[CasualSuperman]

With how buggy their flagship OS has become, why would I trust anything else they release to be better? Or even if it does work well now, why should I expect it to stay that way? Microsoft has burned through all possible goodwill at this point, at least for me.

[simonw]

Microsoft employ over 100,000 engineers. I'd advise against assuming that everything produced by any of them is bad because of bugs in Windows.

[LatencyKills]

I spent 15 years as a senior dev on the Visual Studio team followed by 5 years on the Xcode team at Apple.

Individual engineers can be talented, professional, and end-user focused. Most of that effort gets lost when PMs refuse to work with each other in a coherent manner. Most of the major issues we ran into weren’t engineering bugs per se, they were the result of management refusing to allow teams to communicate effectively.

When we were first building out the original C# functionality, the C# team refused to talk to the existing compiler teams. I spent more time acting as a go-between than I did solving actual technical problems.

Good people can produce crappy software in that environment.

[workfromspace]

Not op, and I generally agree with your assumption but not for Microsoft, as I don't think it's limited to Windows:

Teams, Office (especially online), One Drive, SharePoint, Azure, GitHub, LinkedIn, all became very shitty and partially unusable with increasing number of weird bugs or problems lately.

[ymck]

And it's not just Microsoft. Apple and other are having the same issue. Something fundamental seems to have happened post Covid but before AI.

WFH, flood of Dev hiring, increasingly hostile worker relations, a bunch of web 2.0 folks finally retiring, VC money drying up...

take your pick.

Software is just crappy these days.

[hulitu]

> Something fundamental seems to have happened

It just became more visible: testing _is_ expensive and time consuming.

[zx8080]

But M$ share price goes up! Investors are smart as they are rich! And they do believe in this all!

/sarcasm

[replooda]

The criticism was directed at the company's product, not the employees...

[ray_v]

I always wish that people would make this distinction more often ... the people=good, the product=bad ... people!=bad

[replooda]

If product->quality_x, I'm okay with employee->?quality_x — but not with either employee->quality_x or employer->!quality_x. A better thing to remember is that people have themselves to feed. Of those 100k engineers, how many can say "no, you don't, Satya, ain't no besmirching my code with slop"?

[trimethylpurine]

The response appears to be pointing out that with so many employees (engineers), it's unlikely that they all work on Windows.

[replooda]

Maybe. But interpreting it thus requires too much charitableness for it not to have been uncharitable, whether intentionally or otherwise.

[trimethylpurine]

You mean interpreting it honestly. Yeah. I caught that.

[sharts]

Don’t the best of the best typically work on OS fundamentals though?

[vlovich123]

OS is such a broad term, especially when applied to Windows which is closer to a Linux distro. Is it the kernel? Windows is fine there as by all accounts the issues are higher up. They’ve had some problems with their update process which is surprising - historically that team would have been populated by the better engineers. most of the other problems have been in the shell and UI where good engineering discipline is not to be quite as expected.

[mavhc]

Yes, but the OS fundamentals are for Azure first, Windows last.

Azure makes money, 50% of Windows computers are basically free and need to get you to sign up for a subscription some how. The other 50% are Windows Pro/Enterprise, but MS assumes they'll get that money forever so doesn't put any resources into that. In 10 years the kids switching to Linux on desktop today will be in charge of the business deals and switch corporations to linux because they're not scared of it like the current business IT leaders

[OtomotO]

They are not free. OEM costs money. Hence with every laptop with Windows preinstalled, you pay a fraction to Microsoft, even if you immediately uninstall and add Linux.

[bionsystem]

Maybe not, there are plenty of hard things to do at Microsoft scale, hypervisors (which I guess could count as "OS" but maybe not "Windows" in the consumer-product line sense), compilers, languages, hardware since Microsoft is doing that too, browsers (although the hard part is chrome-based, probably they contribute to it), databases, distributed systems for cloud products, etc. Plenty of hard things to do.

[wongarsu]

The windows kernel is great. It's the stuff built on top of that that sucks. I doubt MS puts the best of the best on coding the start menu

[trimethylpurine]

Which developer has the best of the best on operating systems?

[mcmcmc]

And yet they still work for a company that has shown it isn’t overly concerned about quality or reliability in its products.

