Windows: Microsoft broke the only thing that mattered

I will leave this comment here by an ex Windows desktop experience team developer which says that designers have lots of control but don't even use Windows, they use Macs.

     > It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows 

      This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.

      I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.

     Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.

I used to manage NT-based infra back in the day, have been on a mac for 15 years now because of stuff like this. A few years ago I bought a Windows box for my daughter. Out of the box the clock was wrong and it would just hang on auto-update. No message, no logs anywhere, just hangs. A few years later the son comes of age and gets his own box. And it’s the same story, no automatic adjustment of the clock. I’m running a bog standard unifi network leading to fiber, nothing complicated, everything else works including all the windows laptops of my wife. But a basic standards-based library-supported Windows function.

I am delaying it because iOS development is currently making me money but once that stops, I am so looking forward to moving back to Linux. Neither Windows or macOS are going in a good direction. The difference is only in the degree and speed of ensh*ttification. Ironically the only thing I might miss is the often criticized Xcode.

All fine and good, yet even me that used to have M$ on the email signature, and signed to Linux Journal during its whole print lifetime, starting around when it was still on early issues, now runs Windows/WSL.

I am not paying for Apple margin's, their lack of options in customising hardware, nor I want to spend evenings reconfiguring BSD/Linux installions.

If there is a good PC (laptop) at a consumer store pre-installed with GNU/Linux, 100% supported hardware, I will consider it, buying online isn't my thing.

Thus my house is full of Android and WebOS powered devices and none GNU/Linux one.

I hate trying to teach my children how to use Windows these days. When I was young, it took some effort to get programs up and running, but once you cleared that hurdle, the computer worked the same, consistently, every single time you turned it on.

Now, most of the time they log in there's a new update to install; or a fresh and distracting dark pattern popup; or a service they need to re-enter credentials for; or, occasionally, a game I've previously installed for them either missing or no longer working properly. It's maddening and confusing even for experienced users.

Perhaps I do need to drop Windows. I'm not a huge fan of the obfuscaon and walled gardens on Macs, and Chromebooks and iPads are more geared towards consumption than creation.

My work keeps me on Windows (programs that have no good Linux equivalent, and a corporate environment that won't accept it for desktop users), but I'm seriously considering dual booting for my children's sake. It's a testament to how far Windows has fallen.

But it's not bad enough yet to have a New Coke type consumer rejection.

"and a MacBook Air M4 starts at $1,099 against a capable Windows laptop at around $400"

Pardon?

At this point, Windows just needs to die

Apple doesn’t have a cloud business, and yet their OS hasn’t been a success story either recently.

I grew up recommending windows to everybody I knew for most of my early life. I’ve had my boomer dad on Linux mint for almost a decade. Any time I am asked for a recommendation I cannot say to buy a Mac fast enough. Yes they are overpriced but the build quality to me is worth it. The windows 11 start menu is user hostile, I seriously can’t believe people use that day to day. I’m old enough to remember when they called it Micro$oft -unfortunately Microslop is going to stick (the author is right about the two settings apps). When was the last time you think an exec at MSFT played an Xbox or described using teams as “pleasant”?

“Adobe and Office run better on Mac, change my mind”

I get that it says something we like to hear, but it's a content-free post that's almost certainly LLM-generated to get clicks. Serious content mill vibes - here's their latest blog article:

https://www.yankodesign.com/2026/03/09/a-cluster-of-volcanic...

Different byline, but somehow essentially the same as this story that appeared several days ago elsewhere on the internet:

https://newatlas.com/architecture/volcano-in-hotel-of-arriva...

Sometimes I forget there are people who love Windows and genuinely believe it's the best operating system.

What's wrong with Windows?

Satya Nadella doesn’t care in the slightest. Windows is of no interest to him.

And the Microsoft management layer has no clue at all.

So that’s the end of it.

Satya Nadal will go down in history as the guy that killed Microsoft. The insane push to AI and copilot jammed in every app plus ads has done exactly what the OP states…

I will recommend that $599 MacBook every time now and power users invest in a MacBook Pro.

I was a loyal Windows user and now my own Surface Laptop 5 sits dark while I work on a Mac-Mini that was meant to be a side app dev machine.

I recently understood why so many people are anti-AI and think AI is a scam.

It's because they are Windows users and being shoved piss poor Copilot implementations down their throats by Microsoft.

I have no doubt that Microsoft is using the cheapest(worst) cloud model possible for free Copilot users or they're running a tiny local model on the NPU when available.

These people aren't running Opus 4.6 or GPT 5.4. No wonder they're so anti-AI and can't see the why there is AI hype.