I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
Well I turned off MCC and gave up.
I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work.
Office on the web is a horror show this way.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
Whoa! Now hang on a minute. That's not fair. They've only been developing software for 51 years! It takes time to get good at these things, you know?
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
I was able to take a 25 year break from Microsoft, from 2000 to 2025. Yet I was drawn back in because my son wanted to play Minecraft. This was the worst account process of any system ever invented, as far as I can tell. Plus in 2025 I had some interesting clients that are large corporations that use Microsoft as their core IT practice. The escape to the relative simplicity and consistency of AWS interfaces, from MS land, was the best part of the IT experience with that client. (With how much I've moaned and complained about AWS over the years, that last sentence is the most damning thing I can possibly say about Microsoft's products.)
I started writing a long rant about my experience with Microsoft accounts, Minecraft and Microsoft Family whatever they call it. Parental controls and stuff. But I think I'll just agree with you. It sucks, it's confusing and is designed to suck as much money out of you as possible.
Just pirate it. Minecraft is really easy to pirate if you don't want to play multiplayer, or want to play on pirate-compatible servers (which is one boolean flag in the official server configuration file and doesn't require a pirated server).
Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.
That is my plan, I have (had, you have to let it go) an old account from when it was a just username, never bothered "updating" it to the email account, I tried to convert when Microsoft said they were dumping all the old accounts, but the process was not working and I quickly decided I don't actually want a Microsoft account. At which point I decided that if I ever wanted to play again I would just do so sans account.
Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)
It isn't if you can afford enough lawyers to make microsoft's legal department blink at the cost of prosecution. If you can't drop $10K+ on a lawyer at the start though I would not put any money on winning.
They will certainly argue, and win, by saying that for legal mumbo jumbo reasons, you only have permission to play it in the exact ways they say you can, and if you already bought the game, but they say you can't play, then it's illegal to play.
Which is why coming at this from a legal perspective a farce. Most of the world is like this, actually. You can assume that if some action brings money to large corporations then it's legal and if it takes away their actual or potential revenue then it's illegal. Go with what you feel is morally correct.
The point of the account was multiplayer, unfortunately. Wanted a locked down account to play the game with a closed group of friends.
Ended up on Minecraft Education on the computer, eventually.
Closed group of friends works fine in offline mode (pirate friendly mode).
If you can get a group of other parents to also pirate...
Not really in the cards, though I can appreciate your dedication to pirate advocacy.
The referenced config setting is apparently literally just whether to have the server authenticate accounts with Microsoft, so pirate and nonpirate players can play together on a server with checking off.
This is basically my experience.
I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.
I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.
Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.
If ever there was a case study in the complexity of "market forces", it's Microsoft's Windows' resilience to pressure from clearly superior options like MacOS. As a life long Linux user, I'd like to believe it's the year of desktop Linux, and Linux is a clear threat, but...maybe next year.
Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrating to better OS options. But continually they don't. So it's clear that Windows' own merits are not what shapes those market forces, but a complex ecosystem of gaming, IT departments, and a long tail of other things difficult to enumerate.
what a shame; I only played minecraft when it was an alpha, and the .jar file ran just fine on my linux machine at the time.
There were problems, but they were problems of a distinct and different kind.
Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.
The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.
'always online' has created a whole new set of buggy from a lot of companies. For example cyberpunk is NOW a playable game. Launch date was a very mixed bag. 'fix it after launch' ugh.
> cyberpunk is NOW a playable game
I never had problems with cyberpunk but I think I know why: I built a new PC right around its release and it was good enough to play it smoothly on 4K medium or HD ultra.
When I checked to see what 4K ultra looked like, the graphics latency caused a bunch of scripting to fall apart and the game glitched really bad.
IIRC the console release was notorious for bugs, so I assume consoles were not performant enough to run the game buttery smooth nor could they be easily upgraded.
I encountered bugs when it first released even with a decent PC. IIRC there was a mission where you were running away in a truck, and it would crash every time at a certain point so I could never complete it. Also the whole save file size limit debacle, where they never actually removed deleted items from your inventory and the save file would reach a certain size that the game could no longer read (10mb or something like that)
I guess it’s surprising because how ubiquitous their products are. You’d expect them to be of better quality considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics.
On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.
On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.
Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.
Don't agree at all. Microsoft originally hoped that other vendors office type offerings would be good enough, they weren't (lotus notes) so Microsoft did it themselves.
Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was in a league of it's own.
There are a lot of great things we got from Microsoft, a zero fee platform to target, a platform that would run on what ever cobbled together pc parts you threw at it. An unbelievable attention to backwards compatibility. Compare that to what we have now in the app store and play store.
> by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics
> Google Workspace, and it's missing features
Sounds like Microsoft got there by having the features.
>extremely aggressive bundle pricing
I mean it's a good deal. As you say, when a company goes above a certain size, it does not make sense to pay for GSuite + Slack + Zoom + RMM/MDM + Zscaler
Windows is still good for gaming PCs, and it will now handle and update itself reliably. No I don't need to hear anecdotes, I work in the IT desktop space. IT janitor monkey if you will. There is no way an enterprise will convert laptops to linux or chromebook.
You see it as malicious, but well, even Google have trouble in this space. Because it is hard.
I suppose the argument is in reverse. They are so ubiquitous, they don’t really have to be good anymore to capture the market.
And they got that position of dominance more via shady deals and sketchy practices than by producing excellent software. Microsoft has done some good engineering, but that's not what made them what they are.
I disagree. Microsoft software was some of the best. Maybe not because their quality was excellent but because their competition was easily worse.
I haven't opened Office in years.