[trimethylpurine]

I don't think people typically have so much choice about it. Everyone is just trying to feed their families and enjoy their life. The job market is a little tough right now, I think, for software engineers. No?

I know a few personally that left their stable job to be hired and fired in the same month and remain unemployed six months later. Very sad.

[mcmcmc]

What a ridiculous excuse. People who join ICE to brutalize minorities and protestors are just trying to feed their families too, then. No?

Working for Microsoft doesn’t make them bad engineers or bad people, but it does make them Microsoft employees. And they get to bear its reputation whether they want to or not. If it makes them uncomfortable then they should make a change or grow thicker skin.

Oversaturation of the labor supply for software engineers has been looming for a while now. Gen Z was sold on infinite growth in the ZIRP era which was never going to happen, but everyone still jumped in. What we’re seeing is structural unemployment. Not everyone’s gonna make it.

[1f60c]

Thaaat's capitalism

[petterroea]

Skilled engineers in an environment that doesn't care about quality may become dull, or simply be forced by the system they are in to not care. In practice they are just like us and so I assume they would find outlets in their free time.

I haven't spoken to a Microsoft developer in a while because there are few in the hacker communities I'm around (go figure?) so not entirely sure though. I want to understand.

[bonesss]

These giant firms aren’t uniform monoliths, especially MS.

Microsoft has some clear ‘A’ teams (compilers, industry leading languages, F*, pioneering web tech, OS innovations, etc), but also ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ teams, and MS is often reactively chasing industry trends. They’re industry leaders, but also victims of their Office, Windows, and Cloud teams pooping on one another at critical market junctures.

In .Net land we can inspect their library code. A number of these ‘Enterprise’ packages around their ‘Enterprise’ solutions are … just passable. Often something you’d write a proper version of to avoid clear issues. When our juniors are delivering better than their official offerings, in light of wizardry being displayed elsewhere, I think we are seeing systematic effects of corporate culture and customer base.

[ddtaylor]

They seem to be alienating a lot of their users right now in a lot of different products. There's a significant surge in open source software right now and Linux and all the people that are coming over are a bit more than usual. Their customer base seems tired of the game.

[solarkraft]

This is not about individual employees. It’s in the nature of being an employee to be beholden to what’s incentivized by their company’s management and structure.

[sharts]

Don’t employees have any say in some of the design , implementation, and quality bar? Management folks are employees as well. But perhaps they prefer the paycheck to voicing concerns around bad decisions. Nothing wrong with that but throwing all the blame on faceless management and structure seems not right since it evolves from collective activities.

[solarkraft]

“Show me the incentives and I’ll tell you the outcome” is exactly about this situation. People who do what they feel is right may be able to do so as long as it doesn’t conflict with company policy, but when it does (say you spend a little more time on perfecting a feature), it gets noticed and eventually corrected.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

The problems with Windows today have nothing to do with bugs but with the strategic vision of Nadella.

[jzb]

And it’s the employees that’ll be laid off if the strategy doesn’t succeed because they just didn’t copilot hard enough or something.

[lysace]

This is also still small/unimportant enough not to be poisoned by their broken corporate culture.

[hudo]

UI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.

[joe_mamba]

>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.

This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users.

You can get something similar yourself at home running all the debloat tools out there but since they're not officially supported, either you'll break future windows updates, or the future windows updates will break your setup, so it's not worth it.

[bcraven]

Something similar, or indeed, exactly the same:

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/leak...

[RajT88]

Talked about back in the Vista days publicly (I cannot find the articles now) - Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.

So they are not incentivized to keep Win32_Lean_N_Mean, but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11.

I have no insider knowledge here, just this is a thing which get talked about around major Windows releases historically.

[necovek]

If anything, Microsoft has a lot of problems because they support a wide variety of crappy hardware and allow just about anyone to write kernel level sw (drivers). Not sure if this changed, but they used to run in the ring0 even.

This was most evident back in the 90s when they shipped NT4: extremely stable as opposed to Win95 which introduced the infamous BSOD. But it supported everything, and NT4 had HW support on par with Linux (i.e. almost nothing from the cheap vendors).

