Windows president addresses current state of Windows 11 after AI backlash
windowscentral.comUnfortunately I kind of doubt it, although Windows is still what I get to use, not paying Apple tax and Tahoe isn't great either, and I have better things to do than fine tuning Linux installations, even on laptops sold with it pre-installed like my old Asus netbook.
Lets see in practice how much they are actually listening.
Now, this would be a great opportunity to actually get stuff like Dell XPS with Ubuntu on PC stores.
> I have better things to do than fine tuning Linux installations, even on laptops sold with it pre-installed like my old Asus netbook
This seems to be claiming Windows is better because you cannot fine tune it. No one forces you to fine tune Linux. You can just buy something with Linux preinstalled and use it and skip the tuning and customisation.
Unfortunately I have the experience that is hardly the case in regards to laptops.
Using various Linux distributions since kernel 1.0.9, Slackware 2.0.
My experience differs. Very few problems with lots of laptops over the last 20 years - mine and family.
I also did specify laptops with Linux preinstalled which I do not think were even available in the days of kernel 1.0.9
Like one could say
> and I have better things to do than uninstall Teams, LinkedIn, Spotify and undo some random settings after each update.
about Windows.
Except Windows is available on PC stores where humans can be talked in person for sorting out issues, while most Linux powered laptops have to be ordered online, with various degrees of missing functionality, with a black box when comes to sending them back for repairs.
Same applies to Apple, Chromebooks and Android pseudo laptops regarding stores available with out of the box experience, the latter two while using the Linux kernel aren't certainly GNU/Linux distributions.
> Windows is available on PC stores where humans can be talked in person for sorting out issues
Has anyone actually achieved anything non-trivial with those? In my experience store help can only do what an average techy knows anyway. Anything else gets you sent to the manufacturer's support.
A lot, which is why normies go to them.
> where humans can be talked in person for sorting out issues
Like the Geek Squad counter in Best Buy? PC setup $39.99 OS Repair $149.99 (presumably also needs data backup $99.99)
I'm in NZ, and help with Windows is expensive here. I have mostly given up helping friends (many reasons including the "last person to touch it" problem).
Good for you if Best Buy does sell laptops with Linux pre-installed, not around here.
Good for you if your friends and family are wealthy enough to pay for support and pay for antivirus subscriptions and pay to upgrade their laptop because their old one has been obsoleted by Microsoft. Microsoft's focus has shifted away from their users.
Linux is a distraction - why do you strawman it? Raw Linux is only to be recommended to very few end users.
The last time I had to support Windows was while I was travelling in Argentina and my father asking for advice about his worry about a virus. His worry was the primary issue, whether he actually had a virus was secondary. There's no way I could safely hand him to a third party to support him (the only third-party people I might trust needed business accounts and had expensive chargeout rates). My answer was change your banking password and "use the iPad I bought you" for any sensitive activities like banking. I couldn't have solved his Windows issue (perhaps didn't exist), nor could I fix his worry. Windows laptop was the cause, and there was no way to work around it. And now he's fighting the side-effects of a forced Windows 11 upgrade.
Windows is an expensive answer, only suitable for a subset of users. Apple and Google have their downsides, but both are less confusing than Windows. Everything has its compromises.
> like my old Asus netbook
Not to say that experience was invalid, but we've come a long way since the netbooks were a thing.
If it was so certain to win the lottery, as betting in getting a Linux Forums style of answer every single time there is a complaint about Linux hardware support.
Maybe that wasn't my only experience?
Even Dell XPS, Tuxedo and System 76 aren't without issues in regards to 100% supported hardware.
That is the experience you mentioned, not the recent one though. Acer finished with netbooks over a decade ago. I can't guess what you're not telling us and I'm happy with everything on my XPS.
The very point that Microsoft devs need two machines in their work, one to do dew stuff, another - with its own special flavor of locked down windows - to touch anything that is even remotely similar to prod (including staging with no real data) says a lot about Microsoft stance on developers and power users ..
Where can I find more information about this? I had never heard that they use two computers like that before.
This story seems overly kind. They aren't going to do anything to fix Windows burning platform, and just try and cram in more AI.
A PR statement that amounts to "we still love you" with no action whatsoever means nothing. We've had years of terrible management decisions about Windows 11 at this point. If they want any trust back statements aren't going to cut it, they would need to actually do things that they don't like and that users do.
Windows is solid under the hood, but the UI/UX is crap and has gotten progressively worse over the years
MacOS isn't perfect either, but it is so much better in not trying to upsell you at every single opportunity
Just let me use my fucking computer lol
I don't think even this is true any more.
