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.
- 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.
Incidentally, neither a rigorous quality control process, nor a team of experienced engineers is particularly cheap.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Sort of matching the decline of Intel too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
then you already have a license.
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
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Microsoft is a joke; all of the formerly glorious tech companies are.
I use a 15 year old computer and I assure you creating a folder has no lag at all.
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).
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.
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.