This. Once you get in the mindset that you know better than the user, it's not a big jump to "I know these directories should be empty, any content is leftover garbage, let's remove them".
Absolutely this, with a followup of "and if you're 'helpfully' deleting an unused folder, check that it's unused first!"
Given that this was (stupid) desired behavior, making sure Documents didn't have stuff in it should have been a screamingly obvious step. It would still have been utterly unacceptable, it could still have created weird downstream bugs when users installed things that target the now-missing default Documents location, but at least it wouldn't have set a bunch of data on fire without any warning.
But then, I guess relying on common sense after the first terrible decision is made is never going to work. There's a reason "never break user space" is rule 1 for Linux updates...
What I paid for is a HAL, some drivers, a filesystem, a handful of media codec licenses, and some basic applications to manage all that. What I got was a bunch of "apps" like "Photos" that routinely try to use up all my available system RAM, a start menu that connects to the internet, displays ads, and routinely lags on a high-end workstation, a file index service that was broken for 3 major update cycles, and an ever increasing number of "privacy toggles" in the completely dysfunctional control panel^W^W settings app.
Microsoft clearly doesn't care about "developers, developers, developers" anymore, because I have never lost this much productivity to an operating system in my life. (I say this as someone who has used Linux long enough to remember how bad WiFi was in the era of ndiswrapper; as well as someone who has used Windows Me and Vista for significant stretches of time.)
Actually, I should probably use the term SaaSS, because that describes the kind of software I hate with passion more precisely. I recently stumbled upon this[0] essay by RMS, and like usual, it turns out he had this thing figured out years before I've even noticed we had a problem. If Windows wants to become a service substitute for an OS, I'll save myself future trouble and migrate away completely.
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[0] - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
Azure's APIs are really nice! Microsoft cares about people developing against Azure. Those developers make them money.
And they've invested a lot of effort into allowing you to develop against those APIs on macOS or Linux.
What Microsoft doesn't care about, is people trying to use Windows to do development (outside of an enterprise use-case, where everyone is using the LTS version of Windows anyway.)
I feel like, increasingly, Microsoft sees Windows the way Apple sees iOS: something you develop for (to target the consumers that use it), not something you develop on.
Imagine a Microsoft that didn't have a Windows product, just their cloud products (Azure, Office 365, Xbox Live, etc.) Would that Microsoft build an OS? Or would they just tell you to use macOS/Linux to interact with their software ecosystem?
I feel like the answer to that question tells you a lot about Microsoft's priorities.
The problem with Windows was never that it didn't have enough features, it was that it wasn't reliable enough. So instead of making it more reliable, they've doubled down on the features.
Well, this is the kind of thing that happens when your whole team is interns and the "senior" is 28.
Reading the associated bugs on github I also learned that there were lots of complaints about the new console, not on features, but breaking compatibility that is. Guess no one thought to start a new project, rather than changing a 30 year-old one that hadn't been touched in 20.
TL;DR: At least one codger is needed on teams doing this kind of work to give perspective.
To be fair, that's what led to Powershell and Command Prompt co-existing. I guess Microsoft wanted to reduce the number of console backends.
Seems like common sense, but Microsoft has been doing this for a while. In Windows 7 (not sure about later releases) the OS runs a 'Desktop Cleanup' periodically that deletes shortcuts to network locations it can no longer connect to. God forbid your network drives don't map one day and Windows decides to nuke all your desktop shortcuts... this actually happened to a user I was doing support for and they were understandably livid
Windows is going into the Apple direction I guess.
That's not "harsh", harsh is what happened to the unlucky users who lost data because no one on the development team bothered to call it out. It should be an implicitly understood rule that you NEVER remove a file you did not create, unless the user explicitly asked to, but I guess MS considers it acceptable to do anything to a user's system after they convinced everyone to take forced updates as being acceptable too.