They haven't supported Office in years. You're only supposed to use the web app version now. And it's not called Office any more, it's called Copilot 365. Not joking.
They haven't added a feature I needed since 2003.
Well yeah, but I've been involved with like 6 universities in different European countries and all of them use MS email.
>considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
I don't think I've used a MS product in at least a decade. At least that I was aware of.
Edit: did some research and I have used LinkedIn. Other than that, nothing.
No GitHub at all?
Product quality has nothing to do with ubiquity. Its all about shady business deals that locks you into products where the migration cost is much higher.
Microsoft products are no longer ubiquitous. That's an early 2010s view. In 2026 most clients are running Android, followed by iOS, followed by Mac, and use Google Docs for their office work. Windows is only used on a per-company basis. If your company uses it it uses it, otherwise it doesn't.
Only small companies here (North EU - Sweden) use Mac + Gsuite + Slack + Zoom as a stack.
Companies over 20 staff are on Windows laptops + Office 365 E3 or E5.
Android and iOS? Sure on the phones...
What "clients" are you talking about? Edit: Re-reading I think you mean clients as in general computers, not business clients. Yes, more of the world is on phones but that is due to cost and society (ipad/iphone kids or third world on android). Real work is all done on PCs/Macs.
Schools are on chromebooks for the kids and Windows or Mac for teachers.
That's the same for the vast majority of the United States.
You got it mostly right. It's Android, then iOS, then Windows. It is still the number one PC OS, in terms of active users and sales. MacOS is a distant second. Of course in 2026, if you want to make money as a developer selling directly to consumers, your best targets are probably iOS and macOS. Android and Windows are rife with users who'll never buy anything and pirates.
You're confusing number of people with percentages. There's still a large share of people who'll pay to use software on windows or android provided your software is good enough. This wrong impression comes from the fact that many users are from 3rd world countries who can't afford anything else. Steam made their entire business selling stuff on windows. And not just proprietary software. Many blender and godot addons are paid and nobody complains. Apart from developing software, where linux and osx are far ahead, in terms of industry software such a autodesk, solidworks, rhino, flstudio, etc, windows is THE platform you want to target of you are planning on monetization. And I'm saying this as a exclusive linux user of 3 years. You know who won't pay money? Linux users. Not out of lack of it, but mostly because of principle of FOSS software. And yes, I'd rather use a inferior FOSS alternative than a slightly better proprietary one
Everyone I see who doesn't use Linux uses a Mac.
well that only means there's a lot of people you do not see. The large majority, according to every available stat.
> ... considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
This used to be the case when Apple was in dire straits and MS abused their monopoly position to gain 95% of browsers market share. Grim days.
But those days are thankfully long done and there are plenty of people who are completely Microsoft-free.
The one thing people are using one way or another is Linux, because it's now in just about everything. Even those in the Apple ecosystem, with an iPhone and Mac computers, very probably have a Linux router and Linux TV at home.
The number of devices in the world running one version of Linux or another outnumber Windows devices by something like 10 to 1. Maybe more.
Microsoft is a despicable company producing turds since forever. I hate them and the crap they produce with a passion since the DOS days.
As the saying goes: the day Microsoft shall produce something that doesn't suck is the day they'll start selling vacuum cleaners.
Google of the 2020s is the new Microsoft of the 2010s.
They're ubiquitous because everyone else fucked up during the 80's and 90's charging too much for everything. MS was affordable. It's really just Apple gaining economy of scale by manufacturing in China and Linux being free while being higher quality that make MS look bad.
Also MS stuff has always been slop. Hate their business practices too. But without Linux we'd be choosing between MS, Apple and Oracle Solaris or something...
Since some time around 2024, the problems started to grow way more numerous than they already were; the workarounds started to be disallowed; and more broken software started to be pushed as necessary for basic functionality. People were adapted to a certain level of breakage, but are seeing a different one.
Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.
This is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!
A very very limited defense of Microsoft and their whole "support vendor" "ecosystem": if you are selling a complex product, there is value in having a robust knowledge base of known problems with known solutions, and a huge base of people who know all the right workflows. A buggier product that's well known and understood is maybe even preferable to a less buggy product with poorly understood failure modes. At least back in the heyday of the NT kernel times, it seemed like there were "MVP"s or whatever that knew the right way to do everything.
(Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
I remember that back in the mid 80s the Application group was not happy about the quality of work so someone circulated a memo about software quality, which I read from Steven Sinorfsky’s blogs. Adding NT on top of it, I’d say they definitely treat software quality a lot more serious than today.
I think they completely let it go when they laid off the testers and let users pay $$ to be testers, starting from 2010s perhaps. Maybe earlier.
I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)
XP and 7 were only good because it was based off of 2000/NT.
Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much.
P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
The kernel is solid, its all the userspace software where they are fumbling hard.
The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel.
Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those.
But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)
At least it has async I/O, unlike Linux.
not sure if I'm missing something, `select` seems to work just fine on my machine
but `select` is not async I/O
> I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid.
Windows NT (including Windows 2000) was considered to be a workstation OS by Microsoft. From Windows XP on, the NT-based Windows operating systems (except for the server ones) were targeted to consumers.
I would argue that Microsoft had a solid run for some years in the middle where their software was pretty good quality. I think it started with Windows 2000 and certainly lasted through the XP era. Windows 7 was pretty decent too. Their operating system was straight up trash before win2k and has been in steady decline for some years now. It doesn't surprise me that younger people are only now (re-)discovering that Microsoft operating systems are bad.
> Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
I don’t see that as support for the claim that Microsoft’s products were half-baked in the 80s and 90s.
