[SteveNuts]

The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

[Wowfunhappy]

> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

And backwards compatibility.

They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.

[dijit]

Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux.

This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.

Glibc provides binary compatibility to newer versions too.

Shims exist in both, “windows compatibility layer” for example, but pulseaudio can emulate ALSA- and pipewire can emulate pulseaudio and ALSA.

It’s actually a quagmire, but I would contend that either has solid story for backwards compatibility depending on the exact lens you’re looking at. Microsoft is worse than Linux in many ways.

Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race - if you totally ignore the w10/11 UWP migration that killed a lot of win32 applications, but drivers for older hardware are much more long lived under linux.

[zigzag312]

What win32 apps were killed by UWP migration? When UWP was added win32 wasn't removed. Win32 applications still work.

> Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race

That is actually a big win as some manufacturers only provide binary blob drivers and a lot of commercial software is distributed as binaries only.

[dijit]

Binary applications do not include drivers. I only mean applications, drivers do not transfer cleanly between versions of Windows.

To answer your other question though; Any GDI that is not accessible through DirectX- The Contacts API, Timers API, BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service), The inbound HTTP server API, NDF (Network Diagnostic Framework), SNMP.

AllocConsole and ReadConsole are gone, NamedPipes (something I used to use extensively) are gone. Toolbar and Statusbar APIs are gone and direct manipulation APIs for the Desktop.

I mean, I can keep going.

[int_19h]

You are describing limitations on sandboxed UWP apps, but Windows still supports regular Win32 just fine, and everything that you describe is available there.

I still run 30 year old games on Windows and write new software using WPF and WinForms even, and it all "just works", much more so than similar attempts at software archeology on Linux.

It's really too bad that Microsoft is hell bent on shoving ads, AI, and dark patterns everywhere in what could otherwise be a decent boring "it just works" OS.

[zigzag312]

Surprising amount of drivers do transfer between versions of Windows, even if not officially supported. But yes, most break at some point.

I'm able to run binaries compiled over 20 years ago on the latest version of Windows most of the time. They do require enabling compatibility mode and sometimes installing legacy features.

I don't know, if APIs you mentioned are available in compatibility modes, but at least named pipes can still be enabled.

But Windows is going downhill lately, so backwards compatibility isn't what it used to be. Improving backwards compatibility for running old binaries would make Linux adoption easier. I hope that Linux PCs market share keeps improving to cross the threshold where it becomes an economically viable platform for most of commercial software.

[71bw]

>AllocConsole and ReadConsole are gone

...sorry, what? I use these intensively and they are still available to use.

[ectospheno]

> Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux. This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.

Every Windows release I compile code straight from a Windows programming book from the 90’s. The only changes I made last time was a few include statements and one define.

[MiddleEndian]

>backwards compatibility

They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies.

I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.

[Wowfunhappy]

That's not a lack of backwards compatibility, that's an app purposefully self-destructing itself!

What I'm talking about is, if your widget factory uses some app to calibrate all the widgets which was written by a contractor in 2005, it probably still works fine on Windows 11.

[dham]

I used some software called Project 5 from Cakewalk back in 2006, as well as VST plugins. I can still install it and use it on Windows 11. Meanwhile, basic plugins from that time stopped working on Mac OS X Lion.

[MiddleEndian]

That detail is definitely true, I just think that in practice the frustration with behavior like this from MS will trickle down(/up/whatever direction). Like the benefit of Windows as a regular user or power user was also that after the pain of dealing with whatever shit MS decided, you could configure it more-or-less however you wanted and it would not change. It will be delayed in the corporate world but it will happen.

[vee-kay]

Just use Thunderbird Portable as email client.

Since M$ is doing away with simple free apps (such as Mail) and forcing users to move to cloud-based expensive apps, you can use FOSS (Free and Open Source) alternatives -- especially the Portable ones (e.g., apps from PortableApps.com) that don't need an install, they can run off a USB drive, and app+userdata can be easily backed up without fuss.

https://alternativeto.net/software/mail-calendar-people-and-...

