOS is like Windows -- You can be typing a document in a word processor, and then suddenly for no reason you're typing it into a browser, and then into a password field that popped up out of nowhere.
Hey, Johnny Apple! Fix this!
It’s too snappy and responsive, real windows I gotta wait with the spinning blue ring thing for a few seconds after clicking ‘x’ on the notifications. That is when they’re generous enough to give an ‘x’ and not force the user through some onboarding flow with no easy way to opt out
Yes. And some apps should freeze for 10-40 seconds despite having an SSD and 32 GiB of RAM.
You're doing something serious aaand suddenly out of nowhere the fan starts screaming cause some cryptically named process decides right now is the time to get stuck in some loop
It must be hard for Windows users to imagine that on Linux there are is no activation, no Microsoft account, no cloud backup, and no pop-up requesting that you install crapware when you plug in a peripheral.[0] You also own your disk encryption keys and are not assigned an identifier that can be used against you.[1]
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/a-hackers-arrest-reveals-microsof...
Meanwhile Linux updates and upgrades have given me grief far more than Windows ones have, FWIW. As does the UX, all the time. As do a million other things I have no energy to list. Every OS has nonsense you have to wade through. It's just that love is blind, and Windows's feels like it's more out of spite than ignorance.
Do you happen to be running Ubuntu? They have made updates terrible in their effort to try and make snaps a thing. I experience far less grief on other distros.
I've had a pretty good track record with Fedora Atomic / Silverblue. The thing I like best about it is that I can have updates safely staged in the background invisibily. And next time I reboot my computer, I boot into that new version. No waiting around or anything.
That's not to say it's perfect. There was a pretty bad bug maybe around 2 years ago where upgrades just stopped working and without any warnings. You had a notice the issue and run a special command to fix the issue. I've also had quite a few AMD/kernel regressions recently that resulted in artifacts in the desktop and AV1 video decode.
I wish there was like a Debian but atomic that has broad support like Fedora does. Though I did see that openSUSE leap 16.1 introduced an immutable option.
Over time it’s becoming this way.
Have you subscribed to Mozilla VPN?!
How about your Canonical Pro subscription?
Someday I'd like to see someone do a similar parody of Linux where your job is to get a printer working in Kubuntu. Preferably on a laptop with a HiDPI monitor.
My impression was that these days a printer is more likely to just work on Linux than on Windows. And without the bloatware.
......? Windows 95 to Vista all had similar installation workflows to Linux sans an extra step to enter the install key. 7 and 10 made it easier since the hardware ID would make having to enter the key manually on hardware unnecessary. Until 11, there was no need for MS account, cloud, etc.
If anything Linux gave me more grief.
Windows 10 definitely begged you to use a Microsoft account to log in. IIRC you couldn't even set it up with a local account unless you told the install process you didn't have internet. I believe it also moved your home folder to onedrive without asking with no way to fully undo that
And to continue to get Windows 10 security updates right now, I had to sign in to a Microsoft Account to do it, so it’s even pushier.
You sign in to enroll your device in the update scheme then just log out again.
I get updates for 10 without having signed into an account (I refuse to).
Yes but every program you run can do anything you can do with your user account, which is catastrophic.
This is true for essentially all Win32 programs too, including the ones that have started to appear in the MS Store. Developers can play in the sandbox from the get go by using Windows Runtime, but no one wants to rewrite their application with a library or environment that Microsoft is going to deprecate and replace in 6 months time.
It's not like Flatpak is perfect, but at least it uses primitives that we understand through containers, and can apply to already existing programs. Even though they were written without playing in the sandbox and might expect full access to services and files, we can fudge it for the most part with bind mounts and open up safer doors through Portal and widget toolkits over time.
I haven't used Windows in a long time, but IIRC Windows behaves the same way. At least, on Linux, there is an expectation that user accounts be actively used, and this is indeed the model followed by most critical software like nginx, postfix, dovecot, etc.
This is not realistic; the start menu opens way too quickly.
