At work I am made to use Windows 11 and I hate it immensely. Everything's so slow. Nothing operates properly. In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell, it also reboots after some time on sleep, for no reason whatsoever. Copilot is everywhere and cannot be truly disabled without admin rights. While not strictly a Windows issue, Outlook is an incredible piece of garbage. It doesn't know if it's running and so can be launched more than once; the icon for new messages doesn't show when it should; search is still as broken as ever; the ribbon, which makes little sense in other Office apps, is absurd in Outlook; folders are useless and confusing; etc.
At home, while I have a Mac Mini 4, a MacBook Air, and several Linux boxes, I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine. Is it insecure? Probably. But today "insecure" feels more like a feature than a limitation. No forced updates of anything => everything that works, keeps working indefinitely.
> I still use an old PC on Win7 as my primary machine
So do I. I've had to deal with 10 and 11 at work and had the same sort of problems, so I've refused to "downgrade" this PC.
It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
I found several ways online to supposedly stop it from doing that, but nothing ever worked.
Although 7's UI is much better than the flat nonsense we get these days, I don't find the UI to be the biggest problem. If using Windows 11, I'd want to replace the underlying OS, not keep it and replace just the UI. So while this project looks interesting, to me it's not fixing the real problem.
> It particularly used to really piss me off that when I was partway through working on something and had several applications open, with data loaded, that if I tried to leave it like that overnight so I'd be able to continue immediately the next morning, chances are Windows would decide to update and reboot, closing everything.
Whenever I use a recent(ish) Windows (rarely :-), it's annoyances like this that make for a poor UX. Again & again.
When you put a computer to sleep/hibernate, you expect it to come out of sleep in a similar state as before. When you select "shut down", you expect that. Not "installing update 1..20, then shut down".
It keeps amazing me that within Microsoft, after having done so many OSes used by millions, some eggheads think that breaking user expectations is a good design decision. It is not.
And even then “Shut down” didn’t actually shut down when there were updates. It was “install updates and reboot”
Just thinking more about how we're told it's "insecure". It's unfortunate that so many tech people are so gullible when it comes to the industry's marketing around this.
Many of us know a huge proportion of news stories come from PR firms that just want to sell us something (it comes up on HN every now and then). In the mid-2000s or so, Microsoft had a particular problem selling Office - there was no reason to upgrade to the current version, because the older one already did everything you wanted. Until that time, established practice was to buy new software only if you wanted its new features; the vendor had to give you a good reason to pay for it. To some of us, the PR that immediately followed the stories of struggles to sell their newer versions - PR that suddenly exploded everywhere - was obvious and transparent. "You must upgrade because old software is insecure!" But it grew into the monster we have today. Some people literally panic if they discover an older piece of software.
Think of young people growing up with that being blasted at them constantly. It must have contributed to the has-to-be-new-and-shiny mindset of Javascript developers, where they're terrified to touch anything that hasn't been updated for a few months.
That long, sustained, and paradigm-shifting PR campaign has been a huge win for many software vendors, and for Microsoft in particular. (Of course, after that, and after a few failed attempts, they managed to get the subscription-based model to work for Office, which in that particular case, bypasses the mess left by their earlier selling strategy anyway.)
But... Old software is often going to be insecure on the network. Are you arguing that an OS from 2013 with a browser from the same time is fine on the Web?
Who's using a browser from 2013? When I said I'm running Windows 7, I'm specifically talking about the OS, including an awful lot of updates it's had since 2013, not all software I run on it. Updates added such things as support for the later versions of TLS, several years ago. Although Google and Mozilla have dropped official W7 support from Chrome and Firefox, there are forks that add it back, which is why I'm running up-to-date browsers.
If we were talking about even older browsers though... 20 years ago, because of the insecure way browsers generally worked, everybody used third-party antivirus or e.g. Norton Internet Security, which seemed to cause as many problems as it solved. But browsers (and OSes) haven't been so open for years - we don't have quite that class of problems anymore, where just visiting a site was enough to get the browser to download and run all sorts of nasties. I don't remember quite when it was that we'd left the most dangerous period behind, when the security of browsers and OSes had been considerably hardened, but it was before 2013. Windows 7 was, and is, much safer on the network than XP, by design.
Fair. As long as people are careful about what they're executing on the OS and it isn't arbitrarily exposed to the network it is less of a problem. My comment about browsers was due to me thinking that a lot of software stops building for old OS targets. I guess W7 is still getting modern support from vendors.
FWIW I'm running CachyOS and for the first time in my life have moved 95% away from Windows (still maintain a partition that I use every few weeks for a game that can't run on Proton). KDE 6.6 is a delight to use and everything "just works" for me, I don't have to worry about ungodly telemetry, and software fixes come in quickly.
I work with Windows 11 and don't see any major issue whatsoever. But note that 16GB RAM is "just" enough to run it smoothly. 32GB is better for serious (e.g development) work. I have run it even on Intel 4200U/4200M CPUs fine (CPU is from year 2014). I agree that new Outlook is buggy and not fully functional - that's why I still use old native MS Outlook.