[MiddleEndian]

I tried Thunderbird first, but unfortunately it was kinda heavy and was fairly unreliable, which kinda tracks with my experience before (at least on Windows). Mailspring works fine and is also open source.

Couldn't find a decent minimalist calendar program that integrated well with Windows. People say they like OneCalendar but I refuse to use the Windows Store, I even got WSL set up without it lol

[int_19h]

Try Vivaldi. It's a "kitchen sink" browser in the same vein as Opera used to be back in its days of glory, so it comes with an email and calendar client that can be optionally turned off:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-mail-calendar-feed-reader-a...

But you can also just use it as an email client and ignore the browser part.

[MiddleEndian]

Vivaldi's email client is kinda clunky as well and has no way to show just my "inbox" (mail without any labels) from Google as far as I can tell, just one big unread chunk. And the calendar seems to just be a column on the left of the browser.

Either way, MailSpring works fine for email, and I've recently discovered Fantastical for a straightforward calendar program.

But it's absurd that I have to do this at all. At a minimum, if I buy a laptop, Microsoft should not be able to actively break it without refunding me 100% of the purchase price.

[codingrightnow]

The Vivaldi web browser tab groups are a killer feature. It's my main browser because of this.

[the__alchemist]

Yep! I can compile a program on Windows and expect it to work on any Windows OS from the past ~15 years that has the same CPU architecture. Linux? Each binary is more provincial. I want to try some of the tricks like MUSL though; haven't explored the space beyond default compiler options.

[hamdingers]

Ironically, you can run almost any vintage Windows or DOS software on any modern GNU/Linux OS too, using compatibility layers.

[krferriter]

Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support. While Linux will probably run on most hardware. It doesn't run well. Like you may just immediately give up half or more of your laptop battery life if you switch from Windows to Linux on a particular machine, even if you use a lightweight and up-to-date environment and use TLP and whatever else to tweak kernel settings. I used Linux on my personal laptops for many years. No amount of tweaking could make it perfectly smooth and have comparable battery life and cooling.

New apple-silicon Macbooks also get such good battery life and performance now that if you are switching from Windows to a Unix-y personal computer, is is increasingly hard to not say that you should go to Mac.

[gchamonlive]

> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support.

I once had to patch uvc to support a webcam that wouldn't work natively on Linux. It would advertise one version of the API but implement another. That didn't affect windows which probably already knew and had proper patched drivers for it.

We can all but wonder why, but my guess isn't that there is some sloppy dev there and windows is just making up for it. It all seems very deliberate to undermine Linux. And it's plausible given Microsoft's bottomless pockets.

So it wouldn't surprise me that these companies are actively hindering Linux compatibility. So much for a free market with open competition.

[Yoric]

I believe that Linux is just a low-priority target. There are so few users on Linux that it's not worth investing in Linux support unless you specifically target Linux crowds.

[gchamonlive]

Makes sense

[int_19h]

If you start thinking about a conspiracy, the first thing you should do is ask yourself how much effort it would take to keep it under the lid without anyone leaking.

[gchamonlive]

As the other commenter said, way more likely that Linux is just a low priority for hardware manufacturers.

[ndsipa_pomu]

> Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support

My experience has been that I can generally just install Linux on a machine and pretty much everything will just work straight away, but with Windows, I have to go and find the relevant Windows drivers to get things like iSCSI working.

[brettermeier]

When did you install your last Windows? Like 20 years ago?

[red-iron-pine]

"I had to patch drivers to get the dot-matrix printer working, and it didn't play nice with the PS/2 used by my mouse (the big one that goes on the nice mousepad)"

[ndsipa_pomu]

I recall lots of reports of printers and scanners becoming unsupported during one of the Windows version upgrades (possibly the Windows 7 upgrade?).

[int_19h]

Likely Vista, that's the last time they did a lot of breaking changes around drivers.

[happymellon]

> And backwards compatibility.

