With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.
Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.
They seem to be alienating a lot of their users right now in a lot of different products. There's a significant surge in open source software right now and Linux and all the people that are coming over are a bit more than usual. Their customer base seems tired of the game.
The criticism was directed at the company's product, not the employees...
The response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.
Maybe. But interpreting it thus requires too much charitableness for it not to have been uncharitable, whether intentionally or otherwise.
And yet they still work for a company that has shown it isn’t overly concerned about quality or reliability in its products.
Thaaat's capitalism
This is not about individual employees. It’s in the nature of being an employee to be beholden to what’s incentivized by their company’s management and structure.
Not op, and I generally agree with your assumption but not for Microsoft, as I don't think it's limited to Windows:
Teams, Office (especially online), One Drive, SharePoint, Azure, GitHub, LinkedIn, all became very shitty and partially unusable with increasing number of weird bugs or problems lately.
The problems with Windows today have nothing to do with bugs but with the strategic vision of Nadella.
This is also still small/unimportant enough not to be poisoned by their broken corporate culture.
This isn't supposed to replace Windows, and it isn't a GUI desktop operating system at all. I doubt anyone working on this has anything to do with the modern Windows desktop UX.
> This isn't supposed to replace Windows,
OP wasn't suggesting it was, just that the lack of quality in one significant area of the company's output leads to a lack of confidence in other products that they release.
but if the host OS is already comprised, what is the point of sandbox inside of it?
Maybe we need secure attestation for sandbox to be protected against compromised host :)
It does sound hard, and might need to employ homomorphic encryption with hw help for any memory access after code has been also verifiably unaltered through (uncompromised) hw attestation.
UI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users.
You can get something similar yourself at home running all the debloat tools out there but since they're not officially supported, either you'll break future windows updates, or the future windows updates will break your setup, so it's not worth it.
Something similar, or indeed, exactly the same:
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/leak...
Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.
Maybe, could also be that for a 9 figure government contract they'll provide a custom LTSC branch just for you with only the features you want.
Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.
So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11.
I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.
If anything, Microsoft has a lot of problems because they support a wide variety of crappy hardware and allow just about anyone to write kernel level sw (drivers). Not sure if this changed, but they used to run in the ring0 even.
This was most evident back in the 90s when they shipped NT4: extremely stable as opposed to Win95 which introduced the infamous BSOD. But it supported everything, and NT4 had HW support on par with Linux (i.e. almost nothing from the cheap vendors).
>Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.
Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD.
>but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11
They're not artificial. POPCNT / SSE4.2 became a hard requirement starting with Windows 11 24H2 (2024) (but that's for older CPUs), and only intel 8th gen and up have well functioning support for Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), HVCI (Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity), and MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control). That's besides the TPM 2.0 which isn't actually a hard requirement or feature used by everyone, the other ones are way more important.
So at which point do we consider HW-based security a necessity instead of an artificial limit? With the ever increase in vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you gotta rip the bandaid at some point.
Windows 11 is running on my ThinkPad T530. Its CPU is very nearly 14 years old.
What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?
>Windows 11 is running on my ThinkPad T530. Its CPU is very nearly 14 years old.
Yes, you can bypass HW checks to install it on a pentium 4 if you want, nothing new here.
>What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?
All the security features I listed in the comment above.
So, if I'm hearing this right:
This computer had the security features that you listed while it was running Windows 10, and now that it is running Windows 11 it is lacking them?
(I'm not trying to be snarky. That's simply an astonishing concept to me.)
It hadn’t. Windows 11 has them, due to support for new hardware mitigation features. What is it you don’t understand in particular?
There's a lot here that is hard to understand:
> > What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?
> All the security features I listed in the comment above.
I geniunely wonder if Windows G's start menu also use React and if the start menu, right click or Windows Search still sucks in Windows G or not :)
React Native, halfway between Web and native.
Microsoft should just open source Windows at this point.
Never heard of Windows G .. that sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads :-)
I've been starting with Tiny11 and then running the debloat scripts against it. Reduces the memory footprint to about 2GB and have found zero compatibility problems with doing this. You just have to use curl or something to download a browser because you won't even have Edge.
> Windows G .. sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads
I'm running 11 IoT Ent LTSC on a some T420; it runs pretty okay.
> Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
In their intended applications, which might or might not be the ones you need.
The slowness of the filesystem that necessitated a whole custom caching layer in Git for Windows, or the slowness of process creation that necessitated adding “picoprocesses” to the kernel so that WSL1 would perform acceptably and still wasn’t enough for it to survive, those are entirely due to the kernel’s archtecture.
It’s not necessarily a huge deal that NT makes a bad substrate for Unix, even if POSIX support has been in the product requirements since before Win32 was conceived. I agree with the MSR paper[1] on fork(), for instance. But for a Unix-head, the “good” in your statement comes with important caveats. The filesystem is in particular so slow that Windows users will unironically claim that Ripgrep is slow and build their own NTFS parsers to sell as the fix[2].
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/785430/
[2] https://nitter.net/CharlieMQV/status/1972647630653227054
The Windows filesystem isn't slow per se, it's a slowness caused by "a thousand cuts" type of problem.
https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
This is not due to slowness of the file system. Native ntfs tools are much faster than Unix ones in some situations. The issue is that running Unix software on windows will naturally have a performance impact. You see the same thing in reverse using Wine on Linux. Windows uses a different design for IO so requires software to be written with that design in mind.