True, but the search fails to reduce the number of options, so some things are right.
I can feel my blood pressure raising. Very accurate to the Windows experience.
Win XP was peak computing for the masses, and most didn’t have a clue!
I preferred 2000, but admit that didn't make it to the masses.
I dont even remember now why windows 2000 was superior to XP, but I ran it until I switched to Linux some time in 2004, despite having XP available too. Installed XP on other people’s computers though, FCKGW…
2k appeared to retain NT's responsiveness with seemingly separate threads for processing UI stuff where XP appeared to devolve to Windows 98 (pre NT) in terms of UI and app event processing merged together into a single foreground event loop.
A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible. You could easily configure it so that it stayed out of your way, and only the updates were a headache. Windows 8 and those beyond were all downright atrocious. While I had dabbled in Linux for years before then, announcing Win7 EOL finally pushed me 100% into the Linux camp.
> A mature Windows 7 wasn't terrible.
Yes. Microsoft peaked with Windows 7. Microsoft had finally fixed their long-standing stability problems. Internally, they had two main tools. One was the Static Driver Verifier, which verified that kernel drivers wouldn't take down the whole OS. The other was a classifier that took in crash dump reports and clustered them into groups given to one developer per bug area. That was enough to stop almost all Blue Screen of Death problems.
Windows 7 didn't have ads, license renewals, integration with Microsoft paid services. It just did the job of an operating system.
It's the last Windows I had. I've been all Linux for years now.
My windows 10 pc continues to bother me to update because I won't get security patches anymore. I will absolutely never update to Windows 11. The only way they ever get me to pay for an OS again is if they go far out of their way to be respectful to the user to compensate for all the disrespect.
> Windows is activated with a digital license. The parody watermark will remain because it is part of the joke.
Thank you for a good laugh
That's just awesome and makes me regret not switching to Linux earlier. I wish the creator of this made the start menu suddenly change after running Windows update, because Microsoft knows best on which folders you need to be visible by default. It can be customized, but you can't go back to how the start menu was.
I recently switched back to windows so I could play Wardogs with the boys and I’m not enjoying my fans running at 100% when I’m not even running a game and the constant notifications. I’ll be back on Linux within a month
they say wardogs will support proton at some point... looking forward to the day linux is the default gaming OS.
I feel like its experience in US version of Windows. I never had so many popups in EU. Whats funny, I feel this way with macos, even after a year after setup I get some start notifications which I clicked many times.
My mother-in-law bought a new laptop last week and asked me to set it up for her, it came with Win11 by default. I was genuinely flabbergasted at how terrible of an experience it was, screen after screen of "We respect your privacy. Let Microsoft collect every single thing you have ever dared to breath onto this computer?" right in the install screen. After that lovely experience you're greeted with a billion random junkware preinstalled like fucking Candy Crush. I wanted to crash out when I clicked around in explorer and saw every UI element buffer for a split second, and after further research it seems they're using React in explorer these days.
What the hell happened?
My aunt pulled a Windows XP computer out of storage recently because she's sick of Win 11. I'm excited to hear updates from my cousin (though unfortunately, I have to expect this experiment will fail)
I hope she doesn't log into anything important on that computer because it's unlikely it can be made sufficiently secure for today's internet.
edit: sigh, HN's dogshit rate limit mechanism impedes meaningful conversation yet again. It's dangerous to go alone, take this: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2413170/why-you-should-never...
People still bother to deploy XP exploits?
Yeah, that's how industrial control and operational networks get breached virtually every day in the US.
Production facilities, water treatment plants, power plants, etc... (wish I was joking)
Valid. The good news is it's a nicer experience once you click through those. (Be careful; there are a few tricks where the "skip" button changes position and emphasis). Then sometimes a Windows update will make you go through part of it again; once every 3 months or so.
Don't worry, AI's gonna fix it in Rust in Windows 12
The "fix everything" button should link to a Linux installer.