I have plenty of printers that have stopped working on Windows over the years, my current Brother laser doesn't have drivers that Windows will allow to be installed anymore. Its fine with Linux, so I just print share it as a generic so the Windows clients can connect.

[anonymars]

My favorite has to be the Windows 8 era UI disaster.

How do most people log into a server? With a high-res physical touchscreen, or remote desktop?

So let's make a whole bunch of functionality impossible to access, because you have to bump up against a non-existent edge of a windowed remote screen, and literally make the UI not fit into common server screen resolutions at the time. I don't remember if 1024x768 was the minimum resolution that worked, or the maximum resolution that still didn't work. But it was an absolute comedy case.

I want to say that with only the basic VGA display drivers installed, screen resolution was too small to even get to the settings to fix it, but it's been a while and I can't find the info to prove it.

[protoster]

Windows struck the iceberg back in 8. It took until 11 for people to finally start to abandon ship in numbers.

[anonymars]

I wonder if it was losing Jim Allchin that did it. He retired after Vista and I'd say he was in charge of Windows during its golden age. 7 was basically Vista SP3, and then things took a different direction.

But, to every coin there are two sides:

"I consider this cross-platform idea a disease within Microsoft. We are determined to put a gun to our head and pull the trigger."

[hamandcheese]

I curious how profitable it has been for Microsoft so far. Are they making billions and billions from these dark patterns? I feel like they'd have to be making a fortune for it to be worth throwing their brand in the gutter like they have been doing.

[tobyjsullivan]

Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies.

I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.

[SteveNuts]

My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel.

I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.

[ThrowawayB7]

> "My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel."

There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel.

Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?

[cyberax]

Linux has won on phones (Android) and on the server side. I don't think Windows Server is seriously used for anything but Exchange/AD these days, outside of hosting specialized or legacy apps.

Windows also comprehensively lost the "exclusivity" moat. Most of popular apps are now cross-platform, because they need to run on Android/iOS/macOS. So desktop Linux is often an easy addition: Slack, Discord, all the messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.

So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.

[pjmlp]

The Linux kernel won on phones, there is hardly any GNU/Linux on a Java based userspace.

And everyone that tries to force GNU/Linux via NDK, discovers that not everything Linux is supported.

[ThrowawayB7]

Even if you consider running on tightly locked down devices to support a monopoly a win, the adoption of the Linux kernel for Android has the same basis as it does for server adoption: people love getting the hard work of others for free. It's basically buying market share. I mean, if Microsoft also started giving away Windows for free and took a bunch of market share away, would you consider that a legitimate win for them?

[handbanana_]

Windows is still very present in the Enterprise, for many more reasons than AD/Exchange.

[int_19h]

There was also the whole "web apps are coming and they run everywhere" thing. Which actually did work out exactly as people expected it to, although it took longer than most predicted - but your average casual PC user spends most of their time in the browser these days.

However, while those web apps might run on Linux (or not, if it uses DRM like all those streaming providers), they increasingly only run in Chrome.

[handbanana_]

This 100%. These threads are the same shit I was reading on Slashdot in 1999

[vbezhenar]

I don't see that making much sense, honestly. Windows kernel is super solid and well architectured. There are thousands of drivers for every peripheral on the Earth. And I don't believe that Microsoft spends that much on kernel development to be incentivised to cut it.

If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.

[doublerabbit]

I jumped ship when WSL came to be. I was more a Cygwin user, all the features of linux but done differently. Been using FreeBSD for years now.

[monocasa]

I think that's true for the consumer side, but I believe Micrsoft still sees value in truly owning a complete system software stack.

Azure is still running on Hyper-V afaik for instance.

[pjmlp]

It does, https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windowsosplatform/a...

[dangus]

I disagree. I think the end of the “world revolves around Windows” era of Microsoft has been hugely beneficial to the OS. Microsoft is way less hostile to other platforms now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.

It seems like the Windows team has been freed to add features that they want rather than adding features that fit into a narrative.