> Native ntfs tools are much faster than Unix ones in some situations. The issue is that running Unix software on windows will naturally have a performance impact. You see the same thing in reverse using Wine on Linux.
Not true. There are increasingly more cases where Windows software, written with Windows in mind and only tested on Windows, performs better atop Wine.
Sure, there are interface incompatibilities that naturally create performance penalties, but a lot of stuff maps 1:1, and Windows was historically designed to support multiple user-space ABIs; Win32 calls are broken down into native kernel calls by kernel32, advapi32, etc., for example, similar to how libc works on Unix-like operating systems.
It's pretty typical these days for software, particularly games of the DX9-11 eras to perform better on Wine/Proton then they do under native Windows on the same hardware.
[flagged]
The file system isn't slow. The slowness will be present in any file system due to the file system filters that all file system calls pass though.
Right, by “file system” here I mean all of the layers between the application talking in terms of named files and whatever first starts talking in terms of block addresses.
Also, as far as my (very limited) understanding goes, there are more architectural performance problems than just filters (and, to me, filters don’t necessarily sound like performance bankruptcy, provided the filter in question isn’t mandatory, un-removable Microsoft Defender). I seem to remember that path parsing is accomplished in NT by each handler chopping off the initial portion that it understands and passing the remaining suffix to the next one as an uninterpreted string (cf. COM monikers), unlike Unix where the slash-separated list is baked into the architecture, and the former design makes it much harder to have (what Unix calls) a “dentry cache” that would allow the kernel to look up meanings of popular names without going through the filesystem(s).
NTFS will perform directory B+-tree lookups (this is where it walks the path) until it finds the requested file. The Cache Manager caches these B+-trees.
From there, it hits the MFT, finds the specific record for the file, loads the MFT record, and ultimately returns the FILE_OBJECT to the I/O Manager and it bubbles up the chain back to (presumably) Win32. The MFT is just a linear array of records, which include file and directories (directory records are just a record with directory = true, essentially).
Obviously simplified. Windows Internals will be your friend, if you want to know more.
This is on the mark.
But there's another issue which is what cripples windows for dev! NTFS has a terrible design flaw which is the fact that small files, under 640 bytes, are stored in the MFT. The MFT ends up having serious lock contention so lots of small file changes are slow. This screws up anything Unixy and git horribly.
WSL1 was built on top of that problem which was one of the many reasons it was slow as molasses.
Also why ReFS and "dev drive" exist...
> TFS has a terrible design flaw which is the fact that small files, under 640 bytes, are stored in the MFT.
Ext4 also stores small (~150B) files inside the inode[1], and so do a number of other filesystems[2]? NTFS was unusually early to the party, but if you’re right that it’s problematic there then something else must also be wrong (perhaps with the locking?) to make it so.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/ext4/inli...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#All..., the “Inline data” column.
NTFS, not so great.
NTFS is just fine. Stable, reliable, fast, plenty of features for a general purpose file system.
Even with Defender etc off, it is not fun. Lots of small file IO brings it on its knees. Some wants to blame the Windows I/O system, I don't know, but what I do know is that when people choose NTFS it is because they haven't an alternative. Nobody chooses it based on its quality attributes. I dare to say there is no NTFS system that is faster than an EXT4 system.
If even MS internal teams rather want to avoid it, it seems like it isn't a great offering. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41085376#41086062
NTFS on Linux should be near-par with ext4 on Linux.
Remember, I said the _file system_ was just fine. It's that extensible architecture above all file systems on NT that causes grief.
The only method to 'turn off' Defender is to use DevDrive, which enforces ReFS, and even then you only get async Defender, it's not possible to completely disable.
...But no way can you wrap it into something that looks posix-y from the inside
Why would you want to?
From the article, first use case:
> Example use cases include:
> * Running unmodified Linux programs on Windows
> * ...
That won't work if the unplugged Linux program assumes that mv replaces a file atomically; ntfs can't offer that.
NTFS uses atomic transactions, that's the only way it has the ability to recover after a fault.
You can read more if you wish in 'Inside the Windows NT File System' by Helen Custer, page 15.
Windows is ultimately a lot more complex, and not open source. This also builds on the Linux ecosystem, so even if it comes from Microsoft, I imagine engineering culture is different from that on Windows and especially their online platforms (that's even worse than Windows if you ask me!).
Microsoft US a massive corporation with so many people, business units, departments.
A comment like yours is just like saying: "I know a buggy open-source software, why would I trust that other open-source project? The open-source community burned all possible goodwill".
Except that a company, no matter how heterogenous, has an overarching organization, whereas the open-source community doesn't.
There is no CEO of open source, there are no open-source shareholders, there are no open-source quarterly earnings reports, there are no open-source P&G policies (with or without stack ranking), and so on.
I'm not defending MS in any capacity, but this library is open for viewing if you were so inclined.
MSR is a somewhat independent org; you should be making predictions based on other MSR projects
Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy. Maybe it works, but yeah you'll probably get screwed over at some point.
Still, the fact that it's open source is a good thing. People can now take that code and make something better (ripping out the AI for example) or just use bits and pieces for their own totally unrelated projects. I can't see that as anything but a win. I have no problem giving shitty companies credit where its due and they've done a good thing here.