I gotta agree. The last MS operating system I didn’t absolutely hate using.
I remember back when I assumed every upgrade - on anything, not just Microsoft - meant an automatic improvement.
Ah, was I ever that young?
mmm
Windows 2000 (in general) was a very good OS that was the precursor to Windows XP. It was, in fact, intended to be both a business and consumer OS, and finally end the Windows 9x DOS-anchored line, but it didn’t have enough consumer features to be a practical replacement so ended up being just another version of Windows NT for business.
But I don’t know how anyone could have a problem with Windows XP, which incorporated the Windows NT kernel for rock-solid stability along with all the features consumers wanted.
Yeah, I’m aware of how it came to be. I didn’t like the look (ugh, just atrocious. Start menu, you are dead to me) or want the “features” such as thumbnails, MSN Explorer, etc. It was basically a bunch of ugly interface changes and items that I generally wanted to turn off stuck on top of Win 2000. Fortunately, I only used Win 2000 to play games, so it was easy let go when it became time to ditch that box.
Well, Microsoft changes the appearance of new OS releases for the same superficial reason that car makers do. Windows XP took on a somewhat cartoonish look just to be different. I wouldn’t call it “atrocious”, but Windows 7 had a much cleaner, professional look. The “Aero” theme, while functionally useless, is quite pretty.
I’m trying to remember how long ago this was.
I remember very early in my career when Windows 98 Second Edition came out, and it introduced a bug that caused computers to freeze on shutdown. I had to have the talk with customers about how upgrading a computer always came with pros and cons. (That was when I came up with my analogy of a car vs a bike; a car can take you further and faster, but a bike is simpler to repair and maintain.)
That reminds me that another very major feature introduced to consumers for the first time by Windows XP was the robust and forward-looking NTFS file system, which came out of the same Windows NT team headed by Dave Cutler that had developed the core OS. I was reminded of this because Windows 9x could only use FAT32, and some releases had a bug where periodically, for no particular reason, the OS would just decide that you had zero free space on the disk. You had to run Checkdisk to resolve it.
Yes, that does bring back memories.
The other big limitations were that FAT32 could only handle files up to 4 GB in size (which back then wasn’t a big deal), and Microsoft implemented an artificial limit of 32 GB for an entire partition it would recognize (which was certainly a problem later for W98 computers as drives larger than 30GB were available).
Cannot really defend Microsoft Windows and I try to avoid it, but there are some mods available (Winaero Tweaker, Open Shell, RetroBar, etc.) to change the UI a bit that many people do not bother messing with.
This one in particular was a buggy mess when I tried it with Windows 11.
I migrated my last Windows machine to Linux about 6 months ago and I haven’t looked back - this isn’t an option for everyone (for example if you are also locked into the Adobe Creative Suite, there is no sensible and completely stable way to try to run that on Linux), but fortunately everything I needed, did have either an actual Linux version, or a fully-featured alternative.
This migration comes after an entire working life using Windows and supporting a Windows-based IT environment - I have been using Windows for as long as there has been a product named ‘Windows’, but a few recent changes were really just too much for me; those were:
- Microsoft’s literally deceitful forced price-upsell on their 365 product (they sent out a notification saying essentially ‘sorry, price is going up - you know, inflation lol’, then ‘but look, you get these new AI features now!’ - it actually turned out the original, non-Copilot tier of 365 is still available at the same price as before, but they did a switcheroo on the product naming and upgraded everyone to a higher tier without asking them).
- The increasing sense that Windows was using me, rather than me using Windows - the OS just became a vehicle to deliver ads to me.
- The encroachment of unwanted and intrusive AI features that had no off-switch - that is, worse-than-clippit levels of interference - ‘hey, can I just interrupt your workflow to suggest a shit way of doing the thing you are already doing just fine?’
I’d been using Linux alongside Windows for various things for a long time, so it probably always made sense to just jump over to it. Linux Mint doesn’t win me any credibility with the crowd that use Linux solely to flex about their technical chops, because it’s incredibly simple and user-friendly - too easy for 1337 h4x0rz, but that’s what I like about it - it just works.