WSL, pre-installing git, adding POSIX aliases to PowerShell, iPhone/Android integration, PowerShell/.net/VSCode/Edge on Mac/Linux, not making Office on Mac complete afterthought shit on purpose, etc.

[yndoendo]

I disagree that Microsoft benefits the end user. Their IoT which took over the Embedded version of Windows is completely bloated in 10 and higher. Version 7 allowed for only installing necessities where their successors force XBox and other built in forced features. Windows 11 IoT is also forcing the creation of a Microsoft account instead of allowing an local account. IoT / Embedded does not mean it is connect and often air gaped. They are also often used to host products and should not have a Microsoft account assigned.

Microsoft's standards for quality keep going down hill. Windows 11 does not even allow the moving of the task bar from the bottom of the screen. Microsoft is end user hostile just like Google.

[dangus]

Isn’t Windows IoT a pretty niche distribution? Surely it’s less than 1% of Windows users.

[yndoendo]

Niche distribution has nothing to do with quality of distribution. The user base are passive users versus active users like daily office and game users.

The quality has gone done hill. Windows Embedded / IoT is often used to run your ATMs or some form of industrial automation. Windows actually has a real-time OS (RTOS) mode for just this.

The company I work has planned to replace Windows with Linux for future products and even moving active products to support both Windows and Linux during the transition. Only products that will stay on Windows will be legacy that are near EOL.

Personally, I would never use Windows OS for future products and solutions in these environments. Nor would I use it for network / server based solutions.

[HighGoldstein]

> now that their main revenue source is Azure, not Windows, Visual Studio, and SQL Server licenses.

Funnily enough, opening their stack to Linux probably made it easier to sell licenses for everything except Windows, since now you don't have to commit to a potentially unfamiliar hosting environment. Even SQL Server runs on Linux now.

[PeaceTed]

One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive?

I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.

At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.

[bee_rider]

I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0. The development of their competition is ad supported, community supported, or built into the price of hardware.

Turn the boat around? To where? Nobody would be willing to pay for their product even if they were to start trying to make it appealing.

[tpxl]

> I don’t much like MS, but in their defense they are trying to sell operating systems in a market where the going out-of-pocket price is $0.

The price of the windows license has been included in the price of PCs for literally decades now. Every computer you buy with windows preinstalled nets Microsoft a couple dozen dollars.

[galangalalgol]

None of their products have a decent moat left, and all are heavily competed. Focusing on making azure competitive while accepting it is a commodity industry with commodity margins is how they stick around. But they will be a value stock, not a growth stock. That is ok, as long as you know that is what you are.

[CamperBob2]

I would be MORE than happy to pay for an un-enshittified version of Windows. They won't take my money.

[sylens]

I think a lot of power users would prefer to pay somewhere between $50-$100 for a Windows license if it meant the enshittifcation wasn't included

[akho]

The issues people cite all primarily affect consumer desktops. I don't think they see decades of lifetime there; it's a dying market, so they milk it.

[nisegami]

Perhaps the aims of these dark patterns were not to benefit Microsoft overall, but perhaps an individual or a team? For example, produce good numbers for particular KPIs at the expense of unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects.

[bee_rider]

I think their earnings are detailed here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3...

IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes:

> Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates

So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue.

But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.

[ehnto]

Using Windows as a server feels like using your lounge room as a commercial kitchen. I can never shake the feeling that this isn't a serious place to do business.

I have this impression from years of using both Windows and linux servers in prod.

[rewgs]

Perfectly put.

[dangus]

While I agree that Microsoft has not been the greatest at delivering customer-friendly stuff, and has built in a lot of revenue streams to their (mostly not-paying) users like Bing and cloud upsells, I think that your take is overly cynical to the software.

Windows 11 has some really legitimate improvements that make it a really solid OS.

It’s not surprising that Microsoft isn’t focusing on Windows as a server OS as they don’t expect anyone to deploy it in a new environment. They know it has already lost to Linux and that’s why .NET Core is on Linux and Mac, why WSL exists, etc. Azure is how Microsoft makes revenue from servers, Windows Server is a legacy product.

