It seems like at least once a week these days Microsoft has come up with a new way to infuriate me. Here are a few from the past month:
Windows 11 “Upgrade” splash screens: No matter how many times I have told them to go fuck themselves, I am sticking with Windows 10, they seem to want to make me install Windows 11. I powered up my computer recently to a full-screen image saying “Let’s install Windows 11!” with a sneakily hard to find “Kindly fuck off” bypass. Windows 11 makes using my computer worse, not better, so I’ll just stick with Windows 10 (and pay for the updates) until Windows 12 comes around.
Decommissioning of Skype and moving to Teams: I use Teams for my work, using multiple accounts (I’m a consultant, so I have accounts at multiple customers). Teams works OK for that. But the account that I used for Skype gets kicked right in the dick when I try to use Teams. It never notifies me of new messages. Calls attempted with me go unanswered because they don’t come up either. I got Skype for my aging parents so they could communicate with me and my brother (and kids) and it was pretty easy to use. With Teams,nothing works right.
Layoffs: I’m a consultant focusing on Microsoft SQL Server, and this year Microsoft has laid off dozens of incredibly talented and dedicated people in that area, along with about 9,000 other people. For cost savings I guess, because their zillion dollars in profits were not enough. They times it so that some of these folks wouldn’t get their bonuses and someone I know missed out on stock options that would have helped soften the blow, and MS refused to allow her to excercise them. (She’s not an executive, just a regular employee who had some available stock options). The cherries on top are that after laying all these people off, they posted request for a bunch of H-1B visas so they could get cheaper overseas labor to do many of the jobs they just RIFed, and that somehow one of the most toxic people I know managed to survive not one but two rounds of layoffs at MS this year.
CoPilot: Let’s force CoPilot into every single tool you use! Don’t try to get away from it, you can’t! “AI that with CoPilot!!!” go shove it up your ass.
If you do end up upgrading to Windows 11 you discover all new horizons of fuckery with pop-ups trying to get you to install new apps, broken functionality like stable Bluetooth, and my favorite, a taskbar that can no longer be moved to the side of the screen and that stubbornly refuses to hide itself or often pops up annoyingly for no reason whatsoever.
A Windows 11 update earlier this year disabled my audio interface that I use in my home studio.
Fortunately I keep fairly regular restore snapshots so I was able to back it out…
… which may well be worse than Windows 11. It’s hard to predict. On one hand, Microsoft OS releases seem to follow a pattern of “terrible” followed by “much improved”. Windows 95/98: eventually fairly stable, considering that it was basically sitting on top of DOS, like an elephant balancing on a bowling ball. Windows ME: an utter piece of garbage. Windows XP: best OS Microsoft ever released. Windows Vista: bloated garbage. Windows 7: fixed most of the problems with Vista. And so on.
On the other hand, however, against this pattern of alternating good/bad, there’s been a general tendency for OS releases to gradually get worse and more bloated and infested with unwanted “features” that benefit only Microsoft. So Windows 12 may fix some of the W11 annoyances, but will undoubtedly introduce many new ones.
Sadly, one of my work laptops was required to have Windows 11 on it, so I have experienced some of this. I’ve got it mostly working the way I want but it’s about 50/50 whether I find the cut/copy/paste icons on the first try of right-click or cuss out loud wondering where the fuckin’ words are. My taskbar is at the bottom of my 4K 43" monitor so there is plenty of real estate. I am glad you’re allowed to align it to the left instead of leaving it in the center. What the actual fuck was behind that decision. “Let’s have the start button move based on how many windows you have open” THREE KICKS TO THE DICK FOR YOU.
You do realize, I hope, that 12 will be even worse.
Isn’t it a requirement for an H-1B visa that the company demonstrate that they weren’t able to get any domestic workers qualified for the job? I mean, granted, that’s usually a rubber-stamp, but I feel like Microsquish might have just shot themselves in the unspecified anatomy with this move.
As mentioned above, Windows releases tend to be like Star TRek movies, every 2nd one is complete crap. Windows 11 is the “second” one, so Windows 12 should be better. It will still do shit I hate, like never allow you to completely remove OneDrive, but it should be more usable than 11.
Just to piss you (and me) off. I actually have multiple applications with top and bottom icon bars so I like to put it over to the side of the screen where I can fast cursor over, and to have it autohide so that it doesn’t eat up useful real estate but no more on Windows, I guess. For all the gripes I have about MacOS and unnecessary UI changes (and my perennial if empty rants about going back to a FreeBSD/Gnome desktop), at least Apple generally doesn’t remove functionality, and you can still navigate almost exclusively from the keyboard if you so desire. That is becoming increasingly problematic in Windows.
Maybe it was the same patch which disabled my video card controls, so now I’m stuck with a slightly darkened screen whose brightness/gamma cannot be adjusted.
Which is so weird, I haven’t run into any of these bugs in W11. The only gripe I have with it is that they got rid of the ability to pin a folder to the taskbar, and set it up as a popup menu.
Other than that, it has run faster and been more stable than 10 was. I’ve also been supporting the deployment at work to upgrade 10 to 11 and it has gone very well so far. It even fixed some of the nagging network driver issues we had with some Dell desktop machines.
My experience has been quite the opposite; almost constant problems with Bluetooth connectivity (having to repeatedly delete and reauthorize basic perhipherals like keyboard and trackball), problems with the operating system recognizing displays and using the correct resolution (repeatedly switching to non-interlaced video over HDMI), and a lot of reboots although the last might be as much due to our corporate malware as as the operating system.
Apple completely sabotaged iTunes into something that’s almost useless because they want people to do things wirelessly via iCloud.
I used to be able to preload apps and everything for iPhones and iPads. Which is great because at a large organization we can’t use AppleID to use iCloud. That’s giving a level of control to Apple that violates state law. Instead we try to deploy via MDM in this slow, clunky, unreliable way.
Apple absolutely removes functionality with upgrades. All tech vendors do that. I stopped being mad years ago because that’s like being pissed off at rainstorms. It’s just nature and you have to deal with it.
I’ve had that problem with Windows 10 for years. I literally fixed that problem for someone on Tuesday this week. (We only have W11 rolled out to select testers right now so 99% of who I’m supporting are still W10.) That’s a Windows thing, not a Windows 11 thing.
But yes, I’m very familiar with those issues and they do suck.
I’ve never used iTunes except to uoload my own ripped audio files and gave up using that many years ago. I haven’t generally had problems with lost functionality (although I have gotten frustrated at ‘unnecessary’ UI changes that moved access to features) but except for core applications and the SDK I use very little of Apple’s provided software for anything I do.
Windows 11 does some cool stuff with windows on my ultra-wide monitor. I bought the fucking thing for work from home but since my work laptop is running Windows 10 it won’t recognize it. The client lets you create custom layouts with designated apps and if you scroll to the top you can choose from a number of pre-created ones.
I’m not really defending Windows 11. I just think that’s a cool feature.
The Windows 11 menu/taskbar is garbage.
I guess I do get more notifications, and then when I click on them nothing happens.
I don’t like the Start Menu. I think it’s a huge step back from 10. I’ve come to live with it, but I miss the functionality and customizability in 10.
It’s not a problem or anything, just not as good IMHO.
(I know there are third party tools to try to restore it, but it’s not enough of a big deal to put my entire OS GUI in the hands of some other company that might stop being supported at some point; plus the ones I tried were a big hassle and had bugs. Just not worth it.)