Nice. A couple thoughts:
1. It needs to take a minute to load. While doing so it should display an "Installing Updates" progress bar that is controlled by a random number generator.
2. After booting in, it should try to sell you several services. The decline options should be hidden and possibly moving around evasively. Clicking them should have good chance of backing up all your files to OneDrive anyways.
> backing up all your files
You misspelled “exfiltrated” for the purposes of AI training and NSA dossier building.
The "Advanced sound settings" "this setting has moved three times" has triggered me. And I'm still on Windows 10!
just want to add that if the creator adds Powerpoint, then starting a Powerpoint presentation should prompt a 10 second countdown to a forced update and restart...
Nice, search does nothing - as always
Proving once again that Windows isn't ready for the desktop.
Don't forget to try some Free Apps in the Windows Store to enjoy the full Windows Experience
Will anybody, ever, write an OS that doesn't serve the purpose of itself? Like Solaris, Win 3.11.. So many pop-ups, every so often... very nice, very useful, thank you. Worse than Micro and soft guy os.
Back when Windows RG (2001) was considered a sharp mockery.
(Random fact, at the time that flash came out, clicking on the A: drive made your real floppy drive light up)
I've spent a few months trying to convince my management on getting a Macbook after fighting with a kernel memory leak that consumes the 128Gb of RAM in my freshly new Dell Pro Max 16 with Windows 11. It seems the best solution my IT gives me is to replace my laptop... which I have already done... three times.
Please, Please, MS, Streisand this. And then they can change the name to "Microslop Winblows"...
Stop giving Microsoft ideas!
Missed opportunity to have that say "365 Microsoft apps installed"
Got a genuine chuckle out of me
As many comments already mention, windows is way worse than this.
Some obscure background task consuming all cpu. Burning your battery when on a laptop.
There is just so much crap in windows, it’s not even funny.
And man I really really liked it. Windows 7 + the performance work they did for 8 that was the last time it felt like they cared.
Pretty good!
Could maybe use a "Catastrophic failure!" error message (experienced for real last week)
Real windows is still actually worse...
So glad I moved off Windows at home back in 2003.
It's too fast to be real windows and there is not a task manager so I can kill apps when they always freeze.
Reminds me of windows rg and microshaft winblows
> Restore failed. Control Panel was replaced by Settings, except for the settings that are still in Control Panel.
Microsoft really needs to remove the Control Panel and let us control everything in the Settings app. It's infuriating to have to go dig in this old mess because of backwards compatibility or something.
Start menu comes up too fast.
Please add deep linking or something so back doesn't mean starting from scratch
I don't know about you but after a few seconds, I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.
I'm glad I didn't have to spam the back button to do it.
I feel like this would be overprocessing. Is the state really that important or difficult to recreate?
LOL. Well made, give me more than a few chuckles :)
"Windows is taking its time for your convenience"..
"Your privacy is important"
This is a remarkable depiction of a modern operating system.
so much rage seeing this
who else got rickrolled?
Are people really seeing ads in Windows 11? I've never seen one, is it a regional or licence specific thing?
Yes, by default the start menu pushes blogspam and ads for software.
In many installations there's also a default widget that tries to get you to stop what you're doing and go look at stocks.
Kinda hate the vibecoded sounds.
You mean the Copilot-ed sounds?
Someday in the future, business students will be directing their agents to study cases written by the Harvard Business Review's LLM agent about how people at Micrsoslop saw:
- What good UI/UX could be
- What good LLM integration can look like
- What good office productivity software looks like
And how after seeing those thins they went on to do the exact opposite. I simply cannot believe how bad most Microsoft products are these days. Windows in particular is so much worse than even Windows 10 from just a few years ago that it's almost funny.
I can only conclude that Satya Nadella is a mac user, because nobody who actually dogfoods Windows would consider the current state of affairs to be acceptable.
This is wayyy too accurate!
Yawn. I have zero nags from Windows 11.