Windows used to have a solid technical foundation and was working on improving longstanding historical warts (font processing in the kernel, what could go wrong?), regardless of how off the rails the end user experience was getting.
Now, Windows seems to be rotting from every direction. The user experience is going straight for minmaxing data harvesting and antipatterns, and the technical underbelly is showing horrible problems getting into releases. [1][2], to pick a couple recent examples.
[1] - https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows/windows-11-...
[2] - https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/october-...
#2 made me reinstall Windows 11 last week. It's incredible. How do you NOT test USB input in recovery.
Also, think about this for a second - you are supposed to wait every 30 minutes until "Microsoft finds a solution".
No one is finding a solution to your boot problems - this is some manager's failed attempt to shove AI everywhere, and the results are catastrophic.
the kernel might still be good but the userland is just awful in every way imaginable
they have even managed to screw up file explorer and the start menu
it's so slow I can see it render the interface, like watching compuserve render a webpage on a 2400 bad modem
(high end i9 box)
I bet it's not long until React ends up in the kernel too
> the kernel might still be good but the userland is just awful in every way imaginable
The Windows kernel is also falling behind. Linux is considerably faster for a wide variety of workloads, so much so that if you're CPU limited at all, moving from Windows to Linux can net you an improvement similar to moving up a CPU generation.
I dual boot with Fedora but rarely ever boot into Windows, last week was 1 of those times and seeing the menu render on right click in explorer had me shutting down in frustration.
How did we forget about deferred rendering, offscreen buffers, etc. And why is it so darn slow? It’s a deplorable experience and it’s obvious strictly Windows users have become desensitized and numb to it all.
on my last machine i maybe booted windows 5 times.
when switching to the new machine i realized i did not actually need windows at all already for 2-3 years straight.
so now I don't have dual boot. only arch with kde.
I maintain multi OS documentation at pon.wiki and it’s just easier for me this way as it’s distraction free, synced to a NAS. I could setup a VM or another system but I’ve always maintained a separate disk as it’s economical with licensing.
At 1 point I was using https://looking-glass.io/ but half of my time is spent doing digital art and couldn’t part with the discrete gpu full time.
I had to take screenshots and that was as frustrating where it just works in macOS and all Linux DEs but Microsoft broke that as well.
A side effect of the tragic decision to now use WinUI on Explorer.
Exactly this. I use a Macbook for my day to day computing, programming, and general internet use. I have a Windows 11 gaming rig. Well, it turns out Hades 2 runs great on my macbook and that's been my game as of late, so the desktop hasn't been powered on in weeks. I just don't like Windows 11, and Linux just isn't there yet for my mixed DPI monitor setup (though I hear is getting close), or VR titles just yet.
SteamVR runs great on Linux, unless for some oddly reason your favorite desktop on GNOME. Valve tested it on X11, KDE Plasma on Wayland (because duh) and wlroots (hyprland and friends) without problems.
There are tons of people happily running mixed DPI setups with -at least- wlroots based compositors (although first time setup can be a bit tricky, as these are built by hackers for hackers)
> Just let me use my fucking computer lol
Why? Look at it from Microsoft's point of view - upselling, showing ads, integrating AI is more profitable or sends the share price up. That gives them a strong incentive to keep doing it.
I run fleets for windows machines, servers, w10, w11, from a Mac.
What Microsoft has done to windows 10 and 11 is ridiculous.
Why is my taskbar still crashing in 2025. Why does opening task manager spike my cpu to 100%. Search its 2025, search still broken. OOBE experience is a joke.
For crying out loud I don’t even care if you make the entire gui rest based and hosted in azure it would perform better than the trash running now.
At this point the Azure management portal has a higher SLA and uptime than my task bar.
No operating system is perfect. I can't customize the hardware for Macs and Linux doesn't have all the software I need (and has other issues, too).
It all feels too little too late. Developers have long since abandoned Windows as a go-to if it ever was one. The amount of projects, even for cross platform languages like Python that basically boil down to run it on Linux only or WSL speaks volumes. And of course anybody who tries to do serious work on Windows has the experience of bloat. Even a classmate in school, borrowing her mom's work laptop for the day while her Mac was under the weather noted how painfully slow it was and how short the battery life was, and of course there's like 10 anti virus programs running. Windows laptops get loaded up with so much junk that even if the OS was better, it still grinds productivity to a halt. Truly disappointing.
And relative to the agentic, I saw a painful demo of using some voice assistant to change the scaling ratio. Which if search was better or anybody gave a hoot about cortana, should be an already solved problem.