If Linux had sufficient market penetration in small business, I bet you could run a successful business fixing problems with Linux products, even today.
(It may be a bit of a stretch but you could even argue Amazon is making serious money supporting big companies with their Linux problems)
counterpoint: in my experience, the low level Windows OS primitives are less buggy than low level MacOS primitives.
They're weird to this unix-head, but generally not as buggy as in MacOS.
But I don't think it contradicts your point. This is just a rare exception to the true general rule.
Windows 2000,XP,7 may not have been perfect, but they were leagues better than the state of the art today.
That isn't true. Microsoft has made some genuinely good software over the years.
Like what
As someone else stated earlier, the NT kernel is actually great.
I find Windows 10 and 11 really good once you tweak it a bit and remove some cruft and tweak regedit/GPO settings. Both for modern software. Not to talk about backwards compatibility, Steam games from 2009 run just fine. Windows is also the standard for online games with anti-cheat. Also, for companies, Excel is a must. Yes, still is.
The whole ecosystem of AD+GPO+ Exchange since 2000 is unparalleled, Novell had something like AD but AD won. That continues with Office 365 where it's not just an office package. It is Identity/accounts/SSO (Entra), MDM (Intune), EDR/"antivirus", Storage (OneDrive), Sharepoint (docs + storage), Teams (Slack + Zoom).
You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I understand if you are a smaller company, then Gsuite + Slack and Zoom is a good choice. But go over 100 people and it starts to not make sense.
I also hear developers liking their IDEs, both full VS and VS Code.
/IT admin
> Steam games from 2009 run just fine.
I'd say somewhat fine depending on the title, they broke a lot of backward compatibility recently
> You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I'd also say that's where they won, because it looks like an attractive option for the executive and people in power who can purchase these.
As if you're asking me, sure it's cheaper but these MS products are nowhere near as good as any of the alternatives you listed and you'd have to factor the productivity loss.
It's kind of a cheap all-in buffet, sure it's cheap but quality isn't there.
The NT kernel was actually an IBM project, which got divorced from IBM because of contract stuff and Microsoft got to keep a copy. It grew out of VMS which was a heavyweight OS for DEC VAXen, which IBM acquired.
That is not correct at all.
Part of the revisionist history these days is making IBM out the be hero that was crushed by Microsoft but nothing could be further from the truth. IBM was the lumbering giant that evaluated developers by lines of code produced, had 14 levels of management, and wanted to protect their hardware interests more than anything. Microsoft hated working with them because they sucked. OS/2 was so buggy that the first patch was almost as big as the entire original install.
Well, somewhat.
It has been a while since I read a book on NT kernel - "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft"
NT kernel was "supposed" to run OS/2 apps and Windows apps. But the NT kernel is of MS making, NOT IBM.
The connection to VAX/VMS is due to MS hiring Dave Cutler, who worked there before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
No. You are thinking of the ibm Mach-kernel “workplace OS” which descended from the os/2 interaction once IBM and Microsoft broke up.
NT was entirely a Microsoft project. They hired the prism team from DEC and started completely from scratch.
Mach and microkernels were hot at one point despite having many issues with performance.
Spider solitaire
Here's a list of MS software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software
You cannot find a single one that was good, or better than whatever was the alternative at the time?
I actually went into reading this thinking I'd agree with you that "yeah that's such hyperbole they must have made something good", and to my shock the good things they have shipped they eventually ruined.
Examples: Edge (bloated with ads and Copilot), Office (now a subscription, hasn't evolved, annoying integration with copilot), Skype (dead), Halo (virtually dead), Doom (studio gutted), Visual Studio Code (locked down marketplace, replaced plugins with their own, now a giant GitHub copilot ad), Flight Simulator (massive regression with 2024)
Looked through it. I'm only considering things while they owned it. For example, Github was pretty good until Microsoft made them migrate to Azure. Uptime has been bad since.
Several of the games are good, but those were mostly made by game studios they own (or later bought). Those are not really part of the core Microsoft culture.
Old versions of Office (pre-ribbon UI) were perfectly usable (if you ignore the years of Clippy, or you disabled that). But in recent years, not.
VS Code was good but it has been getting worse. Every new release is 90% AI features rather than useful things. And it is an open source project anyway, so they aren't the only contributor.
I guess Minesweeper and Solitare are still pretty good (unless they messed them up in Windows 11, which I have stopped using entirely).
But that is pretty damming isn't it? Pretty much everything on that list is bad currently. And the majority was never great.
Evidently you can't, or you would have named it
You're digging yourself a bigger hole. Keep digging.
It really became a problem only with Windows RT attempting to merge mobile OS with desktop. All the non-sensical UX compromises are still from that.
Later they abandoned consumerware after losing the mobile space but that's a different story. Microsoft isn't really a consumer software company any more so there's no point judging it on that basis.
microslop before invention of slop
To bring it back to Xbox a little. I recently picked up an Xbox one X, the late performance boost to their last generation. Firstly, the performance to price ratio is brilliant nowadays, when you get title at native 4K it is a really neat little thing to see.
It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that.
But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical.
an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down.
Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.
Azure is also such a mess.
10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year)
I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
Compared to the old Win32 apps and settings menus of Windows Server, the Azure web interface is a disaster.
And the official auth URLs are always such random crap that I'm surprised people don't get phished left right and centre.
No owners, no responsability, no incentive to fix it. Ticket grabbers and checklist markers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
This is why.
TLDR: complete incompetence at all levels
It’s actually impressive just how badly Microsoft fcuked the online experience in Minecraft.
It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are.
Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s
You know whats the cherry on top? I got it working today and you have to download the actual halo 1 campaign as a DLC from inside or outside the MCC game. Even if I got it working yesterday, I'd have to wait for another download. What the 30GB MCC does initially is still a mystery to me.
I looked into it and apparently just the launcher itself is 16GB because it's filled to the brim with extremely oversized videos and sound files, on top of an already overweight base.
All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
I mean yeah, just wait until you hear about Ark survival ascended: A game with a single 188gb ucas file extracts itself during update, taking over 400gb just to patch 2gb and then rezips itself.
Why don't you literally just pirate it.
You already own it, so it's not even immoral.
I've always felt the elimination of their QA department once the current CEO came in is what really started the decline in quality. Now they are being called Microslop for good reason.
Microsoft is basically Oracle Lite. Oracle is not a software company, it is a government contract fulfilment company with a specialisation in software. Its function is to get money and the engineering department is only an excuse to tick all the boxes on a given contract so it can get paid. Microsoft is the same but also does corporate clients. The rest of us get the scraps.
The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
> But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
They gutted QA in 2014, ending their software development engineer in test positions, and suggesting the developers should test their own code to get velocity.
Subsequent releases were worse than before, and things have compounded since then. Hard to say that laying off the rest of the team made a noticable difference.
Oh thanks for the correction/supplemental information. The gutting you're referring to might be the huge lay offs that I'm thinking of. Possibly conflating the recent AI driven layoffs with those from 12 years ago.
>The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry
Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.
Yeah based on your comment and the others, it seems he did an initial purge in 2014.
QA doesn't get enough love :(
QA got laid off all decade ago. It's been 10 years of bugs like this weeks breaking boot on Dell's.
Thank you for the correction! I think I was conflating the two (having heard about the one from 2014, and then also hearing about the more recent rounds, and not recognizing they were different)
I've edited my comment to correct this. Cheers!
This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).
So, I've had a pretty shit time with Microsoft products over the last ten years, but it wasn't quite as bad 5-7 years ago. Our disagreement on that might be that I'm only in my late 20s, so if you're older than I am, or had newer consoles than I had around that time, I might be a little more tolerant of jank.
But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.
I don't have much to add except that people have the idea that this is a new low from microslop thanks to vibe coded Devs but it's really not. There has been for so long a culture of contractors being treated as printers. Then never given a long enough contract to receive any benefits because it is cheaper. Way and repeat. Nothing is fully understood and nobody knows where the focus needs to be. No wonder everything is in a state that it is. Garbage.
There are stories of MS bringing in high school students to code core features on Windows 95/98 as a part of their summer intern programming.
And you wonder why that system would to freeze up when ever you put a CD in and it had to spin up.
They have always tried to cheap out on this stuff.
>With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged,
Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.
>> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
Their PM motto is "quality is a feature", and obviously not everybody needs all the features.
It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.
All problems with Microsoft products are design and intent problems, not engineering.
The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.
There is some brotherhood of coders who will not acknowledge programmers are anything less than perfect. All bugs and errors are the fault of project managers.
If an engineer executes on bad intent and design goals and builds a bad bridge, that's also a bad engineer.
Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.
Is it 2019 again?
Can you explain this to me? I think it's far more 2000s, when we were having debates about whether software engineers were actually engineers, with professional responsibility, or not.
WinUI 3 was upgraded to stable/release when it had literally thousands of outstanding issues, including stuff like [fully replicable] 'using drag and drop causes the program to crash.' That was about the time I started opting out of the entire MS ecosystem after investing decades in it.
I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.
There's a reason why people either stick to Win32 or go with something like Electron when it comes to making Windows apps.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
I'd say: There is something seriously wrong with the people buying this shit since over 40 years.
It's not like Microslop products weren't pure utter trash already decades ago. They got worse over time, especially lately with "AI", that's true, but nothing ever changed substantially.
I pretty much doubt it's incompetence.
It all has been looking like a deliberately ill intent for quite a while.
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage.
And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!
When did the offshoring happen, because Microsoft has been bad for a long time. Even in the 90s there were so many BSODs.
Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers.
I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
I think “The Operating System is fundamentally Unstable” is a much bigger problem than “First party applications are redesigned too frequently.”
Microsoft in the 90s was doing things that hadn't been done before with Windows. And the NT line, converging to consumers at XP, solved many of them, and by now they don't have an excuse any more.
I’m genuinely confused about exactly what Microsoft was doing for the first time.
Not the first gui.
Not the first web browser.
Not the first spreadsheet/word processor/slideshow.
Edit: I’ll give credit, NT is good kernel, and had some novel qualities.
I would argue that they where tge first to try and do all that at once while on non-specified hardware systems. Yes Apple, Amiga etc will similar stuff but they at least had set target hardware.
Microsoft tried to do everything for better and worse on wildly varied commodity hardware.
The first one that pretty much anyone could use and was useful for them. We credit Apple for popularizing the GUI, too, even though they stole it from Xerox.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.
Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft.
I had bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Mojang, and eventually I was forced to migrate my Minecraft license to a Microsoft account.
After I had successfully created the account, logged in, and transferred the license, and ONLY after I had transferred the license, I was suddenly locked out of my account until I provided a phone number.
I will never buy a Microsoft product again, and I think I've done a decent job reducing the amount of their stuff that other people have bought, as well.
I tried to simply purchase some Minecraft thinggy for my kid and Microsoft sent me through what seemed to be a 70 step process of logging in, captcha, authenticating, verifying, logging in again, trying to buy, getting blocked, captcha, authenticating again, E-mail verification, online verification, blocked again, contacting support, authenticating, talking to their fraud team, re-logging in, captcha, authenticating, E-mail verification... All the while, the browser is redirecting between Microsoft and Xbox websites (I don't even fucking own an Xbox--this is on the PC).