[mjevans]

NT4 started with a kernel mode, user mode, security model and drivers had to be written and validated accordingly.

9x, me, and even compatibility parts of XP (up to some service patch IIRC? Might have been SP2) would still allow dos mode realtime BS for any driver that wanted.

I loath all the dang software modems too cheep to ship a decent device in a single unit and instead slice off the user's already constrained resources.

[necovek]

Heh, who else remembers the golden benchmark, a US Robotics 56k hw modem (the only one I could find locally was an external one too) to get online in either NT4 or Linux. But when I finally did save for one, I could fully leave Windows behind in 1998.

[joe_mamba]

>Microsoft has commitments to their hardware partners to help keep the hardware market from collapsing.

Citation needed since that makes no logical sense. You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have. Sounds like FUD.

>but instead to put up artificial limits on how old of hardware can run W11

They're not artificial. POPCNT / SSE4.2 became a hard requirement starting with Windows 11 24H2 (2024) (but that's for older CPUs), and only intel 8th gen and up have well functioning support for Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), HVCI (Hypervisor-protected Code Integrity), and MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control). That's besides the TPM 2.0 which isn't actually a hard requirement or feature used by everyone, the other ones are way more important.

So at which point do we consider HW-based security a necessity instead of an artificial limit? With the ever increase in vulnerabilities and attack vectors, you gotta rip the bandaid at some point.

[ssl-3]

Windows 11 is running on my ThinkPad T530. Its CPU is very nearly 14 years old.

What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?

[joe_mamba]

>Windows 11 is running on my ThinkPad T530. Its CPU is very nearly 14 years old.

Yes, you can bypass HW checks to install it on a pentium 4 if you want, nothing new here.

>What is missing here that was present when this same computer was running Windows 10?

All the security features I listed in the comment above.

[magicalhippo]

> You want to sell your SW product to the most common denominator to increase your sales, not to a market of HW that people don't yet have.

A key difference between regular software and Windows is that almost nobody buys Windows, they get it pre-installed on a new PC. So a new PC purchase means a new Windows license.

[RajT88]

You are just arguing the requirements are the requirements.

Are they as important as stated? Microsoft says so. Everyone here loves and trusts them, right?

[TkTech]

Is this not just Windows LTSB/LTSC? Which has been a thing forever.

[joe_mamba]

Maybe, could also be that for a 9 figure government contract they'll provide a custom LTSC branch just for you with only the features you want.

[workfromspace]

I geniunely wonder if Windows G's start menu also use React and if the start menu, right click or Windows Search still sucks in Windows G or not :)

[pjmlp]

React Native, halfway between Web and native.

[chris_wot]

No, he's talking about ReactOS.

[drnick1]

Microsoft should just open source Windows at this point.

[hilti]

Never heard of Windows G .. that sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads :-)

[qingcharles]

I've been starting with Tiny11 and then running the debloat scripts against it. Reduces the memory footprint to about 2GB and have found zero compatibility problems with doing this. You just have to use curl or something to download a browser because you won't even have Edge.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Windows G .. sounds exactly what I want for my older Thinkpads

I'm running 11 IoT Ent LTSC on a some T420; it runs pretty okay.

[mananaysiempre]

> Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.

In their intended applications, which might or might not be the ones you need.

The slowness of the filesystem that necessitated a whole custom caching layer in Git for Windows, or the slowness of process creation that necessitated adding “picoprocesses” to the kernel so that WSL1 would perform acceptably and still wasn’t enough for it to survive, those are entirely due to the kernel’s archtecture.

It’s not necessarily a huge deal that NT makes a bad substrate for Unix, even if POSIX support has been in the product requirements since before Win32 was conceived. I agree with the MSR paper[1] on fork(), for instance. But for a Unix-head, the “good” in your statement comes with important caveats. The filesystem is in particular so slow that Windows users will unironically claim that Ripgrep is slow and build their own NTFS parsers to sell as the fix[2].

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/785430/

[2] https://nitter.net/CharlieMQV/status/1972647630653227054

[dgxyz]

This is on the mark.

But there's another issue which is what cripples windows for dev! NTFS has a terrible design flaw which is the fact that small files, under 640 bytes, are stored in the MFT. The MFT ends up having serious lock contention so lots of small file changes are slow. This screws up anything Unixy and git horribly.