The whole “server OS has the weather app installed” thing is pretty irrelevant since enterprises have their own customized image building processes and don’t ever run the default payload. It’s really not worth Microsoft’s time to customize the server version knowing that their enterprise customers already have.

Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things. They’ve delivered a whole lot of really nice and generally innovative features to those spaces. Windows has really nice gaming features, smartphone integrations including with iPhones, even doing some long-overdue work on small details like notepad and the command line.

I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud or done anything like that.

[II2II]

> Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things.

Sure, Microsoft seems to have some great developers behind Windows and those developers are improving the underlying operating system. The trouble is that Microsoft is also using Windows to push their other products. Coming from a Linux environment, I find that pushiness unbearably crass.

On top of that, Windows' main strength has always been application support. I don't even know if that is relevant anymore with commercial developers shifting to subscription models (for native applications) and web based applications (for everything else). The latter makes Windows nearly irrelevant. The former makes open source more desirable to at least some people.

I've also noticed that things appear to flipping when comparing Linux to Windows. I can take a distribution that is intended for desktops, install it, and expect almost everything to work out of the box. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is printer or video drivers or pre-installed applications. Meanwhile, I'm finding that I have to copy drivers to a USB drive and drop to the command line to get something as simple as a trackpad or touchscreen to work under Windows. Worse yet, I've had something similar happen with network adapters. Short of bypassing the OOBE, a Windows installation will not complete without a working network adapter and Internet connection. Similar tales can be told for applications: there is a never ending stream of barriers to climb to get software to install ("look, we care about privacy since we are asking you half a dozen questions about what you're willing to share," while ignoring dozens of other settings that affect your privacy) or prevent advertising from popping up. You don't deal with that nonsense under Linux.

I don't know what the future of Windows is. I don't much care, as long as I get to use the operating system I want to use in peace. That seems to be much more true today than it did 20 years ago.

[shmeeed]

It was interesting to read your comment and find myself disagreeing with every single point you made. I'm not invested enough to argue about anything of it, it's really just a meta observation that stood out to me: Obviously it's still possible to have substantially different points of view on even the most basic aspects. I guess that's a good thing, at least it feels kinda reassuring to me. We could both be right, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

[evilduck]

> I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud

Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.

[dangus]

A lot of this isn't very relevant to my personal use case and/or has not been my experience.

- I have had my Microsoft account connected since early in the Windows 10 days so that I can use my Xbox library. For my personal use case it doesn't really bother me that I have to login. Sure, most competing commercial OSes don't straight up force you to login, but as an example I never really used my Mac laptop without the Apple ID logged in because it has some pretty clear benefits and essentially no discernible downsides. It has some downsides that mostly boil down to what-if scenarios and thought experiments. To me, Microsoft forcing you to login with an account is not a big deal in the context of commercial paid software with a paid license. I can certainly understand why it might be a big deal in a different context. I can certainly see why my own Linux laptop is more appealing to not have this requirement. However, I specifically use Windows for a lot of commercial stuff - Steam, Xbox, etc. Being logged in was going to happen anyway, at least for me.

- As far as being nagged to pay, use Edge/Bing, or buy cloud stuff from Microsoft, all of that has been extremely easy to dismiss permanently. I have not needed to use any power user tools or scripts.

- It's an outdated notion that OneDrive is tossed in the menu bar forever. In Windows 11, OneDrive can be uninstalled entirely like a standard app. When I open my Start Menu and search for "OneDrive," nothing comes up besides an obscure tangentially-related system setting. It's literally not there.

- Sure, various new things have been presented to me along with new updates, like Copilot and the like, but I have been forced into none of it. When I visit Settings > Apps > AI Components, nothing is installed. When I type "Copilot" into the Start Menu, nothing comes up besids Windows Store search suggestions (apps I have not installed) and a keyboard key customization setting. Copilot is literally not there.