Anything that touches a Microsoft account is fraught with horror and pain. Which is why the idea of requiring one in order to turn on your PC is ludicrous.
As they say, the day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners.
My original Minecraft account got lost in all these shenanigans as well.
Bought Minecraft on one of the first survival mode releases back when Notch was streaming himself making the game and Microsoft stole this from me. I'm not particularly sad about the digital access itself but this low-key meant something to me :|
Happened to many people. The system claims it's because of some suspicious activity but everybody who gave in to this blackmail and submitted personal details said that after logging in there was no notice of anything suspicious.
since this is a game it's probably mostly kids whose identifying information Microsoft is hunting for. I can't believe it's legal and the company was not sued yet
me I just pirate it now, never played on servers anyway.
My friends and I play on a private server that I run in offline mode because some of us got locked out of our accounts.
And this is why you know age verification is not done to make sure kids are protected.
If it is through collecting phone numbers, yes
I've had this happen with at least three accounts, the most recent one for the purpose of playing Grounded with a friend. IIRC, between registering and trying to log in, my account was flagged for suspicious activity and required a phone number.
> Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft.
Microsoft stole two of my accounts.
I bought Minecraft in the alpha days when all you needed was a username and password. At some point they mandated an email in the years I wasn't playing and later found out I could no longer sign in.
I bought a new "copy" and lost it because I didn't migrate to a Microsoft account. I didn't migrate because I assumed it was just a scare tactic and I wasn't playing at the time anyway. When I later wanted to play they stopped allowing me to log in.
When I look at the top selling games[1] and see Minecraft in second place with 400 million, I wonder how many of those are the same people buying it again. I'm sure nobody bought Super Mario because it would stop letting them sign in to play offline.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
If you bought during Alpha you're entitled to play it for free forever including all future editions (currently Bedrock) and you could go to small claims court to get your account back, maybe.
"Give us your phone number or we will hold your minecraft account ransom"
You don't get in even with the phone number
Happened to me every time I ever made a Microsoft account. It works for one day, then some fraud process runs overnight and if I try to use it the next day I need a phone number. Good thing I first discovered this on a throwaway account.
Remember when people were allowed to share phone numbers? Like it was actually the norm
Remember when we didn't live in a panopticon? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Same here
This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up...
So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.
The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? James Cameron's True Lies? It is not in our collection, please remain here and we can watch Commando together! It's just as good!
The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies is the best! Ignore that other booth... you may save $2 but are you certain that video will still exist in a year?
And the whole time you know that just under the bazaar is the Underground/Black Market where all is preserved and all can be had, but you'll need to work for it.
Just a minor correction: Commando is superior to True Lies ;)
It is, but it's not much consolation if you want to watch True Lies and not Commando.
From a moral PoV pirating old movies isn't a big issue, especially in cases where the original makers are already dead. At that point you're only feeding Hollywood bosses, shareholders and decendants. Same as torrenting music from dead artists. I don't care for Jimi Hendrix' greedy sister or 'Authentic Brands Group', which owns the rights to Elvis Presley's music. These people can create their own art instead of living off other people's work.
but enough about anthropic
Well played.
What if Jimi Hendrix wanted for his sister to benefit from his work?
Hendrix has been dead for twice the length that copyright originally lasted, and for longer than the copyright period at the time he was alive (i.e. during his life when he was assessing the economic fairness of creating his music, he would've expected his work to already be public domain today). My daughter is older than her grandmother was when that music was written. Why would we care any more than e.g. what Francis Scott Key wanted?
A decent proxy for the maximum appropriate length of copyright might be when the next generation starts making those edits or disclaimers for changing culture (so the original is no longer considered appropriate for current markets), so at most ~20 years or so. One generation, and then it is history/heritage to pass on (or critique, as the case may be).
Who made his guitar? It seems like he made all his art on the back of someone else’s work… they should be getting royalties for every track made with their product
(I’m pointing out the absurdity of trying to assign ownership within a system of shared creation)
I don't think that the guitar manufacturer asked for royalties.
On the other hand there are video cameras that you can't use for commercial purposes because they lack the appropriate video codec license from MPEG-LA :-) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735824)
Too bad because she isn't either way. It's all going to shareholders and top executives.
If we had a sane copyright system everything older than 10 years would be in the public domain
Physical DVD is the way. Praise Criterion
yeah good idea, I'll just pop it into my xbox -- oh.
You can play the DVD without your Xbox being online.
Well!, thank God for small mercies.
Praise Criterion
The whole collection, mostly on Blu-Ray, was 50% off at Barnes and Noble when I was there a couple of weeks ago.
There was a huge display right at the entrance of this huge chain retailer, so in spite of the online streaming hype, there must be a non-niche audience for optical media.
Blu-Ray is risky from the DRM side of things. Those disks can be disabled at anytime and can just stop working if the players are offline too long or the manufacture's servers go down. Rip them to your hard drive if you want to keep being able to watch them without begging for permission.
I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
How would a downloaded file buffer? That sounds more like streaming sites, which yeah are bad. But if you download a movie or season of a show in advance I don't think you'll have the same issues. Language ones or missing subtitles maybe - you gotta check those as the download finishes and before you put it on a media server.
> How would a downloaded file buffer
I've no idea. It happens sometimes and only seems to happen with certain fils. In this case I'm sure it's a jellyfin issue, but this just comes down to having to debug while someone is waiting to watch - which is exactly the time I don't want to.
As for language/subtitles it's true if it happens from the start (which I agree, is usually true) but occasionally the downloads get weird midway through.