WSL1 was built on top of that problem which was one of the many reasons it was slow as molasses.

Also why ReFS and "dev drive" exist...

[mananaysiempre]

> NTFS has a terrible design flaw which is the fact that small files, under 640 bytes, are stored in the MFT.

Ext4 also stores small (~150B) files inside the inode[1], and so do a number of other filesystems[2]? NTFS was unusually early to the party, but if you’re right that it’s problematic there then something else must also be wrong (perhaps with the locking?) to make it so.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/ext4/inli...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#All..., the “Inline data” column.

[jph00]

This is not due to slowness of the file system. Native ntfs tools are much faster than Unix ones in some situations. The issue is that running Unix software on windows will naturally have a performance impact. You see the same thing in reverse using Wine on Linux. Windows uses a different design for IO so requires software to be written with that design in mind.

[m132]

> Native ntfs tools are much faster than Unix ones in some situations. The issue is that running Unix software on windows will naturally have a performance impact. You see the same thing in reverse using Wine on Linux.

Not true. There are increasingly more cases where Windows software, written with Windows in mind and only tested on Windows, performs better atop Wine.

Sure, there are interface incompatibilities that naturally create performance penalties, but a lot of stuff maps 1:1, and Windows was historically designed to support multiple user-space ABIs; Win32 calls are broken down into native kernel calls by kernel32, advapi32, etc., for example, similar to how libc works on Unix-like operating systems.

[MadnessASAP]

It's pretty typical these days for software, particularly games of the DX9-11 eras to perform better on Wine/Proton then they do under native Windows on the same hardware.

[jph00]

They rarely are IO constrained.

[p_ing]

The file system isn't slow. The slowness will be present in any file system due to the file system filters that all file system calls pass though.

[mananaysiempre]

Right, by “file system” here I mean all of the layers between the application talking in terms of named files and whatever first starts talking in terms of block addresses.

Also, as far as my (very limited) understanding goes, there are more architectural performance problems than just filters (and, to me, filters don’t necessarily sound like performance bankruptcy, provided the filter in question isn’t mandatory, un-removable Microsoft Defender). I seem to remember that path parsing is accomplished in NT by each handler chopping off the initial portion that it understands and passing the remaining suffix to the next one as an uninterpreted string (cf. COM monikers), unlike Unix where the slash-separated list is baked into the architecture, and the former design makes it much harder to have (what Unix calls) a “dentry cache” that would allow the kernel to look up meanings of popular names without going through the filesystem(s).

[p_ing]

NTFS will perform directory B+-tree lookups (this is where it walks the path) until it finds the requested file. The Cache Manager caches these B+-trees.

From there, it hits the MFT, finds the specific record for the file, loads the MFT record, and ultimately returns the FILE_OBJECT to the I/O Manager and it bubbles up the chain back to (presumably) Win32. The MFT is just a linear array of records, which include file and directories (directory records are just a record with directory = true, essentially).

Obviously simplified. Windows Internals will be your friend, if you want to know more.

[mananaysiempre]

Thanks for the explanation! Linux, meanwhile, will[1] in the normal case walk a sequence[2] of hash tables (representing incomplete but up-to-date views of directories) before hitting the filesystem’s vtable or the block I/O layer at all, and on the fast path[3] taking no locks other than the RCU read lock.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...

[2] I was under the impression that it could look up an entire path at once when I wrote my grandparent comment; it seems I was wrong, which on reflection makes sense given you can move directories.

[3] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/path-look...

[Rapzid]

Heh, first I've heard of Windows Internals. New friends for The Linux Programming Interface!

[BrouteMinou]

The Windows filesystem isn't slow per se, it's a slowness caused by "a thousand cuts" type of problem.

https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...

[exceptione]

NTFS, not so great.

[p_ing]

NTFS is just fine. Stable, reliable, fast, plenty of features for a general purpose file system.

[exceptione]

Even with Defender etc off, it is not fun. Lots of small file IO brings it on its knees. Some wants to blame the Windows I/O system, I don't know, but what I do know is that when people choose NTFS it is because they haven't an alternative. Nobody chooses it based on its quality attributes. I dare to say there is no NTFS system that is faster than an EXT4 system.