- I think there’s actually a good argument that upsells like OneDrive/Copilot (again, in my experience easy to dismiss once a year and uninstall permanently) that solve complicated problems for the median user (secure backups, document storage, AI assistant) is a decently tasteful way to fund a commercial operating system. All of that stuff is optional, and I can just say no, while paying for annual point releases (e.g. Mac OS X) kinda sucked.

[dm319]

Goodness the file save dialog(s) on Windows - it makes it so hard to save a file into my personal space. It's unintuitive and you need to click through, I think a couple of dialog boxes before you get to 'Your Documents'.

[SteveNuts]

And then you still have to wonder if “My Documents” is actually “My Office 364 One Drive Copilot Pro” or something

[marcodiego]

And people complained that GTK file picker didn't have thumbnails.

[MiddleEndian]

Two things can be bad! But the GTK file picker has improved and now has thumbnails, while you can't really trust MS not to continue to damage its file picker

[dangus]

In what application is it like this? I don’t find this true at all. It’s a completely customizable sidebar.

[gmueckl]

Office has a particularly annoying dark pattern when saving a file. It hides the regular save dialog behind a tiny button in a confusing UI embedded in the main window that is designed to misdirect the user into saving files on OneDrive.

Many other programs do still open the standard file dialog directly, but even there, the local drive amd directory hierarchy is hidden behind a folded "This Computer" node in the tree view that is itself below the fold most of the time.

[dangus]

Yeah, this is the only Microsoft application I am aware of that does this, and I actually think that most Office users want to save to OneDrive and that it makes sense in this context.

The median Office user is using it at work and your employer doesn’t want you saving documents in places you will lose them.

Ditto for universities and schools that provide 365.

[codingrightnow]

I just installed windows on a new laptop and somehow my user directory was setup in a OneDrive subfolder and backed up to their cloud. Between that, Microsoft basically demanding I use their online account to log in, Windows harassing me to finish setting up my computer every time I turn it on because they want me to change my default browser and buy subscriptions, and the random forced update restarts I can't seem to fully disable, I've had it. So I finally made the full time switch to kubuntu. Also, it's a brand new $1k laptop with 16gb of RAM and Windows uses half of it. I'm closing apps to save the RAM. Kubuntu uses 2gb.

[sgjohnson]

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

Server and LTSC SKUs don’t do that :)

[kbenson]

I wonder how much of it is to collect data and sell ads compared to just getting people to start utilizing what is now Microsoft's core resource, which is cloud services.

For them, getting you using onedrive is a (huge) step towards getting you to pay them for more storage using onedrive, and to also allowing them to use their advantage as the OS provider to get you using features that both keep you from moving away from Windows and keep you from moving to dropbox or another cloud competitor that normal consumers commonly use. For example, onedrive desktop sync tied to your Microsoft login, so you can log into a new system and have it put your preferences and files in place.

Having more data to monetize people is useful, but I would bet that they value the the lock-in of integrated services far more, as that's where they can possibly grow (by offering more services once you're less likely to leave), and growth is king.

It's the same thing Google does (and Samsung also attempts to do with their custom apps and store) with Android, but at the desktop level. Apple is able to do it for both desktop and mobile.

[andyjohnson0]

> but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

In my experience thats just not true. Microsoft's client OSs like Win 11 and 10 include these consumer-oriented "features" [1] but they're not present on servet versions of Windows.

[1] I agree that the weather widget etc is annoying, even though it is easy to disable.

[koakuma-chan]

I also stuggled with nvidia drivers on Linux until I discovered dkms.

[Krssst]

I don't think Windows Server has ads by default in the menu (don't remember for the weather though), the default are pretty sensible there since it's a minority OS that has to compete while desktop Windows is a monopoly free to inflict whatever it wants onto users without having to fear any kind of consequence.

[deafpolygon]

one thing to remember is that window servers are deployed with GPO pre-configured, so you don’t usually see these unless admins leave them at their defaults. plus enterprise/education can turn off tracking using the same mechanisms