At that point you’re not playing the downloaded file. You’re either playing a transcoded version of it which will buffer as a computer tries to convert on the fly. Or you’re dealing with a network throughput issue related to the bitrate of the file you’re trying to remotely play.
If you're talking about those random malvertising-supported streaming sites then sure, but torrenting is not like this at all.
No, I'm talking about downloaded files. It happens maybe 2% of the time. You can't be sure the indexers are giving you the correct one.
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
On streaming services shows get silently censored or edited, or episodes are just outright removed (and get re-numbered so you don't even realize what was removed), and episodes get put out in the wrong order, or they aren't released at all in the right language, and there are no subtitles, only closed captions. Neither streaming or piracy are perfect, but only one them allows you to save a show to your hard drive so you know it will be there the next time you want to watch it unlike streaming where they constantly pull shows offline
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
Well that's hilariously untrue. Movies getting pulled out of streaming services is why I started to buy physical DVDs again.
> Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
Yes, those things do happen with commercial streaming platforms; Paramount is especially bad IME, but hardly unique.
> Movies getting pulled out of streaming services is why I started to buy physical DVDs again
Me too, but sadly more and more shows aren't getting physical releases at all anymore.
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
I have 2 words for you: "soon leaving". You may have seen them on Netflix.
And in the US you have the advantage it's generally leaving to go somewhere. In many smaller countries this is not true.
I've never those words in File Explorer.
"who checks the show in advance?"
Maybe I'm old school, but the primary lesson Limewire taught me was to always check the media before you show it to someone else.
Every 'issue' that you mentioned about wrong episode, wrong language, etc. If those are the costs to ride the ride then so be it. No CEO gets paid in 'had to redownload a different version'.
> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
From 2013
PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
Yep... It gets a little less funny by the year.
I think some of the most prophetic writing in terms of specifics came from Richard Stallman that basically called it all out in the late 1980s, including social media.
You may not always like what he has to say but he did think through how this stuff can be leveraged against the users.
Most interesting part of this for me is the lukewarm response it gets from the initial replies. The sense of humor here was ahead of its time.
the original was 4chan[1] , then it circulated around. It had better reactions elsewhere at the time.
[1] https://copypastatext.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Doritos...
What an absolute gem, thank you
Thank you for sharing. MCC is nice when it works. I’ve also found that running the original Halo in Xemu emulator makes for an extremely lightweight, fast, and performant experience. It’s remarkable how heavy weight MCC is compared to the original games.
Not related to the Microsoft gaming division, but yes, Microsoft products are a mess. I am forced to use Office 365 to do some slides for work, and I decided to use Office for macOS so I could use Claude extension.
All went relatively well, until I needed to share the slides with others using Office 365: my first try of sharing the slides by clicking the Share button inside Office for macOS caused it to upload to SharePoint as read-only: not even myself (the document owner) could edit it.
I said "fine, I will just upload the .pptx file manually", and it worked well enough, until the file came back with some comments for fixes: now if I clicked the "Open on desktop" button, it kinda created a local copy that I could never sync with the remote one, but they're still clearly the same file because it did show as the same file when I went to properties on both desktop and web versions.
At that point I was getting really pissed off, so I started editing locally and copying my changes to the remote version. Office still had one more surprise: I could copy whole slides remotely, but copying part of a slide (say a rectangle form with some text) would instead convert that part to an image. Seriously, what the f*ck Microsoft?
In 2023, spent multiple hours setting up a Microsoft account for my GF just so she could play Minecraft. The process involved HTTP 4xx, 5xx, missing emails, activation codes that were "expired" even though they were less than 30 seconds old, countless instances of HTTP 302 (or JS / HTML based redirects?) that simply went to a landing page instead of redirecting to the "You've been authenticated" thingy and tons, tons and tons upon tons of captchas. Audio-based ones even, at some point! Some of the voices I could easily understand, others had like a thick accent or something - and English is not my mother tongue. The only thing driving me forward was a boiling hatred towards Microsoft.
It's wild cause it was so easy circa ~2010, back before Mojang was purchased.
Microsoft makes a web login seem like some kind of lost knowledge like Roman aqueducts.
Mojang was username+password later email+password, following industry trends (username is easily seen in-game so you only have to guess a password which for many people is easier than guessing their email).
It continued to be so, and then Microsoft forced everyone to switch to a Microsoft account, deleting the account of anyone who didn't do so (in complete violation of Notch's original sales contract with players). If you watch the progress bar of Prism Launcher logging you in to a Microsoft account you see it logs into Microsoft, goes through a bunch of indirection, logs into Xbox (!!), bunch of indirection, then logs into Mojang. And then you get to launch the game.
It used to be a simple endpoint with username+password -> auth token. Not any more with Microsoft!
As far as i am concerned they stole my Minecraft account by force migrating it and me cannot being bothered doing all that, all the time again.
In Xbox's defence, pretty seamless. I am signed into my xbox account, which is a Microsoft account. When launcing a game all that account auth bullshit is taken care of.
My wife has her own account, and our accounts are bound to our controllers. When you press the xbox button you are immediately signed into your profile, and it's instant. When she launches a game with her controller, she sees her saves and vice versa for me. With Baldur's Gate 3 it even keeps all her mods separate from my mod-free setup.
Some game publishers (activision, ubisoft et al) require their own accounts, and that's usually also taken care of automatically. The xbox goes and sets up a profile on that publisher's system on first game launch.
No idea why this is being downvoted, because it accurately describes the Xbox experience.