If even MS internal teams rather want to avoid it, it seems like it isn't a great offering. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41085376#41086062

[p_ing]

NTFS on Linux should be near-par with ext4 on Linux.

Remember, I said the _file system_ was just fine. It's that extensible architecture above all file systems on NT that causes grief.

The only method to 'turn off' Defender is to use DevDrive, which enforces ReFS, and even then you only get async Defender, it's not possible to completely disable.

[MatejKafka]

You can just turn off Defender using a group policy.

[sunaookami]

NTFS is infamous for being super slow. Even using EXT4 through WSL is faster.

[repelsteeltje]

...But no way can you wrap it into something that looks posix-y from the inside

[p_ing]

Why would you want to?

[repelsteeltje]

From the article, first use case:

> Example use cases include:

> * Running unmodified Linux programs on Windows

> * ...

That won't work if the unplugged Linux program assumes that mv replaces a file atomically; ntfs can't offer that.

[rafram]

This isn't supposed to replace Windows, and it isn't a GUI desktop operating system at all. I doubt anyone working on this has anything to do with the modern Windows desktop UX.

[dspillett]

> This isn't supposed to replace Windows,

OP wasn't suggesting it was, just that the lack of quality in one significant area of the company's output leads to a lack of confidence in other products that they release.

[viraptor]

Given anything the size of Microsoft, it's not a good assumption. MS has large research teams that produce really interesting things. Their output is unrelated to released products.

[dspillett]

Companies want us to trust their things based on positive experiences with their other things, and that works both ways.

[Reddit_MLP2]

but if the host OS is already comprised, what is the point of sandbox inside of it?

[necovek]

Maybe we need secure attestation for sandbox to be protected against compromised host :)

It does sound hard, and might need to employ homomorphic encryption with hw help for any memory access after code has been also verifiably unaltered through (uncompromised) hw attestation.

[lemonish97]

I know windows 11 is super buggy and riddled with issues (and the copilot mess), but I'm starting to feel there's a weird echo chamber around these forums that don't even bother looking at what the product or repository is, and automatically assume it's bad 'cause it's from Microsoft.

[zelphirkalt]

Once the amount of bad software coming out of a shop rises over 50% this becomes a sane assumption, since it is more likely than not, that it is trash coming out of that shop. So in case of MS it does seem a reasonable assumption to make.

[Peanuts99]

I use Windows 11 all day and can't agree it's buggy at all, compared to Windows of the past it's very reliable. The worst I can say is they've made some poor decisions about the defaults around ads in the UI. But all of that is easy to turn off.

[necovek]

Windows is ultimately a lot more complex, and not open source. This also builds on the Linux ecosystem, so even if it comes from Microsoft, I imagine engineering culture is different from that on Windows and especially their online platforms (that's even worse than Windows if you ask me!).

[dooglius]

MSR is a somewhat independent org; you should be making predictions based on other MSR projects

[b00ty4breakfast]

I'm not defending MS in any capacity, but this library is open for viewing if you were so inclined.

[autoexec]

Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy. Maybe it works, but yeah you'll probably get screwed over at some point.

Still, the fact that it's open source is a good thing. People can now take that code and make something better (ripping out the AI for example) or just use bits and pieces for their own totally unrelated projects. I can't see that as anything but a win. I have no problem giving shitty companies credit where its due and they've done a good thing here.

[MatejKafka]

> Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record with security or privacy.

That's a very unfair assessment. In many areas, Microsoft services and Windows are better protected than most alternatives (e.g., disk encryption, virtualization-based isolation,...), and security is taken pretty seriously for new products.

[BrouteMinou]

Microsoft US a massive corporation with so many people, business units, departments.

A comment like yours is just like saying: "I know a buggy open-source software, why would I trust that other open-source project? The open-source community burned all possible goodwill".

[CodeMage]

Except that a company, no matter how heterogenous, has an overarching organization, whereas the open-source community doesn't.

There is no CEO of open source, there are no open-source shareholders, there are no open-source quarterly earnings reports, there are no open-source P&G policies (with or without stack ranking), and so on.