It's not that complicated. Yeah you have to spend an hour or two after install looking up some guides, tweak some registry keys & turn off a bunch of default Settings.
Then you have practically zero nags.
Also no need to update 600+ MB every friggin day like on Ubuntu...
The Windows dunking is getting old.
> you have to spend an hour or two after install [...] Then you have practically zero nags.
And you see no problem with that?
Look - we have entered into a full gambling society. I need to know that every update I do there is a chance candy crush gets installed.
Ex-Microsoft, but it's incredible how mismanaged this company has become.
Firstly, the level cronyism is just ridiculous, almost comical. You see Principals and Directors that can barely code at what I'd consider SDE 2 level, but are there purely because of favoritism. Then, you have multiple factions duking it out and releasing iterations of the same product over and over, just for the sake of empire building. All this while blocking or even sabotoging other teams from getting ahead.
There's also the constant rotation of the same people speedrunning features and wrecking havoc on projects before getting promoted and rotating out. Then, whoever's left behind to clean the mess gets PIPed because "the project was running fine when we left it!"
And not only that, but executives and PMs shoving a barrage of pop-ups and notifications for the sake of improving key metrics because We'Re A DaTa DriVeN CoMPAnY. Yeah, no shit you get more engagement by adding popups, but who cares because the customer satisfaction metric is too abstract to be tied back to your team.
Finally, at the end of the day, everyone goes home and uses Macbooks and iPhones.
Very cool website!
> Win 11 parody
I'm sorry but where is the parody?
- A Win11 Home user
I'm also a Windows user (and a Linux one too, no worries guys), and I must admit, this parody is a little bit real ...
this is too much fun. nice one :)
Needs the "update completed" notice then moves all your icons, apps and menu items around to new locations or gone completely
A couple recommended additions
1. the full screen "welcome to your windows experience" to enroll with Office 365
2. Run a Space Force satellite app that stalls into involuntary windows update
Parodies are supposed to be fun!
That wasn't fun. At all.
screams into pillow
hmmyou should add random delays for each actions. Also add random freezings for each element. This is too clean to be windows.
MacOS is going the same way unfortunately.
Lol. Love it but for some reason my windows does not do any of that
I have Windows 11 Pro and I've never seen an ad. I don't remember turning anything off but I did upgrade from Windows 10, so maybe that had something to do with it, unless it's just that Pro doesn't contain ads. I also don't use it with a microsoft account and don't have any "services" from them, so maybe that helps.
I'm curious about this, as a Windows 11 pro user, myself. Do you already have a Microsoft account, use OneDrive, and pay for Office 365?
I have a microsoft account but I use a local account for Windows 11. I always had MSDN and had a pro key so maybe its an enterprise thing. It is a legit copy. I don't use onedrive or 365. When I go to Accounts it has a blue button to Sign In, so maybe local accounts don't get ads.
Really? My Win 11 install (sparsely used nowadays) is nag city. Set up OneDrive, activate cloud backups, sign into your Microsoft account, oops Xbox Game Bar popped up because I pressed some key combination, reboot (a few times) to finish updates, set up copilot, error installing update, reboot before installing update, etc.
Some other ones to add on from my fresh install: Start menu search will search the Microsoft Store for apps they want you to install, some key combinations will launch copilot and if it's not setup it will take you to a webpage that will help you set it up, every office application has a cheap looking unhideable jeweled title bar button to "Upgrade your plan".
Solutions in order of the problems listed: https://superuser.com/questions/1927207/how-to-remove-the-st..., https://github.com/midrare/hyperenable, and my favorite: downgrade to a previous version of office which is almost certainly unsafe and has active exploits (16.0.19929.20106). But I hate that button THAT much and my wife refuses to move off of Onenote for our family knowledge management. I am close to just using Onenote in a browser (where I can zap the offending element) but the loading pages on demand is annoying.
Same story here. I have much more frustrating experience with my MacOS laptop.
Haters gonns hate I suppose
If you use windows, I am sorry but you deserve it