I have a 10 years old Xbox One, and every fucking time my family and I want to play a game, maybe once in a few months or so, it's always a struggle. Oh, let me download a few gigs of a system update. Oh, and the game you want to play needs an update too. Oh, and you are now logged out so go remember your password and type it using the controller. It's never a seamless experience that you would expect of a game console, which has one job: let the users play games.
You can use the Xbox app on your phone as a keyboard for the console. Or you can connect a physical keyboard.
Do you work for Microsoft by any chance? :)
I mean, come on. The vast majority of services that have apps running on TV implemented QR code based login workflow ages ago, and it just works. For Xbox, logging in is always a struggle.
Does the XBox not have an option for doing those updates in the background or when you aren't playing?
If you haven't played a game recently it will punt it out of the auto update queue.
It does but it's not reliable. The update process is also the slowest imaginable other than Windows update. It takes several minutes at times just to discover which games need updates.
It probably does, but it's turned off the majority of time. It's still plugged in, so I wouldn't mind if it updated itself silently, but no, it does not do it when it's turned off.
When I see Microsoft, I run away.
No one is perfect but Microsoft is really efficient at making me lose my mind.
They ruined Minecraft in the same way. Microsoft login tied, emails, captchas, losing auth, losing purchases because it can’t tie auth to the system.
Microsoft is a joke.
And that's just the login system, not even mentioning the glacial pace of updates which end up consisting mostly of slop anyway (though I like the nether and aquatic update. Those areas were sorely empty before.)
Reminds me of the fact that I lost my Xbox account because they shutdown hotmail. My account is working on my Xbox but the password reset options are not supported by the OS on the Xbox. And I can’t change the email of the account from an Xbox. The support wasn’t helpful either. I read that somebody with the same issue got them to change the mail by logging in and out while on the phone. I don’t have the energy to jump through these hoops.
There's more to this story, you've forgotten your password or something. Hotmail accounts moved to outlook.com, just reset it on a PC.
Rather than download the 30GB Master Chief collection, you might try downloading the Xemu OG XBOX emulator plus the original game on archive.org.
https://xemu.app/
Ha! This is pretty much what happened to me on my steamdeck the night before last. Login via GitHub or something nonsense. I was too tired, I turned it off. I tried a few years ago and I ended up in and endless loop of login redirects. Totally broken.
Why on earth does this it require a login in to play!? I'd prefer to emulated the OG box version, but that is one emulator I've never got working.
Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.
I was gonna say, this is every time the gang feels like firing up a round of Uno.
I had a similar experience this weekend. Some friends got together, one got the new Halo campaign, and we looked forward to playing co-op, like the good ol' days.
Well, adding a screensplit co-op now requires a log-in, which requires a phone to register via a QR code, which, after about 5 minutes of trying, completely failed. So we just turned it off and played Catan.
Meanwhile, an illegal pirate version from torrents works flawlessly after installation and double-clicking on the exe file.
I hope you refunded it.
Been there as well. You just want to play a game you own and end up making new accounts and sharing personal details, and even then might not even succeed.
This is a big reason I try to keep my old consoles alive. My OG Xbox is queued up ready for a clock capacitor replace so I can fire up real Halo CE any time I want!
> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email
Does anyone even provide real information? What is the point of even asking for a name?
Don't be such a racist troll.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171881
Had the same thought but with the new Halo remake which I own on PS5.
On booting the game, you're presented with the text "Press X to join" in the second player slot. That's a lie, pressing X just makes the screen flash.
Had to search online what to do. Turns out you need a Playstation account AND Microsoft account, AND they need to be linked just to join as a split-screen player. However, no prompt or UI is implemented to explain or do any of those for a second player.
Ok, setting out to do this BS. Feeling nostalgic about Halo CE LAN parties with 0 internet connection or accounts needed. She logs in with the PS account which she had to make to play another couch co-op one time a year ago. That itself was for no reason other than to boost Sony's MAU metrics but I digress. MS account made. I assume you need to create an Xbox gamer tag too, so we do that. Back to Halo, same flashing screen issue. No prompt appears to link the PS account to the MS account. I have a hunch that MS is incompetent and didn't implement the linking process except for the primary player. I'm right. You have to force close the game, switch the primary PlayStation profile to the second player, then relaunch the game. Finally got the prompt to link accounts. Now "Press X to join" works. Truly egregious how poorly implemented and communicated this is.
At this point we're 45 min in and have lost interest.
>I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
For several years, you've been forced to login with a MS account on first boot.
xbox hardware
I had one I received as a gift. Every week or two it would boot up to its green Welcome screen and then just sit there animating itself gently, without being interactable in any way. This is how it does software updates. Apps that have problems with things like server outages tend to just sit there failing silently, eventually taking the whole machine down. Sometimes It complains that wifi is too unstable to install an update and demands a wired ethernet connection instead.
Every month or two my unit started locking up at random forcing a system reset and reinstallation. I'm not sure why, mainly it runs youtube, netflix and crunchyroll; I've never enjoyed the feel of the xbox controller for gaming. You can't get any sort of technical information out of it unless you want to pay $30 or so for a developer pack, which provides some basic OS utilities and lets you run your own unsigned apps. I briefly considered doing the latter so I could make dashboards and browse them on the sofa, but I grew to despise the xbox design ethos so much that I just bought a PS5 instead.
I also have a ps3, which has been going strong for >15 years and only ever hiccups if the power is cut suddenly and it needs to do a disk check/repair on its next boot - in which case it informs me clearly about what's happening and why. The only reason it's not my main console is that companies like Netflix and crunchyroll stopped supporting the platform. I still boot it up sometimes so I can watch things I paid for via Amazon prime without ads, because Amazon stopped updating their ps3 app some years ago but it still works.
