Had to reinstall Windows and could not disable Cortana or even skip some weired voice output during initial setup. Immediately removed Windows again and installed Ubuntu.
But I also had lots of fun when Code Red and Nimda came around - full perm file navigation on computers everywhere. Any Win2k box knocking on my firewall was telling me it was wide open for use.
Then it got a virus.
30 minutes after I finished installing windows.
> Windows leadership should be fired and replaced by people who are actually Windows users, not MacOS users.
As a longtime Mac user, Windows leadership decisions don’t make any sense to me either. I have precisely zero interest in making 11 my primary OS… XP, 7, or 10 wouldn’t have been ideal but if I had no choice but to work with Windows those would be greatly preferable to 11.
loss leader funda in action, prolly.
or, sort of: those who live together, stick together.
aka if you buy window pcs, you're likely to buy windows servers and vice versa.
In fiscal year 2026, Microsoft Corporation's revenue by segment (products & services) are as follows:
Dynamics Products And Cloud Services: $9.01 B
Enterprise and partner services: $8.26 B
Linked In Corporation: $19.82 B
Microsoft Three Six Five Commercial Products And Cloud Services: $102.00 B
Microsoft Three Six Five Consumer Products and Cloud Services: $9.18 B
Other Products And Services: $109.00 M
Search Advertising: $15.18 B
Server Products And Cloud Services: $129.43 B
Windows and Devices: $17.08 B
XBOX: $21.79 B
https://bullfincher.io/companies/microsoft-corporation/reven...
To be sure, as another Mac user, they make sense in that they want Apple's revenue and reputation. The problem is they categorically refuse to invest in their engineering staff to even remotely the degree Apple does, which is reflected in the "quality" of the products on offer.
Everyone wants to be Apple, and they're all convinced despite ongoing proof to the contrary, that they can do it for pennies on the dollar. It's genuinely kind of pathetic how desperate they are to be Apple.
Can they instead aim to be what Apple was? Being what Apple is or going where Apple is heading is rather gross.
That is what they did. They took windows 10 added the theme and taskbar/start from the triple failed 10x added arbitrary cpu cutoff and released as 11.
No, it's just made it worse for you. You aren't the customer though. Enterprises are customers, you're just a lowly user.
Hopefully one day someone at Microsoft will remember that customers are actually made out of users.
Whether that is to the benefit of smaller enterprises is a separate question, but it's clear that almost all of the effort going into windows is (and has been) aimed at the enterprise. Users be damned.
In the example linked you'll see that most of the document only matters to corporate users. There are only 6 bullet points under "User Experience" out of many pages, and several of those items are also only relevant to enterprise... Unless you count the search "improvements".
I'm not sure that anybody sane would count search. Approximately zero percent of users want terrible web search built into the damned start menu. Microsoft is like "Now you can tell the difference between a program on your computer and malware from the internet with the same name!" As if it were the first time anyone had thought of it. It's obvious that confusing the users into clicking things on bing.com was the entire goal to begin with. It's become hateware.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/whats-ne...
That's fine, but I do not want to tab into an app whose last windows I have purposely closed. I closed it so I have a cleaner slate of apps to work with. If chrome is closed, it should not show up until I open it again. Not just windows but also linux make much more sense in that regard.
Mac is the most culturally colonialist minded thing in my experience, its i18n support is terrible for smaller languages.
The "windows bonkers" model is strangely copied by most third party windowsin systems, as it makes sense, with having the recency based tab order, and being a global list. For us who work with more than a single software and often have to work between two different software, maybe an editor and a terminal... it is usually pretty handy.
About telemetry, and ads: It is also present in MacOS, but less invasive indeed. And about not showing something down my throat: the other day my iphone just told me in declarative, with a single accept button: now your system will be updated to ios27 (download of updates was enabled, with manual confirmation).
Also having to unlock every app after every brew update in the applications as they "have been downloaded from the internet"... it is not something i'd call refreshing and not working against me.
So damn true. I never got the point of the MacOS windows management approach. It's a joke.
* Switch between non-minimized application windows: "⌘ + Tab" (but not between windows of the same application!)
* Switch between open windows of the same application: "⌘ + `" <- Yes, that's backtick, a different physical key depending on the keyboard language layout, WTF! (but doesn't work for minimized windows of that application)
* Switch between open and minimized windows of the same application: "Ctrl + ArrowDown" and use arrow navigation.
And yes, there's Exposé button/gesture, which, again, doesn't show minimized windows and doesn't work with an arrow navigation.
I don't share this optimism, Apple has not been a hardware-first/computers company in a very long time and nowadays makes more bucks profiling your consumption habits to sell you "content" on their ever more "content-consumption" oriented devices.
This is a ridiculous statement given how many people complained about it at the time!
There seems to be a common cognitive bias where things in the past are considered good and things in the present bad. So a few years from now, a bunch of people would say "Windows 12 is so bad, the incredible thing is that Windows 11 was already near perfect", completely forgetting the sentiment at the time.
I feel like this is the point. Microsoft don't want to support a consumer desktop OS anymore, and are pushing people to other devices, where their profitable cloud services are also available.
MS wants you to pay for authentication, office, cloud services etc without having to do consumer support or anything like that. I reckon they see Apple as the perfect partner for this, someone with a desktop experience compatible with their cloud experience.
This is not a improvement for the users, it's a improvement for Microsoft shareholders, because many users may decide to pay for additional Microsoft services (additional revenue after paying for the operating system) and it allows Microsoft to monetize customer data (Microsoft learned this business strategy from Google).
" Home and Pro (since version 22H2) edition installation requires internet connection and Microsoft account login (only if for personal use on Pro) is mandatory unless manually bypassed to create a local user. However, Microsoft has since blocked one of the last remaining easy bypass methods that allowed local account creation during initial setup, complicating the bypass process further. All other editions are excluded from this requirement. "
It is true that it was a major scam by Microsoft against its users when they forced them to sign into an online Microsoft account during the Windows 11 installation. Especially the stubbornness and determination with which they patch all the loopholes in the installation process (just to make it impossible to install Windows without an online account) is remarkable.
But in all fairness:
* Microsoft practically stopped charging users for upgrades since Windows 10. Windows 10 could be installed for free from older Windows, and Windows 11 is again a free upgrade from Windows 10.
* How many macOS users actually press "Setup later" when setting up a new Mac and use macOS without an Apple account? I think there will be very few of them.
Honestly it's the same for me. Taskbar is a bit weird and start menu is a bit weird, but I was able to turn off unwanted features, so it's not bad right now.
I'm mostly Linux user and my Windows usage is more about gaming, but I did some programming with it as well.
I hope someone at big corp will be so bored one day that he'll just start releasing Win 10 updates after reverse engineering the mechanisms and we will get Win 10 support again.
The rule still alive and stands strong - every second Windows is just a crap. ME, Vista, 8 and now 11.
Like if you dig even slightly below the surface you get a dialog window straight from windows 95. Network settings for example, something I routinely have to deal with. It is absurd VPN companies make full-blown windows desktop software to tweak VPN settings on your PC because the default windows UI is so crap.
I doubt there's many people using them, so I can see why they don't bother to support alternative shells.
Everybody should have simply ignored them. Win 10 yes, whatever you're trying to pull with 11, no. What could MS have done about that? Threaten to end support and then relent when nobody takes the bait?