If you’re not tied to some proprietary software that only works on Windows, and you are not constrained by workplace requirements to use Windows, consider giving Linux a try.
Interesting sidenote:, part of my migration process was to use various third party disk management tools that run under Windows and one of these booted into a thing called WinPE - which is a really slimmed-down version of Windows to which system builders can add in features so as to build a ‘necessary parts only’ environment. There’s also Windows IoT edition which is a similar concept, but you can’t use WinPE for extended periods and you can’t get Windows IoT if you are just a regular end user/consumer.
But Microsoft absolutely could provide a Windows desktop experience that has just the parts you need and none of the bloat and annoyance you don’t want - because that’s what those two products are. They just choose not to let you have the debloated and simplified choice.
Once I beat it into shape, I don’t mind Win11 too much. It’s kind of annoying in small ways, but so has every OS I’ve had. It’s definitely better than my phone’s.
I use Winaero Tweaker, StartAllBack and OneCommander. Those solve most of my issues.
I have Win11 on my work laptop and Win10 on my home PC. I can safely say that I’ve never used my work laptop and thought “Wow, this makes me want to put Win11 on my own PC” but there’s plenty of times I get the Win11 upgrade nag and go “Bleah” at the thought.
As mentioned, the start menu, task bar and right click menus are all direct downgrades. One Drive is absolute trash and the longer I can put off dealing with that, the better. The file search is remarkably poor on Win11. It’s not only slow, it’s also dumb and will, for example, show a file when I type in FI but then it disappears when I finish typing FILE. You already knew it was there! The heightened attempts to force everyone into a Microsoft Account linked OS so they can push more garbage on you (Win10 does this somewhat, Win11 takes it up several levels). The attempts to dumb settings down and hide everything behind “advanced” menus.
I can use it. I use it daily. I don’t like it though and it hasn’t grown on me over the last couple of years. It’s still markedly inferior to my daily Win10 experience. And not that Win10 is the best thing ever but it’s still better than 11.
I have no need of teams, so stop autoloading.
CoPilot should be an option you turn on and not the default that you have to jump through hoops to turn-off. Kill the Clippy
And add OneDrive to the list. There are a few reasons that I don’t want my info in the Cloud and this is harder to get rid of than New Clippy. On my desktop in named my root directory onedrive during the install and on my laptop I jumped through all of the hoops to deactivate it but it still insists on having onedrive cloud be my default selection for saving.
Microsquish: It is my computer so let me use it the way I want to - not how you think I should.
I recently got a Bluetooth trackball for my laptop (I hate trackpads), and I’m experiencing much the same problem: after a cold start it will work for a random period of time, then BT just stops — the adapter disappears from Device Manager and the BT toggle disappears from Settings. MS tells me to run the BT Troubleshooter, which says the computer doesn’t have an adapter. The intertubes tell me this is a common problem as of a few "up"grades back, but so far I haven’t found a solution. The search continues.
Most of my other issues — start menu 
, taskbar 
, search &c — I’ve managed to address with third party solutions (I’ve been using Open Shell for a decade or more and haven’t experienced the bugs @Atamasama sees, but that means little). I’ve also stopped OneDrive from syncing and disabled Copilot, which takes care of most of the annoying “suggestions.” So many of Win11’s shortcomings can be remediated; the aggravating thing is that they exist at all.
Right. Not that win 10 was that great. And 8 was of course a monumental F*-up.
I would happily stayed on 7 indefinitely, except that a few applications and drivers I really need eventually stopped working or being supported.
I might look into this one.
One other issue I have that I think is a Win11 issue is that sometimes when my computer goes to sleep, the ethernet isn’t working upon waking up. Sometimes a reset through Windows diagnostic work but other times I need to reboot. I don’t think it is a hardware issue because it never happens while my computer is awake.
Well, they can be remediated if you have administrative control of the computer. My Windows machine is a work computer which is locked down to within an inch of being unusable, and I can’t even select my own background or make it default to Num Lock on. I can’t fix a damned thing on it so I just have to live with the pain.
Stranger
That’s a power management setting. I don’t know why it’s happening now, but it’s not a W11 issue. XP even had that setting.