It's possible half of my problems are because I don't have admin rights, and the other half is because the machine is too weak.
Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway? I used to produce documents on an Amstrad PPC640. 640 stood for 640k of RAM (no hard disk). It was fine.
I understand the above makes me sound like an old fart (or fool), and we have moved on from DOS. But what does Windows 11 do that Windows 7 couldn't?
I honestly think this is a difficult and fascinating question. This is like the dark energy of software cosmology. Why is the natural state to get larger and more complex for un-proportionate pleasure of use?
Largely, I think, because devs are given too powerful computers. It's easier for companies to "fix" or preemptively had off performance bugs by giving developers high-end computers than to spend extra development time truly fixing them.
Because they’re a bunch of perverts and want to know every button you clicked.
> Why do modern OSes need so much power and RAM anyway?
Because code writers are lazy and prefer to use 20 levels of abstraction or a 5MB library for a simple function.
Windows 11 can run many more different UI toolkits, all jumbled together. It has more graphical effects in there. It has so much telemetry and Microsoft Defender will never-ever give up and will inspect everything, all the time.
My main issue with Windows 11 (and where I use it I do see quite a lot of issues) is that apparently it won't run on my personal PC at home - and no way am I going to buy a new PC just to run Windows 11. So installed Linux Mint and I'm perfectly happy!
> In addition to forced reboots which are annoying as hell
Not to defend Microslop here, but your workplace should disable this via Group Policies. Sounds a like badly or unmanaged work environment.
Obviously you shouldn't have to pay your works to constantly fight against and disable microslop's bullshit all the time, just so your other employees can actually get work done.
How large is the company you work at? I'm guessing large. What is the general sentiment across layers in the company? My guess is everybody hates it (all layers)?
It's a client of mine; the IT department is extremely small (fewer than 5) but the company has maybe 500 employees total? Since I work there, I've not heard anyone complain specifically about their computer or the Windows version. Most people don't care / don't know better, they just use what they're given.
I daily drive Windows 11 (with WSL) and with some tweaks it feels okay: the O&O ShutUp10++ utility (or any number of similar ones, as long as you trust them), some group policy, maybe Everything if you want fast search, LibreOffice instead of MS office and just some Settings changes. It sucks if you don't have the permissions to change that stuff and are stuck with the bad defaults.
In some ways it's a bit like having to customize a Mac to feel comfy (AutoRaise, Rectangle, DiscreteScroll, ...), except in Apple's case it's because they believe that they know better what my computing experience should be like, and in Microsoft's, it's some enshittification and pushing me towards features that I don't really want or need.
At the same time, games work (even the shitty rootkit anti-cheat), lovely software is all there like Notepad++, MobaXTerm, SourceTree (though GitKraken is really good if you want to pay for it), SteelSeries Sonar (the only experience of managing audio devices that wasn't unnecessarily messy or complex, tbh even VoiceMeeter has weird UI/UX), oh and FreeFileSync and ofc all of my dev tools and other software. It's just passable in most categories.
I still believe that something like Linux Mint would give me the best desktop computing experience, cause it almost never is actively hostile to me as a user - all of the instances of it sucking and being broken are either growing pains, ecosystem fragmentation, insufficient development effort (given that there isn't a multi-billion dollar org behind it, or at least not really the DEs or most userland software, or that the drivers don't always get as much love from vendors), or circumstances outside of their control (e.g. the anti-cheat situation with games), rather than a conscious choice on the part of the developers.
> insufficient development effort
I've used Win/Mac both very extensively as daily drivers, but since 2021 using exclusively Ubuntu LTS. In practice I don´t notice any lesser quality, or drivers not being good. I basically have no complaints. I'd say my Ubuntu 22 LTS is a lot less buggy than the megacorp stuff I used to use.
Outlook should be illegal. My biggest pet peeve is that its search doesn't work properly and it misses showing emails. I cannot count how many times I had relative crying calling me that someone is deleting her emails. The emails were there, just incredibly hard to find. Oh and the "Focused" mode that has zero sense.
I don't know how businesses operate using this garbage.
I once got abuse from an Income Tax official for claiming that an email with the details they requested had been sent to them, as the official opened Outlook and searched for it in front of me and couldn't find it! Had to convince the guy to try multiple different keywords before it luckily emerged in the search results.
Just to offer a counter point - I'm at Windows 11 Enterprise at work(as a game developer) and it just works. We don't have any copilot stuff because it has been disabled by corporate policy. I don't see any ads. The system is mega stable, for search I just use Everything, I don't have any issues with Explorer really, other than the stupid change of copy/paste into icons, which I've undone with one powershell command. I think as a C++ dev it's a great environment to work in.
That basically means resetting the annoyance back to win7 level. And yeah, it’s a great OS if you can do that. Just like linux is great if your hardware is supported or macOS was great before catalina.