I started out with MS-DOS back in the 80s... errr, the 20th century and was technically invested in Microsoft's way of doing things for years, as it balanced technical depth and accessibility with an approachable user interface, without the constant tinkering and driver annoyances of Linux. Nowadays you would need to pay me to use it. The only gripe I have with Sony hardware is that there isn't any way to self-sign software if you want to make your widgets or apps to run on your own machine. The closest you can get is installing Roblox and then using their free developer tools (engine + a Lua derivative).
> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
Fortunately, it's nothing like what you experienced at all.
the hardware is good
but it is so hard to give them money on it
i dread buying new games as it is a game of chance what way might work this time
I don't know and let me spice this up with another story:
I have a ps4 and I undusted it a couple of weeks ago, then after a couple of os and game updates that took 2h to finish, they asked me to subscribe to playstation plus to play online and to basically use my internet.
What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
The point of the console is to make you only buy games that are compatible with the console. For example if you have a PS5, you'll give a cut of your games to Sony instead of giving a cut to Microsoft.
> What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
Anti-cheat. Knowing that if you get into a match with other people they won't be running software on their system that gives them an unfair advantage.
In 2026 a console is a streamlined PC that can't be used for anything else but games - but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating.
> but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating
??? It's not the early 1990s anymore where you had to fiddle with autoexec.bat and assigning IRQs to get your DOS games to run. The only "downside" of PC gaming is that the hardware isn't subsidized like game consoles are, so you're upfront investment is a couple hundred bucks more. But then you don't need a subscription for multiplayer gaming, and PC games are cheaper (80 Euros for a game? come on...)
None of this sounds easier or less frustrating than Steam.
Microsoft harder is good? Relative to what?
Xbox, the topic of discussion, is literally famous for a 'red ring' hardware failure.
I am not sure it's fair to equate the xbox 360 with the current generation which is the Xbox Series X/S, which was preceded by the Xbox One X/S, so the 360 is two base iterations old at this point.
Not that I am defending M$FT here. I'm just clarifying so we don't drift into calling everything a "Nintendo" like my parents did.
I tried to login to Microsoft's account this week to play Sea of Thieves, and I literally couldn't log in for 30 minutes because it kept going on a redirect loop. Enter email, enter password, "we're checking your information", logged into into the account dashboard, but as soon as I clicked any button [1], got sent back to the login screen.
Tried two browsers to no avail. Found someone on Reddit that suggested resetting the password and finally managed to make progress. Utterly loathsome software, how the hell does a tech company exist when they can't even get their login system working properly?
1: all because I needed to change the country, now that I'm not in UK any more, as the game required age verification just to allow access to the multiplayer functionality. Thanks, Starmer.
> Since I couldn't do anything else,...
Sail the high seas my friend.
> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
It was pretty great up to the 360, but with the Xbox One everything went to shit. Game consoles were meant to be plug-and-play, today they are more hassle to setup than a PC with Steam (ok, I guess Playstation isn't quite as terrible yet).
Note "up to the 360" is only two different consoles! The Xbox, and the Xbox 360.
I would bet that Microsoft is 100% composed of vibe coded slop these days. Everything they touch these days turns to shit.
MCC and Xbox Live on Windows have been exactly this jank at least since MCC's Windows release in 2019.
I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.
uConnect and the various 3rd party storefront/DRMs are a travesty on the Steamdeck - the Decky plugin Junkstore goes some way to remedying it, but Far Cry 3 is harder to get working than any number of tempermental Switch emulations with pre-cached shaders and other graphics hacks.
Silly, you should've paid $60 for the re-re-remake of halo one (which would still need a login i guess...)
Sorry though, i just reinstalled MCC yesterday to play Halo 1 myself, and lucky me my Microsoft account worked fine
Nothing infuriates me quite like an additional gaming account inside of a dedicated gaming platform. Running under a Steam/PSN/Xbox account and want to play the game you just bought? Sucks to be you. First create a Ubisoft/Blizzard/indie-studio-with-one-game login so we can better monetize something.
I've lost count of the times my buddy and I wanted to play coop, and I was forced to log in to my ms account for a split screen game. I remember back on the original xbox, and x360, using 'guest' just worked. Forcing people to login for couch coop is asinine.
I wonder if this one is actually deliberate as a slop-pushing thing, or if it's actually a developer level thing where some devs assumed every player has an account.
It definitely depends on the game. Some allow second (or third or fourth) players to play as "guests" (not signed in to any particular account), and some don't. Party games, or games designed primarily for co-op, are definitely more likely to allow guests.
Weirdly, in my limited experience it seems that 'premium' / AAA games are more likely to require an account - I suspect it's because they want to be able to save unlocks/progress for those players. Perhaps they think it will incentivize those players to buy a copy of their own.
And the Steam version is distinctly better to boot. The XBox Store version last I tried just straight up didn't work.
Microsoft's gaming division was in an absolute shambles and that was before they gutted it.
Eh. Recently I invited a friend over to play games. I have Linux so it's normal that shit doesn't work but I came across a bug where Steam would just casually take 300% of CPU when Steam Controller was connected and even if I managed to start the game, controllers wouldn't work. I couldn't debug the issue on time, so we did not play games. After she left I figured out that if I first connect the Xbox controller and then the Steam controller then it works, but if it's the other way around then it doesn't. Or in reverse, I don't remember and I'm away from my PC.
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sounds tough. have you considered showing her an actually good game? just spitballing here
Hope you didn't preorder GTA 6 then :)
Or any Rockstar game on PC since Max Payne 3, for that matter...
Or Ubisoft titles etc etc.